MEGAN’S DILEMMA
by Lena
Megan sat in her kitchen on her favorite red chair, the one she had purchased at a garage sale in Connecticut last summer. It was an antique wooden chair painted her favorite shade of red, with a matching red leather pad secured onto the seat by means of slightly grimy gold tinted rivets. Megan had seen the chair and easily imagined it in the kitchen of some stereotypical 1950’s home with the little woman sitting on it in her Sears Catalogue kitchen reading Good Housekeeping while her pineapple and cherry encrusted ham baked and her four sons played catch outside with their father who always smoked his pipe after dinner.
By the time Megan got her first glimpse of the chair the gloss ruby paint job had faded to a dull matte burgundy and there was a vague scent of mildew in the seat. That was one of the things she loved about it, it wasn’t fresh and gleaming, it was aged and natural, more natural at least than if it had been repainted.
As fondly as she remembered the purchase of the chair, the real focal point of that summer was that it had been the last time she had seen her mother alive. Her mother had brought the chair to her attention at the garage sale and even gave her a few dollars to contribute to its purchase, which is why Megan would never let the chair go. Nothing could make her throw it away, not even if it were infested with termites and all four legs fell off. It would always remain with her as the last thing her mother ever helped her with.
Five months following the purchase of the chair Megan’s mother died unexpectedly of heart failure. Megan was at a meditation retreat in Colorado that week and unfortunately out of reach. She didn’t attend the wake or the funeral and so she never got a chance to see her mother again after their trip to Connecticut.
#
Megan and the chair were in her recently completed Mexican themed kitchen in her Bronx apartment. Her kitchen looked like Scarlet Macaw blew up in it. She had taken her time in decorating it as she had been waiting all her life for the perfect kitchen that personified her love of all things Mexico.
Somehow she had managed to find an affordable retro looking red refrigerator on EBay. Megan had always wanted a bright red refrigerator as she was hopelessly nostalgic about the 1950’s and had remembered seeing such a fridge in an old Vogue magazine ad. Then there were her wall-mounted cabinets, which she was extremely proud of. The panels on the doors were painted a fierce scarlet red and no ripe banana peel on Earth could ever match the fluorescent yellow of the doors’ trims. The sides of the cabinet sets, of which there were two, were a lime green only ever seen in the blood of some alien space invader from a dinky made for TV movie.
Then there were the walls, oh the walls. These were especially tasteful. Not until the day she had walked into Sherwin-Williams and requested the color had Chuck, a veteran clerk of fifteen years, been asked to mix a bright gold paint for someone’s kitchen walls.
The pièce de résistance was the wooden dining table at the center of the kitchen. Here she had most clearly expressed her passion for all things Mexico. The table had been custom made by a friend of hers who worked as a carpenter by day and a Dr. Evil impersonator for Bar Mitzvahs by night. This furnishing was especially unique because she had requested that the tabletop have the image of the Mexican flag carved into it and then painted appropriately. Finally a quarter inch thick sheet of glass was mounted on top to protect the carving and made the table functional. That was how much Megan loved Mexico.
Since her early teens Megan felt a powerful draw toward the bright tropical color palette, spicy flavors and vibrant way of life of Mexico. The very white, very Irish Megan also adored the pulsing Salsa beats that made her hips twist and thrust, and the spicy aromatic recipes that her very steadfast, very Irish parents would never try in a million years.
Megan grew to resent being Irish and desperately tried to find any connection to Mexico in her family history. After months of overseas phone conversations with her grandmother and great aunts and uncles followed by a few stern yelling sessions by her father over the obnoxiously expensive phone bill, she was extremely disappointed to come to the very obvious conclusion that there was not a sliver of Mexican ancestry in her family tree.
It was an obvious conclusion only because her mother and father were the first of her entire family line to migrate to the Americas. Her parents were born and raised in Ireland, as were her grandparents and her great grandparents and her great great grandparents and so on. Megan and her immediate family were all copper tops with thin bright red hair, which looked orange in direct sunlight. Their speckled freckles lay on their nearly transparent white faces, which also carried their emerald eyes.
This was not a sight Megan enjoyed seeing reflected each morning in her plastic framed Baroque style bathroom mirror. Secretly she hoped one day to wake up looking like Salma Hayek. With thick rich chestnut hair that went all the way down to the center of her back, olive skin that could enjoy the sun instead of dread it, full lips, breasts and possibly even a thick yet defined buttocks. That was the body she would kill a stranger for. Deep down she knew better than to hate herself and every morning Megan would have the same five-second inner conversation with herself about her natural Celtic looks. She was who she was and she needed to stop whining and brush her teeth and get on with her day. So she did.
