When is a day too long?

LONG DAY


The truck pulls up while she's in the bathroom. The doorbell clangs even as she is snatching toilet paper off the roll. She wipes, yanks her underpants up hard enough to tear them and pulls her skirt down to cover her wrinkled legs.

Damn! She can hear the truck door slam and the roar of it's engine as it leaves. Fed Ex is long gone by the time she can fumble with the dead bolt and get the old door open, it sticks.

"Wait!" The wailed word pops out before she sees the package snugged against the wall. She breathes out relief and sucks in thanks that it's here, finally here.

She leans down, grunting at the arthritis in her right knee, picks up the box (larger than she'd thought it would be), carries it inside nudging the door shut with her hip. She slits the tape and throws a wad of brown paper on the floor, digging beneath more for the treasure.

She lifts out the twelve green boxes, long and thin, wrapped snugly together in cellophane. She picks at one end with shaking fingers, open! Open! Finally she rips the plastic with her false teeth, stabs open the box with her rusty scissors, and tips it. Twelve bright yellow pencils spill out onto the table led by their rubber noses. Although yellow like their kin, these are princes of pencils, declared so by the tiny yellow number three inscribed on them and outlined in sparkling green, and the bold H for hard. These pencils will last. She is delighted. How many stores she'd dragged herself in and out of searching through endless racks of ordinary soft number two's before she'd thought of ordering them from the Internet.

Then there'd been the long wait through the weekend and two days more before the prize arrived.

She sharpens eight before her wrinkled hand tires of turning the crank; four go into the vase on the table, four in the cup on her desk. She is replete.

She sits at the table by the window, looks at the pencils in the vase, picks one up and twirls it in her hands, then replaces it.

The day is young and still, and she is the second, but not the first. A little breeze nudges the wind chimes and drowns out the loud ticking of the clock. A car passes her house, she follows it with her tired eyes. The wind dies, the clock ticks, the mail arrives. She goes out to retrieve it, folds the slick bright clumps of advertisements in half and throws them into the trash.

Eleven o'clock, soon it will be time for lunch. She sits and stares out the window again.

When will the next package come?