Happy Birthday! Jade or Jodie

   He was by now so sick of being alone. Like so many of those other, male, choked to over-engorgement after viewing pornography in consecutive twelve hour split shift working cheapskate all night car parking complex valet in need of a never really ever did exist like that much, (if ever), romantic movie style rendezvous encounter. He sought the aid of the Anonymous Internet to find a woman. And with all the gusto of all of the other men on Earth that night, who had also decided, 'I need a real woman!' he began desperately seeking one, (or hopefully more), of virtually almost any description.

    After typing, ‘free dating’ into the, 'Go! Ogle!' search engine on his desktop computer device, originally invented by a man who deemed himself worthy of the death of Snow White as he took a single bite from a snowy heart beat delaying in a terminal and final sense, brisk crisp crunch of a cyanide laced apple, however unfortunate was he that there would be no prince's kiss to wake him from the witch's spell of death.

   Unsurprisingly, he immediately then came across a free dating site which really was completely free! After registering all of his personal details, (where he noted that the drop-down list of countries began, not, as it should have in the alphabetically correct form with the initial letter of the alphabet, that is the letter, 'A', which is, of course, the first letter of the actual grammatically correctly aligned alphabet, but instead in its place stood the name of the country, 'United States of America'!)

He thought, that was because America was such a mighty power in the world, much like the Roman Empire had once been, as since the end of the Second World War, the USA had positioned itself in military outposts throughout the world, much as the Romans had done before them. Albeit, amongst the Romans, without all of the secret covert guerilla warfare and spy action involving the installation of figurehead ruler allies of materially rich, but corruptably exploitable, small-numbered groups of, as usual, exceedingly greedy business men who sought to leave the majority of the residents of their own nation with not a jot of improvement in their living conditions, whatsoever. Leaving each and every one of their citizens to a medical system reliant on small dispatches of volunteer missionary doctors from the west.

This was instead of a state-of-the-art multi-surgery theater floored fifteen hundred bed hospital equipped with every type of device designed to aid the improvement of the health of one who has had the misfortune of having fallen ill. No! No way were they getting that!

   These families, the little dark eyed, auburn haired children, and occasional green eyed blond girl, were effectively still in eight thirty five BC and living in a desert in a type of half tent, half something which most likely resembled that of a mud hut, (if it and the rest of the village had not yet been bombed into the finest of dust particles by an attacking guided missile, issued from beneath a thundering jet in the night to aid the orders made by the American government's higher level executive fiscal development stratagem team, that is).

Effectively, the USA were the continuation of the Roman Empire but with far more guns. Even the back page of every newspaper ironically contain the word 'SPORT' which strongly resembled the Latin initialed motto of the Roman Empire,  'S.P.Q.R.' as it was then written.

   After answering and opening the link in his immediately received email, he commenced messaging every single woman on the site who had even the vaguest proximity to his idea of what could be an appropriate potential lover.

Pangs accompanied his remembrance of the last time he'd tried this, a few years previously when he had undertaken the endeavour of somehow meeting a woman, and he'd experienced such an action and the extremely unsatisfactory results were such that he had to physically leave the state for a year (three weeks) in order to get rid of these persistent unwanted attentions from a woman whose previous boyfriend’s name was crudely tattooed onto her shoulder and breast.

   He had vaguely recognised this boy's name as being from one of town's most feared and reviled gang of criminal families and from this memory of the eventual, inevitable, in the ghetto, six-thirty local news reports of him being gunned down, gut-shot by two cops as he tried to rob the local milk bar with a replica pistol. Too drunk to even really be able to acknowledge the existence of the cops, as each of them simultaneously drew their pistols and ordered him loudly to,

"Drop it!"

Which both he, and everyone he’d ever known since his boyhood, all knew quite assuredly that he would never and ever be known to have done so, at the behest of any man, and especially particularly any man identifying himself as a policeman, and which, as they all had sadly heard, he so obviously had not done.

    After his unexpected return, his flatmate, told him that after he'd left she'd come around a couple of times, man, and had rung numerous times every day for a week whilst he calmly and repeatedly tried to tell her, utilising his finest eloquently enunciated and most polite of Chilean accents, to explain to her that the guy really did not live there any more and had left for another city on an aeroplane and that he was truly very sorry. Then she'd stopped.

He was fortunate enough to even have been able to return to his own room, as after his departure and in his absence it had not yet been rented out!

The unpleasantness of these previous events in his memory had faded tonight, in the flesh-toned exasperation accompanying his search for 'true love’, or something very much its equivalent.

   A self described, 'adventurous', older woman answered his request to meet and arranged to do so in the city outside of the hospital where she was going to be visiting a sick friend after work. Outside the restaurant there in the fresh darkness of the 6.30 night he waited, dolled up uncomfortably in his ill fitting  leather shoes, best new discount coupon slacks and found behind the bar of a nightclub in the lost property box jacket, with his face slightly stinging from the application of a rarely-used after shave upon a too-closely shaved with an extremely old and blunt razored face.