Her affection for Mexico was no secret to those who knew her. The secret was that she did not actually know anything about Mexico’s history, politics or any of the other stuff she found boring or difficult, including the Spanish language. She knew, “hola”, “por favor”, “taco” and “gracias”, and those kept her satisfied. All of her knowledge of Mexico was acquired from watching Telemundo and feature films staring her favorite actors: Antonio Banderas, Desi Arnaz and Raul Julia. Unbeknownst to Megan, none of these actors were Mexican.
#
At the moment Megan sits in her kitchen tapping her Moroccan Red painted fingernails on the Mexico flag table in front of her, considering whom to call for advice. She needs someone she can trust. Someone smart, someone savvy and especially someone who would not rat on her. In a flash it comes to her. “Sarah! Call Sarah! She’ll know what to do about this hideous morbid mess!”
Megan and Sarah met in college at a frat party. It had been a week since school started and Megan was upset that she was not a part of, or even witnessing any of the crazy college pranks, toga parties or other activities she had seen in almost every film that depicted college life.
One of the more important things Megan learned in college was that the frat parties start after the first week of school. Everybody had to settle back to their school routine, even the party hearty beer-guzzling students.
A few days before the party all the frats sent out their most attractive, sincere, well groomed members onto campus with a few hundred flyers to hand out to cute female freshman. One of these seemingly fine young men approached Megan as she was entering the food hall next to her dorm and started to butter her up with a complement about her beautiful shiny red hair. He then proceeded to sell the party to her as a great place to mingle with fellow classmates and get to know the best fraternities and sororities. She glowed at the idea of attending a real life frat party in all its terribly beer-stained glory. Megan got dolled up alone in her room to the best of her ability and took to the party.
Upon her arrival she found it hilarious that all the college fairytales about frats were proven true before her. Four out of every five frat guys were in a beer chugging contest and every other one of them had the slimiest smirk she had ever seen. The house was a train wreck, the bathroom resembled a pig’s trough with mud and other unidentifiable brown stains in the tub. There appeared to be five-year-old beer bottles in most corners of the house and the paint on the walls was peeling at an accelerated rate.
At the center of the possibly once long ago living room was a large blue plastic drum barrel filled about three quarters full with a red liquid. It was punch specifically made by the frat for any and all ladies to enjoy who were not fans of beer.
Megan first met Sarah when Sarah had first noticed Megan standing beside the punch looking for a clean cup to take a sip of the concoction. Megan’s vibrant fiery red hair reminded Sarah of her favorite childhood literary and film character: Pippi Longstocking, and Sarah’s love of Pippi drew her to Megan. She jokingly warned Megan that the drink likely contained a slight aftertaste of Rohypnol. Megan had heard stories before of girls given drinks laced with ruffies and the consequences that followed so she heeded Sarah’s advice and ceased her quest for a clean cup. They slowly backed away from the drum barrel and moved to the other side of the room and began to chat about everything they witnessed around them. The drunks vomiting, the randomly occurring wrestling contests, freshman boys being escorted out of the party by their ears and so on.
After about an hour Megan thought she’d seen it all until the bizarre moment a guy shaped like a refrigerator grabbed some semi-drunk junior girl by the legs then threw her over his shoulder and made his way to God knows where to do God knows what. Thankfully the young lady seemed to enjoy the gentleman’s romantic approach of introducing himself. She was giggling as though she had a few too many cc’s of Nitrous oxide. Which could possibly have been the actual reason she giggled like that. It was a wild and crazy 90’s college party after all and it was at this point in the evening Megan and Sarah decided to leave.
They went for grub at Tony T’s Pizza. The restaurant was crammed with other college students, the ones not cool enough for the frat parties. This included the actors, the eggheads and the weirdos. Megan and Sarah spent most of the evening in quiet whispers between them exercising their ability to judge the innocents around them as coldly and quickly as possible. Each girl realized they were not alone in hating pretty much everyone else and it was a bond that kept them close years after college.
#
Megan and Sarah continue their phone conversation, “Sorry. I’ll try to calm down. So what should I do about this dead body?”
#
Megan had been standing on a ladder changing the light bulb in the bedroom of her apartment when she noticed a black dot between the base of the overhead light and the ceiling.
