Decoupage

Ireena unlocks her apartment door and walks in. She closes the door, and locks it. She puts down her bag, she walks over to her fireplace mantle and she picks up an envelope. She takes a small baggy out of the envelope and she spills out some of the contents on an old chemistry textbook she had once used in college. Ireena had wanted to be a chemist until she discovered the basic problems plaguing the inner city. She decided she had to do all she could.
She took out one of her credit cards and cut out a line.
She found Rory’s name on her cell phone and pressed send.
She leaned down to her textbook and snorted the line.
The line rang once, twice.
Rory picked up.
“Hello?”
“Hey Rory, it’s Ireena, what’s up?”
“Nothing I’m just riding the train home from work,” he said. “What are you up to?”
“Oh I’m just doing some decoupage,” she said.
“You mean you’re making a collage?”
“Yes. Well, I’m calling to tell you about the Halloween party.”
“Oh cool, who’s having it?”
“My friend Lauren is having it. It’s starting at 10:00.”
“Should I meet up with you before?”
“Yeah, just come to my apartment.”
“Okay, what’s your address?”
“I’m on the corner of Schiller and Leavitt. Just call me when you get there.”
“Okay.”
“What are you going as?”
“I don’t know yet. I think I’m just going to make my own costume.”
“Rad.”
“Yeah, rad,” Rory echoed.
“Okay well just come over sometime around 9 tomorrow then.”
“What are you going as?” he asked.
“The Black Widow.”
“Ooh, creepy.” he said.
“It’s Halloween,” she said, “Bye-bye.”
“Bye.”
She cut another line out for herself.
She picked up the newspaper.
She took out her scissors and clipped the headline that read:
China: N. Korea not sorry
She figured out the focus of her next collage.
She snorted the line.
She saw a picture on another page of rows of automobiles—all Ford Tauruses. She clipped this picture and placed it below the headline she had cut out.
She took out her easel and a poster-board. She painted a huge mushroom cloud as the first image for her collage.
She put the headline and the photo next to the mushroom cloud.
“This looks clumsy,” she said to herself.
She decided to just paint the scene she intended to create with found images.
She painted mountains behind the mushroom cloud, and she painted stars in the night sky, and she painted the glow from the explosion orange, gray, purple, red, blue, yellow, and green, and then she painted tiny houses which had recently been blown to bits, and she even painted a few small people, huddled on the ground, kneeling face first to the ground, head down, covered by their arms. She worked on it for two hours and she decided that it was not executed well enough to be taken seriously. She put it aside and decided to work on it another time. She turned on her television and sunk back into her couch. She picked up the remote control and she cycled through channels. She thought about what she would make herself for dinner.