Brandon, OR/ID: Part VII

Suspended Pinks
By Jem Morgenstern

A cello sits quietly in the corner of the room. Its dark body stands out against the blushing pink walls. The wooden floors are similarly dark. Anne is sitting on a yellow chair. This is a room she hasn’t been in before. The cello in the corner is a stranger to her - a distant relative to her own cello. She is staring at its peg box. The head of each peg is parallel to the others - an impossibility that leads Anne to ask questions that she doesn’t intend to answer or vocalize. She wonders if the cello is tuned properly. She wonders why it wouldn’t be. She wonders if the cello’s cellist has a method of tuning the cello in a way that keeps the pegs perfectly aligned with each other. An impossibility.

She stands. Her shoes are between the doorway and the wardrobe. The left side of her left shoe is parallel to the right side of the wardrobe, the right side of her right shoe is exposed to the air flowing in through the doorway, the heels of both shoes are against the wall behind them. Their laces are undone. Each time she looks at the shoes, she is bothered by the end of the lace on the right shoe that is frayed. She is planning to replace the laces soon, because she is trying to minimize the number of small details in her daily life that make her uncomfortable. The next pair of laces will be the fourth pair of laces that have been on these shoes. She replaced the first pair because they were a particular shade of blue that didn’t match well with the peachy yellow of the shoes’ bodies. She still has this pair of laces stored in the bottommost left drawer of her own dresser at home. She has considered lacing that pair onto the shoes rather than buying a new pair, but she decided the combination of colors would cause the same amount of discomfort as the frayed end that she is attempting to ignore now. The shoes are now on her feet and she is walking down the stairs. The stairs are steep - otherwise, her pace would be quicker.

There is a long hallway at the bottom of the staircase. The walls are bare, likely because it is hard to pair artwork with the intricate wallpaper. The floors of the hallway are the same as they are in the room with the cello. There is a small decorative table near one of the doorways. Nothing is on the table. The rooms in the house are wide and spacious, but this corridor is suffocating.

The tiles in the kitchen are a muted white that is similar to the tile on the countertops, the cupboards and walls are a heavy blue. On the countertop near the sink, which is below a wide window, there is a wooden cutting board. There is a column of drawers next to the white fridge - two cutting boards that are identical to the one on the counter are in the middle drawer. The knives are all kept in the drawer above the cutting boards. The drawer below the cutting boards contains miscellaneous tools that are not used often. None of the handles to the cupboards or drawers are matching. There is an asparagus green kettle on the stove and Anne hears it begin to whistle. Two teacups are set next to the cutting board on the counter. Something is placed on the cutting board - Anne is unable to identify what it might be by just the sound of its heavy body landing on the wooden board. She enters the kitchen and does not look at the cutting board.

“I have to go. Are you busy later this week?”

Anne knows that he is busy later this week, but she feels that asking this question makes her unexpected exit seem more polite. Her question and presence in the kitchen are met with a concerned expression.

“Yeah, the rest of this week will be kinda busy, but I can see if I can find some time. Is everything okay?”

She knows that ignoring his question might spark some suspicion, but she chooses to anyway.

“I’ll text you later. Let me know if you can find time.”

She can tell he isn’t satisfied with this response. They talk for another short amount of time before she is able to leave. She’s glad that she decided to leave before he was further into the lunch-making process. They both exit the kitchen and walk down the narrow hallway towards the front door. There is a table next to the door with a stack of small books. Anne glances at the titles and finds that they are almost all contemporary christian fiction. She’s glad that she decided to leave before she was further into the romanticizing process.

It has been two hours. Anne is walking through the mall to a store she believes will have shoelaces. The mall is crowded and she worries for the unsupervised kids who are chasing each other around the always ignored mechanical rocking horses. She thinks about coming to the mall with her parents - she is surprised by the lack of change and she experiences a mild sensation of loss while thinking about the things that have changed. She wonders if the children understand how temporary childhood is - though she then hopes that they don’t, because she doesn’t want them to worry about the impermanence of their childhood freedoms. She doesn’t want the pleasure of childhood to be spoiled by the aggressive reality of temporality. Her thoughts sway between the consideration of childhood as a concept and memories of her own childhood. She remembers the excitement she felt when her parents gave in to her begging for a ride on a mechanical rocking horse and the dry embarrassment she felt when she got on the horse and discovered it wasn’t as fun as she had imagined. She tries to pinpoint the exact moment her childhood ended, but eventually determines that the loss of childhood is a gradual process of it being torn away rather than a single moment.