At first she had thought it was a bug or beetle and she almost fell backwards off the ladder trying to escape its potential jumping distance. Once she realized it wasn’t moving at all she investigated closer then closer then closer still until she finally poked it with her right index finger. When it had not attacked her or shot some sort of foul smelling defensive juice she scraped at it with her fingernail then pulled at it slightly and realized it wasn’t organic or even ex-organic for that matter. It was machine.
She tugged at it a bit more, but not too quickly. As far as she knew it was what kept the roof up or was an electricity monitor that could shock her into the next millennium.
After a little while she had tugged it out from where it was stuck between the wall and the back of the light fixture. It was some kind of thin black one-inch doohickey with a wire attached that continued up through the ceiling with no visible end. The wire she discovered was not like any Megan had seen before and she realized it didn’t belong there. Not at all. In an instant she had realized what she was looking at.
“It was a camera, like the ones they use on that T.V. show …SVU or something. A secret tiny perv camera they put in toilets, but this one was in my bedroom… my bedroom, on the fucking ceiling!”
She calmly climbed down the ladder and walked out the bedroom and toward her coat closet next to the front door. After opening the closet and shuffling things around, she found what she was looking for and returned to the bedroom. She made her way up the ladder, took a breath and slammed a hammer into the ceiling about three inches from where the camera rested.
“Hell yeah, I was pissed! I went at that ceiling like there was a million dollars in unmarked bills behind it.”
Her blood boiled as she hammered and smashed the ceiling and walls until she traced the wires to their origin. Ten minutes, one ceiling, seven walls and two stairways later she ended up in the subbasement.
“It just went straight down. …Are you kidding me? I wasn’t going to just sit there and let some crazy do this. I was going to find whoever it was and kick their ass.”
As Megan made her way through the low-lit horror movie-esque subbasement she noticed one door slightly ajar. Her jaw was clenched so tight that her teeth throbbed and threatened to shatter. She was much too furious at the moment to be frightened of what she might discover in there, so she just stepped straight in prepared and eager to deal out some damage.
She hadn’t even changed out of the Hello Kitty pajama set she wore which she had received for Christmas last year from her office Secret Santa.
#
Everyone at the office knew Megan was a fan of Hello Kitty because she had brought it to everyone’s attention fifteen minutes after the Secret Santas were assigned. She also sent out a mass office email that was a cartoon of Hello Kitty unwrapping a gift of a Hello Kitty doll.
She had certainly lucked out that year after buying her own Secret Santa, Frank, a gift card to Burger King. Megan did not know Frank very well and figured since he was a guy he should love fast food, especially fresh succulent burgers. Guys like tender beefy hamburgers, right? Unfortunately Frank was a vegan, a very sad vegan that Christmas with an unusable gift card and he had taken so much care picking out those cute Hello Kitty pajamas for her. Frank was so dedicated to the vegan cause he destroyed the card. No one got any burgers that year.
#
She opened the door to the dimly lit room in the subbasement and immediately realized what had been going on. There were ten televisions lined up together on a large metal folding table at the back of the concrete room. The only source of light in the room came from the illuminated screens and each of them displayed a different bedroom in her building at the center of it. She could see the Lawrence’s bedroom, the Reeves’, Phil and Jack’s… everyone’s. Sitting atop the third television from the left was a half eaten jar of Fluff and broadcast onto this television’s screen was Megan’s bedroom. Her right eye twitched and her left opened more than thought naturally possible. Megan Davis was going to kill herself a voyeur perv.
Megan was ready to continue her hunt for this unknown sicko and made a very dramatic turn towards the exit taking a few striding steps before her eye caught something large in the corner of the room beside the door.
She tried to focus her eyes in the dimly lit room and gave up in frustration after a moment then blasted toward the object. She got about a foot away from the entity before she realized what it was and screeched to a halt. She had been rushing toward the entity with such vigor she almost fell right on top of it before she made herself stop. Luckily she was able to offset her momentum in time and prevented herself from toppling over it. She stood there in front of the corpse of her voyeur not too surprised by his identity. Before her was the cadaver of Rich, the building’s unenthusiastic Super.
His body sat in a brown faux leather office chair looking quite comfortable beside the door she’d just entered. He was leaning to his left with his arms draped over the sides of the chair, the light from the screens reflected in his open eyes giving them the false look of life.
