Waving Not Drowning

Today there are 5 books on programming and design. Softcover tomes, each an inch and a half thick, identical in size, differentiated only by colour schemes. Outdated computer manuals stacked in a leaning tower on top of an overflowing recycling bin pushed to the edge of a perfectly manicured lawn. Sarah is intensely curious about the people who live here. Last week there were two dog eared pulp fiction paperbacks, a Carnegie Mellon course calendar from 2004, a bamboo room divider missing a panel, and an old fishbowl complete with faded coloured pebbles and plastic trees. The week before there were two medical text books and random issues old New Yorkers spanning the last 3 years. Either there's a host of foreign students rotating through in a short term rental situation or the most eclectic, artistically inclined, well read, tech saavy family on the block. It's a non descript semi detached two story barn like house, smack dab in a multi culti family neighbourhood just off the m...

Charlie always says no. Confidently but not with so much force as to raise any flags. Direct, make eye contact, no embellishing, then move on. Sometimes the interviewer will elaborate, a subtle attempt to casually redirect, asking the same question with other language to provoke a different response. Charlie's been at this for a while, she knows the drill, sees it coming miles before the neural synapses have even fired in the doctor or nurse or social worker or psychiatrist sitting in front of her. On a third attempt to question her once, the triage nurse started speaking uncomfortably loud and very slowly, as if Charlie was either deaf, mentally challenged, a foreign student or all three. Maybe it was the hapi coat and chopsticks in her crazy dreadlocked hair, who knows. Her asian phase has long passed. Regardless, the blue eyes, fierce red hair and freckles should've been a dead giveaway. The problem with a technologically advanced medical system in the largest city in the co...