The store’s shoelace options are more limited than she had imagined. There is white, black, off-white variations, and a small group of neons. None of them are particularly attractive to her. She takes a few off the rack and holds them against her shoes. A sedated blue, a muted yellow, a pristine white, a violent neon pink. She puts the neon pink and the white back on the rack. She holds the blue and yellow against her shoes again. She puts the blue back on the rack.

At home, she replaces the laces on her shoes. The old ones are placed in the garbage bin. She feels like throwing them away is a waste, but she knows that keeping them around will do no good. With the new laces on her shoes, she is relieved that she won’t be bothered by frayed laces again until these ones are also worn to their limit. This small chore was the only activity Anne had planned for her day. A moment of stillness follows the completion of this one goal as the embrace of her achievement loosens. The stillness is a midpoint between her short pride in her small accomplishment and the inevitably approaching fear that the empty hours following will be filled with nothing but the questioning of what to do next. Anne is ashamed of her ruthless habit of killing time - the guilt of idling while time passes overwhelms her before the time she is afraid of wasting has begun to pass. There is some dirt on the rug in her bedroom, she thinks, so she decides to vacuum. She knows this will only occupy a small portion of the time to follow, but she is happy that the few minutes it takes will be spent in a way that she considers productive. With the vacuum on and the bedroom door closed, Anne doesn’t hear the knocking at her door. She would never know there was a knocking at the door and she would never know why.

Anne is able to occupy the rest of her day with small activities similar to vacuuming the rug in her bedroom. She finds a short time to play her cello, but she hasn’t yet forgiven her talent for the work it created when she was invited to perform at the Philadelphus Lewisii Music Hall nightly each day of the previous week. She punishes herself for the stress she has caused herself. At this time, playing her cello evokes the same stress her practice sessions had before, which is unpleasant. Overall, she is satisfied with how she spent her time.

She receives a text from the date she abandoned. He has found some free time later in the week and wants to know if this time aligns with her schedule, because he would like to see her again. Anne isn’t sure if she wants to see him again. She doesn’t respond.

Anne’s shoes are in the hallway. Her left shoe is on the right side of her right shoe - the toe is against the wall and its heel is against nothing. Her right shoe is pointed in the opposite direction. Her socks are still on her feet. She is sitting at the kitchen table in silence. There is an empty floral white bowl on the table in front of her. The head of her spoon is resting in the bottom of the bowl. There is a matching plate to the right of the bowl. On the plate, there is a small portion left of the bread she cut herself from the loaf she bought the day before at a supposedly French bakery. The texture of the bread isn’t as satisfying as it was the day before. Anne hasn’t yet decided if she will finish eating the bread. With the potential for love and the bread on her mind, she’s reminded of one of the many Johns she has known throughout her life. His absence doesn’t darken her mood. She wonders what he might be doing with his life now - she knows he’s no longer a gardener and she knows the friends they shared haven’t heard from him for a long time. Although she doesn’t care about him, she hopes that he is doing well.

Brandon, OR/ID: Part II

Flower Stuck in Gums

By Jem Morgenstern

Anne is a recent high school graduate from West Kilby High School, which has no counterpart in the East, North, or South. It is the smallest high school in the city and is mainly reserved for the elitist children of the classist wealthy adults. Their sports teams are ranked as the worst in the region despite having the best equipment. West Kilby High School’s archrival is The Deng Xiaoping Catholic School for the Gifted, which is the school with the least and worst sports equipment and also ranks as second-best in the region despite their condemnation of extracurricular activities because, as quoted from their introductory guide, extracurricular clubs and activities distract students from achieving their full intellectual potential. West Kilby High School doesn’t have much to show for its overfunding besides its orchestral dominance over other schools’ music departments. This is mostly because the school is able to afford having a music department. Of the six high schools in the city, only three have musical classes to offer. Anne, although a student of West Kilby High School, didn’t play in the West Kilby Orchestra. Instead, she played for the Callcott Loyal Orchestra, whose home was Callcott Loyal Orchestral School for the Musically Talented. Callcott Loyal, although being dedicated to the musical arts, only had the second-best orchestra of the three schools that have music departments. This is mostly because the students of the school had no teachers. Callcott Loyal Orchestral School for the Musically Talented let the students teach themselves. Considering that many students at Callcott Loyal were completely self-taught musicians, them ranking second-best in the city is actually very impressive. Anne is a musically-gifted, 19-year-old, kind romantic. She often has a difficult time hearing what people say and is too shy to ask for repetition. She chews rose flavored gum, she hates talking to the elderly, and she too often drives over the speed limit. Her life had reached a stasis where positivity and negativity lifted each other up and dragged each other through the dirt. There was no movement in her emotional vortex, which left her with a pleasant blank feeling most of the time. This was what she had expected her life to feel like after achieving her ultimate goal, but she questioned how it could possibly feel this way if she hadn’t yet met her true love.