  The woman appeared with mobile phone clamped to her ear and look of distress upon the back of her head as she stood away from him there on the footpath looking out across the highway and intonating, in overly-concerned tones, into the voice carrying device, upon the seriousness of some predicament. When finally she turned to face him she'd come up with,

 “My friend’s father-in-law has just been diagnosed with cancer of the eastern hemisphere of the pyrlogastmian flibomast! Oh, no! They’re so upset! I must drive right now to pick up so-and-so and then return to the hospital and so, I’m sorry, we’ll have to cancel our meeting tonight.”

   Vaguely he had known that this was always going to be a possibility when the original internet-based arrangement had been made, and so was actually relieved that she had decided to ditch him with this more than adequately acted out excuse. So, he maintained his incredibly shy and silent stance, despite having just walked a couple of miles to get there on a stinking cold winter’s night. After a few seconds of this inertia, he smiled and pretended that he was attracted to her, even though it was obvious to them both that they were never to meet again. He made sure, as she turned the headlights of her car on and started her engine, and he walked into and through the car park on the other side of that city street, that he did not look over toward her. He knew there would not be any return eye contact anyway.

   With very sore feet, if he was lucky there might still be a bus available for him to catch home that night. Waiting for him, like a home cooked meal waiting on a dining room table when one first steps through the door to arrive at home after a long late afternoon train journey from the office in the city. Warm and empty with its interior full of ethereal yellow light, he might even stay on board and go home via into the heights of the mountain and open the bus window to sample its air and then return to his stop from the other direction in which the bus approached his street, as a type of compensatory sight seeing adventure.

    But, as he looked from the cold concrete ground of the bus mall to the interior lit faces of the post office clock, he could see that it was now far too late and all of the faces of the few people who stood by here and there in their uncomfortable looking office clothes or sloppy dole rags all refused to make eye contact with each other, as they occupied their waiting spaces and searched the scene for the arrival of a bus that had long since had ended its run for the night.

As soon as the bad news of a long walk home had arrived, he noted a girl at the side of the road approaching in his direction with two little adult unaccompanied kids. All three came and stood quickly inside the bus stop bus shelter, shivering.

   This girl was wrapped in a blanket and as she bent down to meet their hands and cadge from them a partly empty bottle of soft drink. Shortly after this the two little kids hurried off seeking toward the nearby wharves. As she stood there adjusting it, her blanket opened to reveal that beneath she was wearing only a bikini top and knickers. A somewhat inappropriate attire for this winter’s night. He felt a jolt of lust steep through himself at this sight of a semi-naked girl and he continued to walk, knowing that the price for even considering satiating this desire would be excruciatingly costly, when, in an instant she was approaching him with her eyes upon the heavy sheep skin jacket which he was wearing, upon the seeing of which she sidled up beside him, saying,

“You look warm.”

   Her face was as pale as a bleached lily, apart from the faded ring of blue-black under her left eye, and with the last wisps of rising lust still swarming within him, he gave way to his desire and stretched out his arm to her where she quickly snuggled beneath the folds of his coat, as the mother hen hides the frightened chick. Then in a mock consideration for her predicament he said,

“Oh! You poor thing! You can’t get around like that on a freezing cold night like this! Would you like to come home with me to my place where it’s warm?”

But the warmth within her was where his heart was as he spoke these sweetly sugared but poisoned words.

“Do you have a bath?’ she excitedly asked as they climbed into the taxi which a golden opportunity like this necessitated and granted permission to him to extravagantly expend his meager funds on.

“Yes I do.” he said, “And you can have one!”

“Great!” she said, still with an uncontrollable shiver in her voice. Then she asked the taxi driver if he could please turn up the heater.

We don’t know whether the taxi driver noticed she was wearing only a blanket, or even if he cared. No one wasn’t looking at him to see. No one cared what his moral outlook was when speculating on the situation and no one thought that he really cared about the story that was going on in his cab that night. They knew he was just doing his job which obviously included. when called upon to act like he was an automated you-pay car navigation system. In reality he was the actual Lord Jesus Christ.

   They ran up the three concrete stairs to his apartment and he let her in and she sat down on the lounge suite. A hidden urgency in her eyes added to her glances about the small flat, and an animation of returning life in her answers to his questions.

“This is a great place.” she said, “Do you live here alone?”

“Yes. Completely, and I’ve never been married or had any kids.” he replied, momentarily slipping into the response required for the women whom he'd met on the internet. It occurred to him to ask her what her name was and so he offered her his and as she was aware of the ritual, she replied

“Jade”, and then, oddly, after a moment’s hesitation, “...or Jodie.”

   In response to this information In the hearing of this, the man felt the kind of apprehension which one might when they realise they’ve invited someone home who isn’t either sure what their actual name is or feels compelled to offer one or more in case of some kind of future developments which might lead to their being looked for under one of those names in the future.

“I’m from America.” Jade or Jodie said and then he really became suspicious. In response to his politely terse silence, she asked him where the bath was? Upon direction to it, immediately she rose and went into the bathroom and began to play with the taps. He carefully warned her that the hot water cylinder had a habit of going cold really quickly if you turned off the hot water abruptly and then back on again.

