Current Issue

Home

Rena Sherwood has lived in both England and America. She has poems appearing in upcoming issues of T-zero, The Custer-Hawk Gazette, Scifaikuest and GlassFire. She has sold short stories to Atomjack , Story Station and New Witch. She currently writes articles for web content sites Strategic Websites, Content Gurus and Adonico.

Trouble On The Sharon Hill Trolley by Rena Sherwood

I could have avoided all that trouble if I had only remembered to take my Prozac. On the day of my big job interview as a clerk in a real office, I'd remembered to floss my teeth, polish my hand-me-down shoes, put a brooch over the nametag holes in my blouse and quadruple-check my resume, but somehow forgot that no morning Prozac always leads to a walloping afternoon withdrawal migraine. This was my chance to get out of Kmart and stop having to beg my parents for money. I took the earliest trolley I could after dawn.

I found the lawyer's office in West Philadelphia with time to spare. My interview went brilliantly because the human resources manager was obviously drunk and kept ogling my chest with a smile. But I was yet again told the dreaded, "Nice to meet ya, Miss Jackson. We'll call you," and shown the door. Well, I'd been warned that not having any work experience in an office would go against me. But how do you get experience working in an office unless you work in an office? I don't get it. By that time, the withdrawal symptoms were starting to claw their way into my eyeballs.

I braced myself for the trolley ride home to Clifton Heights. It would be ten or fifteen minutes at the most until I could collapse at home with medicine, tea and a pillow to cry into. Was I doomed to stay in low-paying, high-stress retail gigs supplemented by my long-suffering parents all of my life? Apparently so. I just managed to keep from bemoaning my Kmart fate to the rumpled construction worker sitting next to me. Somehow, I doubt he'd be all that sympathetic.

We'd just pulled out of Sixty-Ninth Street station in Upper Darby when the firecracker went off. If you're not familiar with trolleys, they are not as large as train cars, small enough so that a loud noise at the front of the trolley was just as loud as at the back of it. The sudden POW was so loud that the man next to me actually peed.

I jumped up to avoid the sudden puddle, and froze as I saw sunlight glint along the barrel of a pistol held in the hand of a beady-eyed freak badly in need of a bath. He loomed over the collapsed driver. When he was sure both the driver and the trolley were knocked out, the freak scanned the baker's dozen of passengers, but seemed to focus his attention on me. "NOBODY MOVES!" he roared. "I'm takin' over this trolley!"

I couldn't believe it. This had to be a joke. The freak was trying to hijack a trolley? They don't exactly run trolley rail lines all the way down to Cuba, or wherever it was hijackers always hijack to. The furthest he could get was Sharon Hill. I know Sharon Hill is kinda a hick town, but it's not that much of a hick town that it could pass for Cuba.

All the other passengers froze, hands in the air, whimpering and keening. They even turned off their Walkmans and didn't answer cell phones. Visions of future Movies of the Week and what actor would be chosen to play them were flashing before their eyes, I'm sure. All that was flashing through my eyes was migraine pain.

There was something about me he didn't like—I guess because I kept wincing at his extremely loud voice, which the migraine had magnified. "DON'T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT!" he ranted, leaning his snarling mug in my face. "I HAD A CRAP CHILDHOOD! IT WASN'T MY FAULT! BLAME GOD! GO ON—SAY IT!"

"Ooookay," I found myself saying while every orifice in my head felt like it was bleeding. "I blame God, not you. Now can we get this trolley rolling again?"

"WHADDYA, NUTS?" he roared, waving the pistol in front of my face.

I'd had enough. Not only was I facing the rest of my Christmases behind a cash register, the migraine was getting crippling, bending me into nausea. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's being a retail worker hostage with dry heaves. I figured a bullet in my head would be a relief. So I smiled.

Then I clobbered him. The pain in my hand momentarily covered up the pain in my head.

He burst into tears and curled up into a ball. I bent down and grabbed the pistol.

Later on, when the police (and my parents) asked me why I risked certain death to act like a hero, I replied, "Hey, get off my back. I had a headache and a clenched fist!"

I never did get that office job. Next time, I think I'll splurge for a taxi. Things I have to do to get out of retail.

THE END