Anne had never cared about romance or marriage. She tried so hard not to care about romance or marriage. She almost succeeded, but she couldn’t stop herself. Love was what she wanted most, out of everything. She always had the feeling that it might be hiding around the corner, but every time she turned that corner, nothing was there. She sat in her room, listening to the wind and her neighbor’s radio that always played too loudly, thinking so fondly of her perfect future. She doesn’t want anything spectacular, nothing worth writing books about, nothing anybody would care to hear about. Anne wants a calm, sweet, clean future. Anne wants that future to be now. The love she yearns for takes time and patience - truckloads of patience - she understands that, but she can’t help it.

From outside of her bedroom window, he caught her eye. He: twenty-three and already dead inside, commonplace brown hair, commonplace white skin. His name is John, often referred to as The Gardener by Anne’s parents and - for the sake of narrative eccentricity - by me. In all honesty, The Gardener is such a boring character. He isn’t boring in a way that makes him interesting, unlike Anne, who is boring in a way that makes her quirky and relatable. The Gardener is so simply boring, but has won Anne’s love so simply by standing in her view. Henceforth, The Gardener - however uninteresting he may be - is now an important character. Anne looked at him. Only looked. She had not one thought of him, she did not listen to his rustling in the bushes beneath her window, she did not attempt to speak to him. Anne knew this was love, but how could this be it? It changed nothing and everything inside her, but how could this be it? She is drawn towards him. She wants to garden beside him so badly, despite hating working in the yard (as well as her parents, which is one reason why the hired The Gardener). She hated him already for cutting her bushes too short, but she forgave him immediately because her love would not allow her to pay mind to such a small thing. He finished with the bushes and turned the corner. Her heart bleeds with his absence, because she is so deeply in love. Anne is in love with The Gardener she knows nothing about. She does not catch another glimpse of him for the rest of the day.

It’s 8:45 PM, well past the usual 8:30 PM dinnertime. Anne glances at her clock, back at the screen of her computer, back at the clock, back at the screen of her computer, at the clock on the screen of her computer, back at the clock. It’s 8:45 PM and she has not been called down to eat whatever it is that John - The Cook, not The Gardener - should have prepared for her to eat by now. She brought herself up from her chair, casually so as not to seem angered or hurried. Then, casually, she walked to the door of her room. She opened her door, casually, as if just to use the bathroom. She stepped from her room and walked to the stairs that led downwards to the first floor of the house, which contained one of three kitchens on The Property. The first of the other two is in the basement level of The Home. The second of the other two is in The Maid’s Cottage, which is currently home to The Gardener, The Butler, The Maid, and The Laundryman. The Cook lives in The Home, along with The Breadman, The Tailor, and The Family. In all, The Property is home to only three people who are not men: The Tailor, Anne, and Mother Anne. Mother Anne is the mother of Anne, and those two are the only two women on The Property. The Tailor, who is not a woman and also not a man, is the only one on The Property to identify as either or neither. While still not identifying as either of the one-two genders, The Tailor prefers to be referred to with the use of the pronouns typically used for women: she, her, and such others that can be inferred from the given information. Of all the men on The Property, only two are not named John (John is a very common name in this city). John, the son of Father John and Anne’s younger sibling, is the youngest of the Johns. The youngest of Anne’s two siblings is one of the two men on The Property to not be named John. Mother Anne and Father John decided that naming both of their sons with the same name just wouldn’t be practical, so they named him Jon. The other man on The Property not named John is The Maid, who is named Anthony.

