My Little Blue Dress by Bruno Maddox Page A

seemed absurd that they should hit the ground and make no sound. A year was ending, a decade too, and the barman sat at a table by the fire with his own little glass of something, totaling columns of figures in a big parchment ledger with a quill pen that he filled from an inkpot. The flames of the fire fluttered, the pen scratched hypnotically . . .
    . . . and suddenly I was in the function room of a cheap hotel, a guest at a surprise party to welcome in the Nineteen Thirties. Every other guest was a decade. The Twenties were there, in a floppy jazz hat and a string of pearls, dancing crazily while trying not to spill a little glass of absinthe . . . The Teens stood erect and apart in military fatigues, sucking on the end of a pencil while they worked on a poem about life in the trenches . . . The Zeros were off to one side in Victorian garb, basking in their own personal downpour of new-century optimism . . .
    Suddenly footsteps! I dove for the lightswitch and we stood in the blackness with thumping hearts as the footsteps crescendoed, the squeak of the handle . . . SURPRISE!!!!! we yelled at the figure in the doorway, a . . . a nondescript man in a white T-shirt . . . with hair of ordinary length. I looked at him harder, the veins in my forehead popping out.
    He mumbled something I couldn’t hear . . . in a voice I couldn’t describe  . . .
    â€œHey! Hey!” The barman stood above me in a raincoat and a fedora. “You were shouting.”
    â€œWhere are you . . . where are you going?” I didn’t want him to leave. Not yet. Not now.
    â€œI’m going to a party.”
    â€œNo, please, I . . . not alone. Please.” I wrenched apart the front of my blouse and invitingly cupped my breasts. “Don’t leave.”
    It was no use. The man sensibly ignored me. “There’s a set of keys on top of the register. Lock up when you leave. Happy New Year.”
    With that the barman departed.
    And boulevards away, a drunken crowd began the New Year countdown.
    Ten.
    Nine.
    Eight.
    I wasn’t ready . I wasn’t ready for the thirties.
    Seven.
    What would they be like? What would the world be like?
    Six.
    Five. I fell off my chair, felt my face crash where the floor met the wall.
    Four. I . . .
    I . . .
    [jesus fucking christ what the fuck is a slope of foreboding? hmm?”
    you MUST know something else. thirties
    thirties thirties, come on THINK
    if you can survive not sounding even faintly like an infant or a yokel or a girl of any description you can wing it through the thirties despite total gaping ignorance
    time now is
27 AUG--7:53 P . M .
    a.k.a. only 30 yrs done in nine hours—half of it wasted on typing word “eloïse” a million times. Did she HAVE to have an umlaut? MÖRÖN?
    fucking only ten hours left so TYPE LIKE THE WIND—and also obviously like an incredibly old woman recalling her life in the 1930s.
    stakes = INFINITELY high
    and delete all notes to self when finished, obviously
    27 AUG--7:54 P . M .]
    Â 
    Three.
    Two.
    One.
    â€œHappy New Year.”

1930–1939
NEW INTERIORS
    [27 AUG--7:54 P . M .]
    T O START WITH, reader, I really thought I was fine. The ceiling of the apartement looked the same as it always had. Checking my body with my hand I felt no blood, wet or dry, and when I swung my feet to the floor and sat up, I felt no sharp, stabbing pains. Greatly relieved, I commenced my usual morning routine: get to feet, pull on bathrobe, kettle on stove, tick tick whoosh of gas, go to bathroom, sit down, urinate, stand up, back into main body of room, activate radio with hand . . .
    An announcer was reading the news. Unbidden, my right hand scrabbled for the off switch.
    Silence.
    I looked at the hand, then ran to the bathroom to be sick.
    Something was wrong with me.
    Hunger forced me up again at twenty