I wrote a short story
The Delivery Dance
This can’t be the place, he thought, looking down at his phone to verify the address, which was indeed correct.
But it was just a standalone white wall in a small, fenced-in lot between two mansions. Well, Ryan would describe them as mansions, though he suspected the rich bastards living there wouldn’t.
He sat astride his bike, feet on the sidewalk, delivery in a white plastic bag dangling from the handlebars.
There was no door in the wall, and no windows, just a mailbox with a hand-painted address in red affixed to the front. He considered leaving the bag in the mailbox but was worried it would spoil in the hot sun.
He laid the bike flat, pushed through the fence, and carried the bag to the other side of the wall. Nothing remarkable there, just the other side of the wall.
He remembered what was in the bag and felt the familiar sting of anxiety poke his sphincter.
He could hear piano happening somewhere deep in the house on the left. It was manic, furious. Probably Russian, he thought, Rachmaninoff or that other guy.
Ah, the hell with this. He went to place the bag in the dry grass behind the wall.
Just then the piano stopped and a woman appeared in a lot-facing window in the mansion.
“Yo, Fonzi!” she said.
Fonzi? He squinted up at the window. Was she talking to him? And was she naked? He tried to shade his face but was staring straight into the sun.
“My name’s not Fonzi!” he shouted, a bit louder than necessary.
“I know, dipshit,” she said, “just bring that bag over here. I’ll pay for it.”
“It’s already paid for,” he said, holding up the bag as though it were evidence, “through the app.”
“No shit,” she said and vanished from the window.
When she answered the door, Ryan was disappointed to discover her fully clothed.
“I’m Krystal,” she said, “with a K.”
“I’m Ryan,” Ryan replied, then looked at his phone. “Are you Brian?”
“My name’s Krystal,” she repeated.
“Well, I can only deliver this to someone named Brian. Do you know where he is?”
“I wish,” she said, and guided him into the house.
Ryan’s phone chimed, then chimed again, then squawked, which Ryan knew meant his boss was getting impatient. The delivery was scheduled for an hour ago, but it took him an hour to even make the pick-up, and now he’d biked all the way out here only to find a plaster wall in a small, fenced-in lot.
Krystal toured him through the house as though he were a hired hand receiving his orientation.
It was nice inside, Ryan thought, if a little dated.
The kitchen was big and open and the appliances were old but looked like they had never been used. She opened the fridge to reveal a half-empty glass bottle of Coke, a squat bottle of fancy mustard, and what remained of a foil-wrapped Honeybaked ham.
“Have a Coke,” she said, pressing the bottle into his hand. In the living room she pointed to the sliding glass door, through which Ryan saw a reclining, middle-aged man wearing board shorts and a fedora squinting into his phone beside a pool.
Ryan’s phone made a baaaa sound and he reflexively sipped the Coke. It was flat.
“Is that Brian?” Ryan asked.
“Well, that’s a Brian. Does that help?
Ryan’s phone made a shooting star noise and he sipped the Coke again. Still flat.
“That really depends,” he replied. “Is it Brian Madagascar?”
Krystal laughed and fell into Ryan, grabbing him by the T-shirt. “Oh my gawd, that’s got to be a fake name, right?” She pulled him closer.
“You trying to seduce me, Mister?”
Ryan’s phone made a noise which sounded to Krystal like Ice Cube yelling “Timber!” She’d grown bored of this game. She pushed him away and looked at her husband, his starch white paunch and dumbass fedora. And did he have a boner? Or was it just the board shorts scrunching up? She couldn’t tell from this distance.
Just then Brian stood—no boner, thank God—stretched his arms overhead and lifted a leg to fart. A look of concern passed over his face. He placed the phone and fedora on the chair and dove into the pool. Ryan reflexively held his breath while the guy was under water, an annoying habit he’d picked up as a child while watching movies where the characters spent any amount of time in a body of water.
Brian still hadn’t emerged 35 seconds later. Was the dude okay?
“He always fucking does this,” Krystal said as she slid open the glass door and stomped into the backyard.
Brian surfaced and both he and Ryan took a huge gasp of air.
Ryan couldn’t make out what they were saying, but they appeared to be arguing, which didn’t exactly take sharp detective work—they were both pressing double middle fingers at each other.
This was certainly not the scene he expected to find. Don’t rich people lead better lives, sort of intrinsically? Do these rich bastards not even know what they’ve got here?