Anne is now in the primary kitchen. The time is 8:55 PM. The house is rather large, so it takes some time to get from room to room. The Cook is finished preparing dinner, twenty-five minutes later than usually scheduled, as requested by Mother Anne and Father John. Anne arrived just in time, along with her parents. Anne questioned her parents and asked for them to reason why dinner was scheduled twenty-five minutes later and they said plenty, but it could have been easily summarized with no good reason. They began eating: carrots and potatoes prepared in a variety of ways, caramelized onions with mushrooms, lentils, and pulled pork.

Anne needed to ask about The Gardener. She couldn’t stop thinking of him. The thought so fondly of him. Every minute of the time she spent watching him was etched into each each minute of the rest of her day and she could not stand living a minute longer without knowing who he is. The clock ticked dramatically, as if it were being held up to her head to taunt her with each passing second. She was nervous. She knew asking about him would raise her parents’ suspicion, but she had to. To herself, Anne promised that she would ask straight after swallowing the bit of mushroom that was in her mouth. She chewed slowly. Before swallowing, she paused and thought more. She made an agreement with herself to eat one more mushroom before asking her parents about The Gardener. The rearranging and rescheduling of her planned actions continued for some time, before she realized that it would never happen. She knew herself well enough to know that she would never be brave enough to ask even one thing about him. She finished eating, left her seat at the table, and began the long walk back to her room.

The time is now 10:01 PM. Anne is alone in her room. She regrets not having the courage to ask about The Gardener. She regrets not having spoken to The Gardener herself. She goes through every crevice in her mind, searching for anything to wallow over and regret. Her window is open, her room slowly loses its heat to the chill of the dark Autumn air, and her blankets have never felt more cozy. All she wants is to sleep. She wants her consuming thoughts to be brushed aside by exhaustion. Then, she wants to fall deeply into her sleep, so that her mind refuses to let those thoughts back in.

The morning came quickly (not literally any quicker than usual, but Anne felt it had). Anne woke with a startling sense of rest. She wasn’t tired and she didn’t mind the fact that she had awoken half an hour earlier than she wanted to. The sun shone brightly through her window. The Property’s figure was sharpened by the contrasting shadows and illuminations. The gentle sound of garden shears snipping at her bushes wafted upwards and into her ear. She could not believe he dared to cut her bushes any shorter, but she was glad to know that he was nearby. She peered through the immaculately polished glass, down at him. He looked just as perfect as he did the day before. The Gardener’s perfection, which is so obvious to Anne, is not obvious to most others. Even in his own narrative, The Gardener was less than important. That day, Anne was the only one to value him. He didn’t value himself, as a person. Mother Anne and Father John didn’t value him, as an employee. The Staff of The Property paid no mind to him and didn’t value him, as somebody who had shared an experience with them. His mother and his father didn’t value him, as a child. Even before speaking to him, Anne knew that The Gardener would be boring and valueless, but she loved him for being genuine. He was real. All she saw, all he showed: it was physically and limitlessly real.

After staring, watching, gazing, and glancing for weeks, Anne finally talked to The Gardener. They talked and they both enjoyed the conversations they had together. Their chats became more frequent. When Anne felt the timing was right, she asked The Gardener if he would like to go on a date. They went on a date. They enjoyed their date and they both agreed upon going on more dates, so they did. They went on many dates. This continued for many months. The Gardner changed Anne’s contact name in his phone from Anne to Anne(GF). Anne never changed The Gardener’s contact name in her phone to anything besides John. Despite their many dates and many efforts, the two never fell in love. In the end, it was Anne who put their dates to a stop. He was simply boring. Even in Anne’s ridiculously romanticized reality, his combined personality traits couldn’t create any dynamic of interest or allure. Anne’s first impression of him was completely inaccurate. It wasn’t even a struggle for Anne to decide whether or not she break her ties with the boy. One day, she simply said to herself, “Anne, it’s not going to work”, and she texted him right then and there. She didn’t take care to be gentle with it either. Anne knew that The Gardener would not flinch regardless of what it said. The day it happened, Anne removed his number from her phone, but The Gardener kept hers as Anne(GF) until the day he died. That was the first time he developed any character. He couldn’t bring himself to delete or even change the label in his contacts because, to him, it felt as if that would remove or alter a time in his life that he hadn’t even realized he enjoyed so much. For the first time, The Gardener was an actual being with actual feelings and a real personality. He acquired the trait of being sentimental. He acquired a genuine appreciation for time and memories. Now and then, he would come upon a moment he found to be beautiful yet he knew without effort that he would forget that moment only hours after. In these moments, he would strain himself to remember every detail, so that he could look back on it and recall the mundane sense of bewilderment that came from them. It was in one of these moments, only months after the day of Anne’s last text, that The Gardener died.