#
The subbasement was an area of the building only the Super was really known to frequent. He often hid down there, eating jars of Fluff and avoiding angry tenants. Megan had discovered this a few months prior when she caught him hiding in the laundry room, sitting in one of the plastic chairs by the dryer shoveling a finger full of Fluff down his gullet. She had been especially grossed out because even from ten feet away she could see the one hundred pounds per square inch of packed soot, dirt, oil, grease and other unholy germs caked under his fingernails as he licked the Fluff off his fingers like a scene from an unrated French film. Instead of washing her week’s worth of whites that day she left silently and tried to erase the thoughts from her mind.
#
Even as the now ex-Super sat before her in peaceful eternal sleep, he was creepy. As usual he was a greasy sloppy wreck and wore the same work boots he was likely born in. She’d never seen him wear anything other than a t-shirt with stains that kept rearranging themselves and his trusty two sizes too large levis. Megan took a breath and looked around the room to be absolutely sure there was no one else there. It was just her, the Super, his treasure trove of screens and the Fluff. Nothing and no one else was in the room. No one. She calmly left the room, closed the door to the subbasement, went upstairs, and back into her apartment. Megan assumed he had expired from a heart attack or some other natural cause of death associated with the particularly unhealthy. The man was very obese, unhygienic mess who cared as little for his health as he did for Megan’s broken garbage disposal he had avoided repairing for the last eight months. There would be no mourning from her for this guy. Sure he was a sleazy perv but he was also racist, sexist, smelly, unbelievably lazy, dirty, rude and probably quite sticky. So therefore the proper handling of the discovery of his corpse was not the highest on Megan’s list of priorities for the evening, but it was inconveniently something to consider.
#
“Should I call the cops or start the roast turkey?” Megan was expecting a guest for dinner that night. A Mr. Geoff Smith: Attorney, dog lover and apartment owner. They had met a few weeks ago at their gym on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She had read in Cosmo that a great spot to meet attractive wealthy men was at a nice gym, and Squeeze Gym was a very nice gym. They even did your laundry while you worked out. It was worth the loan, yes…loan. Megan had taken out a small loan to pay for the gym membership and very expensive yet very necessary snazzy workout outfits. She considered it an investment in her love life as well as her health. At least that’s what she would tell herself every time she saw the monthly gym bill.
Geoff and Megan had gone on one date before at a restaurant Geoff had suggested. Captain Cook’s Seafood Restaurant specialized in fresh… seafood. Unfortunately, Megan was not a fan of eating anything that lived in water and her meal was less than satisfying. She didn’t mind too much because it gave her a great opportunity to invite Geoff over for a homemade turkey dinner for their next date. That date was later this very evening.
#
This was a big night for Megan and she really did not want a police investigation to screw up her chances with Geoff. She knew of course that the right thing to was to call the police immediately, but as she mulled over that idea, she simultaneously planned what she should do if she were to decide to wait until after the date to… rediscover the body and then call the authorities. The holes in the stairways could be covered with flyers until she relived the incident, as she certainly did not want any tenants to notice the holes before she called the police. The holes in her own apartment could easily be covered with posters and art she was meaning to hang up anyway.
The Butterball turkey she planned for this evening’s menu was atop the kitchen counter awaiting its fate. Either the dead turkey or the dead Super would get Megan’s full attention that afternoon.
#
“…Oh I’m sure Geoff will understand. We can reschedule after he gets back from his business trip to California week after next. No he’s just going to revise some contracts and visit some of his old college buddies. They haven’t gotten together in a few years so they rented a boat for a few nights. It’s good for him to see his boys and he’s been working really hard on the Lively contracts.
…Oh yeah, Mr. Super perv. I know… I’ll call the cops as soon as I hang up with you. He might have a family that’s worried about him, or maybe someone that depends on him. God, what if he has a kid who needs to get picked up at school or something? …I can’t believe I even considered it. It’s crazy…Yes and heartless…Yeah I am better than that, thank you. …I guess there must be someone out there who loved him. …It’s true he may have been gross, gross and mean, gross and mean and lazy but it doesn’t mean he deserves abandonment even if it is only temporary. …Very true no one deserves that kind of treatment. It is inhumane. …Yup even grotesque and morbid. Sure, sure. …Anyway I should go then, so I can call Geoff. … O.K. I’ll call you after this all blows over. Thanks… bye, Sarah.”
Megan looked at the turkey on the counter then the telephone beside her. She took a deep breath then reached out setting the oven to 325°F. “Eh…he’ll still be dead in the morning.”
END
P.S. Here is a gift for reading this masterpiece:
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