He looked down at his phone. Three missed calls. He called the number back.
“Have you made the delivery?” his boss asked.
“Yes! Well, no, I’m in the house next door.”
“Shit, bud, I’m no doctor, but don’t deliveries typically go to the specified address?”
“I was over there, but—”
“I don’t want your “but” I want you to make the goddamn delivery! NOW!”
Ryan rushed out of the house, followed closely by a peacock, which ran to the curb, looked both ways, then bobbed down the street.
Shit, thought Ryan, he’d been careless and let the peacock out. He didn’t even know they had a peacock. Krystal appeared at the door.
“Baxter!” she shouted. “Thanks a lot, Fonzi,” she said to Ryan, flipping him the bird. Ryan sprang into a crisp salute, then started running down the hill after Baxter, the plastic bag banging against his thigh.
The plastic bag! Oh, shit! He remembered the delivery and came sprinting back up the hill.
Krystal had disappeared into the house and her husband, Brian, now stood on the mansion’s front porch, shirtless in soaked board shorts, holding what looked like a video game controller and wearing a VR headset with a microphone floating an inch from his lips. A drone buzzed up off the roof and blitzed down the street after Baxter.
“I’ve got eyes on him,” said Brian as the garage door opened and Krystal reversed into the street in an open-top Jeep.
“Roger that,” she replied to her headset, tires squealing as she pointed the vehicle down the hill and tore off.
What in the fuck was Ryan even seeing here? A drone? A goddamn peacock?
What kind of lives were these people living?
A few minutes later Krystal roared back up the hill, the peacock now in the passenger seat wearing goggles. She shot Ryan the bird as she turned into the driveway and disappeared into the garage.
The drone reappeared, now hovering 10 feet over Ryan’s head. Krystal’s husband was still standing on the front porch shirtless. The VR headset obscured most of his face, but Ryan could see his grin—it looked to him like the smirk of a man about to open a promising pornographic GIF.
Ryan could hear the drone shadowing him overhead as he walked toward the plaster wall.
He placed the delivery down, took out his mini pocket tripod, affixed his phone to it, and placed it on the ground about fifteen feet away, ensuring it was framing the package dead center in the shot, as directed by the “Self-employed Contractor Handbook of Best Services” (SCHBS)—known as “SuCH BS” in the contractor world.
He switched the phone to video, pressed record, and walked into the frame. He hated this part. The company had earned a reputation for both losing packages and abusing their self-employed contractors, so some whiz kid in marketing came up with an idea she’d seen on social media and now all delivery contractors were required to perform a 15-second dance beside the package and post it to their personal social accounts, along with the 13 required hashtags, like #IsThisWork, #WorkingIt, #FunAtWork, #LikeFUN, #LikeFunFun, #LikeFunFunSON, and so on.
Ryan started to dance.
It wasn’t a good dance. He wasn’t a good dancer. The most charitable way to describe it would be what a soft-shoe tap routine might look like if you explained it to a one-legged blind man in a language he couldn’t speak and then made him do the dance at gunpoint while an irritable sea lion brayed in his ear.
The drone hovered overhead in the sun’s glare. Ryan couldn’t see it but knew it was recording the whole thing. Package recipients had now taken to recording and posting videos of the delivery drivers recording and posting videos of themselves, which was an unintended but highly celebrated social media trend in the corporate office down in LA.
Ryan tried to not even think about it as he counted through the required dance length. One-thousand-one (tappity-tappity-tappity-tap), two-thousand-two (tappity-tap-tap-tappity-tap), three-thousand-three (tap-tap-tap-tap- tappity-tappity-tap)…
Krystal’s husband stood motionless on his front stoop, grin widening across his face. “Oh yes,” he said, though neither Ryan nor anyone else could hear him. “That’s it, baby. That right there.”
Ryan finished and posted the video. He started to get back on the bike but his phone made the sound of a packed theater bursting into applause, which meant somebody had clicked “love” on the post. He pulled his phone back out.
It was his 11-year-old daughter, Alex, who he hadn’t seen now in…how long? Nine months? Wow.
He remembered holding Alex in the days after she was born. Ryan thought her eyes were the most beautiful and unimaginably precious things anyone could ever dream up. And early on she so rarely opened them that whenever she did, Ryan would holler for the whole room to rush over.
He wanted everyone to come look and to see them, for the whole world to understand.