Brandon, OR/ID: Part I

A Baguette Shouldn’t have a Name

By Jem Morgenstern

This story begins in a not-actually-French French bakery in a not-quite-suburban division of a not-quite-recognizable city directly on the border of Oregon and Idaho. Neither state wants to claim the city for no reason other than its reputation. The city isn’t scathed with rampant crime, infestations, or insurmountable poverty. Really, claiming the city wouldn’t be burdensome in any way, but the place is so inexplicably unextraordinary that neither state wants to claim it. Residents aren’t taxed by either state, so they’re only taxed by the city and the national government, which allows the city to raise taxes by quite a bit without any complaints from residents. Because of their increased taxes, the city has been able to become quite beautiful, but still unseen and unheard of by anyone besides the residents living there. The city’s residents never feel the need to move away from the city, unless temporarily relocating for schooling or just vacation. People living outside of the city never feel the need to move into the city (people are only interested in cities they’ve already heard of and don’t care to hear about anything “near Idaho”).  There are only two difficulties for a city with no state, really. One is that people who still send mail are never sure which state to put on their envelopes and the employees of the USPS are never quite sure how this city could be here and there, but they’ve learned not to question it and they sort the mail that goes to the same city that is somehow in different states in its own category. The second is that residents don’t know which state is their “home” and don’t know which state to have pride for. Some residents decide to show no pride for either possible home state and some choose to show pride for both, but the second of which is often too much work and is the less common of the two. In smaller portions of the community, the confusion caused by having no state goes further to where they question if they even have a country or which country they belong to, which is the only explanation as to why the not-actually-French French bakery in a not-quite-suburban division of the city claims to be French while having been run by not-actually-French Americans since it was established twenty years ago.

This day’s sunrise seemed to last longer than the average sunrise, which had caught the eye of the single baker who showed up to work that day and the single customer who had begun driving to the bakery just as the sun’s cantaloupe light leaked through the outlines of his neighborhood’s rooftops and treetops. The sun rose with a certain gentility that slowed the pace of the hour, neutralized worry for the seemingly elongated passage of time, and warmed the mellow chill of the air. For the baker and the customer, the time they spent alone that morning was for each of them one of those undefinable moments that are so appreciated and then easily forgotten by the next hour. As the baker stood in reverie without disruptive thought, a piercing chime rung in the kitchen and pulled his ear towards the baking bread. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to leave his position quite yet because he knew this would result in the loss of this immaterial moment of comfort, but he had to for the sake of the not-actually-French French bakery’s reputation. He took a deep breath to say goodbye to his lull. Then, he walked into the kitchen and passed the counters topped with flour and flavorless yet decorative seeds. The baker pulled a pan of seven baguettes from the oven. The bell dangling from the door’s hinge jingled as the customer, who took a deep breath to say goodbye to his lull before he left his car, walked into the not-actually-French French bakery. This was the only bakery where he would buy breads despite it being a twenty minute drive from his home and that there were several other bakeries within a considerably closer distance. The customer had always felt like this specific bakery was more authentic than the others despite it being pseudo-French. What truly appealed to him wasn’t the bakery’s authenticity. If he had cared about authenticity, his favorite would most likely be the actually Albanian bakery just fifteen minutes away from his home. The customer actually cared about which bakery made bread the way he imagines bread should feel, smell, and taste. With the exception of their bethmännchen (which is German, not French), this not-actually-French French bakery closest fit the standards of his idealized bread.

While the customer has come to recognize the baker because of his frequent visits to the bakery over the years, the baker has yet to register the customer as a recognizable figure. The customer always feels somewhat disappointed when that baker fails to recognize him, which hasn’t gone unnoticed by the baker. The customer’s disappointment is made obvious through teeny expressions and vocalizations imperceivable by himself, but seen by bystanders and misinterpreted by those bystanders as off-standish traits that make the customer feel even more like a stranger than he should at this point with his history of customer loyalty. The baker’s inability to recognize this customer or any of the other regulars is somewhat negligent, but excusable because of his tendency to focus on the insentient instead of the living. Because many of the bakery’s regular customers give off-standish vibes of imperceivable disappointment at this baker’s inability to recognize their loyalty, the baker comes across many off-standish strangers in his line of work although they aren’t actually strangers or even off-standish.

The customer bought one of the seven baguettes and left the baker and the bakery without any exchange of words beyond the standard employee-customer conversation.

“What can I get for you today?”

Just a baguette.

“Okay. Is that all?”

Yes.

“Two dollars, please.” (Bread isn’t taxed in this city.)

Thank you.

“Thank you.”

Goodbye.

“Have a good day.” (It had been, but it soon wouldn’t be.)

The baguette was in a brown paper bag, shuffling around in the passenger seat of the customer’s car as he drove the twenty minutes back home without the witchlike sunrise illuminating his middle-class car’s worn surface. Six minutes into the drive, the customer’s car was struck by another much heavier car. The customer then died. The owner of the heavier car wasn’t unphased by the strike, but he was still in the same condition as he was before (physically, but possibly scarred mentally). The survivor looked around the intersection. There weren’t stop signs on either of the intersecting roads and the speed limit for both was 45. This hazard had simply been overlooked by anyone and the owner of the heavier car, in the end, would not be blamed for the fatal accident. Then, the survivor took his cellphone from his pocket and called the emergency dispatch hotline. The emergency dispatch hotline squad arrived shortly afterwards. The squad pried the door of the customer’s car off its hinges and onto the ground. They were actually unsure of that to do next, since this particular emergency dispatch hotline squad was composed entirely of recently trained officers who hadn’t paid much attention to the boring parts of the training process. They stood at the pried entrance of the crippled middle-class car and stared at the most brutally mangled corpse any of them had ever seen (some had seen mangled corpses before). The squad looked to the survivor, stupidly, as if he would know what to do in this situation. The survivor looked back at the emergency dispatch hotline squad. The baguette stood still in its brown paper bag, unscathed. The survivor realized the squad was staring him down for answers.

“Pull out,” he said to them with stern certainty without noticing that he forgot to say “him” between the two words he had said. The squad hadn’t noticed either, so they pulled him out.

Most of him. His stringy torso slipped out from beneath the seat and the wheel with a surprisingly low level of effort, but his waist and legs stayed put. The squad wasn’t sure how to react. They knew these were the remnants of a person, but it wouldn’t have been easy to identify as a former human without the context. They ignored the mass of boney pulled pork they just flung onto the ground and frisked the pockets. They found his cellphone, which had a chip on one of its corners, but there was no evidence showing that the accident caused the damage. The customer had always been trusting of his company and felt no need to protect his phone with a password, which made things a lot easier for the emergency dispatch hotline squad. The baguette rolled just a bit because of the squad’s interference in the car. The squad opened the phone’s list of contacts, opened the tab of recently contacted contacts, and found Anne(GF) at the top. They scrolled down a little more and found several other Annes with explanatory labels in parentheses next to them with no spaces. Anne is an incredibly common name in this city. They decided to contact Anne(GF) first. They called and she didn’t sound worried despite what they had just told her. She hadn’t actually heard most of what they had told her and she filled in the blanks with what made the most sense to her, which shouldn’t have made any sense at all. The scenario that Anne(GF) had made up to steamroll over the blanks in the conversation was that John (she knows several Johns because it’s an incredibly common name in this city) got into a car accident and they needed her to collect some items. What the emergency dispatch hotline squad had actually said to her was that some guy got into a car accident and they needed her to help identify his unrecognizable body. Anne(GF) got to the scene in twelve minutes.

“Anne,” the squad never would learn how to greet soon-to-be-scarred identifiers of corpses.

Where is it?

“In the front seat,” slightly surprised by her hurried reference to him as it.

Anne(GF) noticed the legs in the driver’s seat and figured that wouldn’t be the front seat the squad was referring to (she was still under the impression that she was collecting John’s items). She walked to the other side of the car and opened the front passenger’s door. She saw the baguette. She took the baguette.

Is that all?

“What do you mean?”

Is this all there is to take?

“We’re not sure if you’re supposed to take anything. What is it?”

Anne(GF) didn’t understand any of what they said. She decided that they must have asked what the guy’s name is, which she thought was odd because they were the first ones to mention his name. After some thought, she came to the conclusion that they were just testing her to see if she was really the Anne they called to collect the items (now item).

John.

“What is that?”

John.

The squad stared at Anne(GF) and Anne(GF) stared back at the squad. She got into her car and drove off with the baguette in her passenger seat. She was home in ten minutes.