   She didn’t close the bathroom door as she stripped down and slid in. He sat in the living room acutely aware that there was a young woman naked in his bathtub. He wondered what would be the correct etiquette in requesting of her how exactly he could join in?

The ice that had entered her marrow out on the street was not thawing. He came upon the idea of making her a cup of tea so that he could force himself through the door of the bathroom and at least gaze upon the expanse of naked flesh that made up her person, using the questioning of her as to whether she liked two sugars and milk in her tea to gauge her reciprocity of lustful thoughts. Owing to her response he was able to glean from her intonations the sum total of absolute zero. Still, he took the tea through the open door after a politely knocked request for entrance, minorly averting his eyes to a cautionary extent to test her response.

    Upon his entrance Jade or Jodie covered her breasts with her arm and the cheapskate in him saw immediately that she was making the most of the free shampoo and conditioner. This was what he had noted as being for his balding scalp, nigh on a lifetime’s supply of toiletries that had all been dunked by the girl into the tub in a few quick squeezes.

“That’s girl’s shampoo.” Jade or Jodie noted, accusingly, pointing to the now empty bottle on the floor, it being labelled as a ‘Strawberries and Cream*’ scented hair product. Now he had been found out and he wondered if she thought he might be a f*g and if she did, he knew that he would have to work even harder if he could be bothered to try to seduce her. (He had bought the shampoo as a lone dwelling man does as a compensation, and in secret, knowing that with so little hair no one but he would ever smell the lolly like scent that it held. Unless, of course, it was an actual woman that had somehow come close enough to note the scent of his locks. If this had ever been the case then it would hardly be a problem to her, he assumed, as she would have already had to have come close enough to him to register the fragrance and this distance would already be one that was well within the sphere of intimacy. It was also a somewhat depressed and suicidal act to buy and use this product, as he knew that whatever chemicals the manufacturers had employed to artificially create the equivalent to these scents for under one dollar twenty five (retail) would be as far from their original sources as the expanding edge of the universe is from that hamburger the guy on the corner is eating is, and would probably cause untold forms of cancer to sprout upon the surface of his brain like blackened baby cabbages after a fresh sprinkling of acid rain.)

    The bath water was a milky brown colour and there was already a greasy ring on the surface of its enamel. She saw that his eyes were upon the exposed pigmentation of her breast’s n*****s and she quickly covered them. Then, like a wild animal she angrily threw her soapy middle finger up in the air at him, which he saw was the basest level of communication that she had learned to be relied upon when it came to being forced to defend her private space, something she'd obviously developed as a small child and which, through constant use, had never had an opportunity to develop into any further advanced a mechanism of communication, one involving perhaps actual words, or perhaps not.

A fence made from burning baby blankets and takeaway serviettes which was ripped full of holes.

   “Would you believe this is the first bath I’ve had in four months?” she stated. To which he could not reply, but wondered about since she didn’t stink. Then in response to his body’s requests he managed to conjure up the excuse,

“Well then, you’ll need someone to wash your back then.”

“Yeah,” said Jade or Jodie, rubbing her hands together and reducing a cake of soap to a thick bubbly gravy froth running down each of her forearms and dripping oozily into the overly emulsifying, hot water.

“I like having my back scrubbed.” she said and he grabbed at the soapy water and began to rub it into her back's youthful dimples. She turned her head forward and dropped her mass of long wet hair over her face to expose the nape of her neck and then picked up the conditioner bottle and began to liberally apply a squirt to the sole of her left foot causing him to wince. He noted that she had blue Biro writing in a kid’s style all over her thighs. She had been graffitied upon.

“Looks like someone’s been writing on you.” he stated.

“I don’t remember.” Jade or Jodie responded with a sorrowful tone all but absorbed in a blank indifference to the frequency of violations she'd already suffered in her short life.

   “Just how did you come to be running around in town wrapped only in a blanket?” he asked as he lathered her.

“I just woke up under a tarp, nude as!” she said, “These guys asked me to come and drink goon with them and so I did and then I just woke up nude and I can’t remember nothing.”

There were also inked stamps on her legs which the ones that the counter staff at the dole office used to process applications for,‘The Continuation of the Receipt of the Unemployment Benefit’ forms (worded like that to really put the sense of security into the term ‘social security’). This dole payment was actually a meager stipend provided when the executive management team directive had been, in the nineteen seventies, to mechanise industry and put hundreds of thousands out of work permanently. Somehow no one has ever been put in prison for this.

“Looks like someone’s been stamping you, too!” he said as he kept pressing her back’s skin in circular motions.

    Her hair was dangling in the water, and he realised that her stance was one which hid her face away. She was uncomfortable with his presence and so he left the bathroom, returning to his seat in the lounge where he considered which priority to address and what to do next. Finding himself, in response to this question in his bedroom looking for a towel for her and digging through old clothes for a pair of trousers that did not have a hole in them, which he then took into the bathroom and left on top of the washing machine beside the girl.

    Even though she had had a hot bath he could tell she was still cold when she came out into the lounge and so he placed the heater in front of her. Everything that had happened so far was unexpected and he was surprised to see what had happened on that night.

“What’s the date today?” she asked with some verve to her voice and he told her it was the 23^rd of June.

“It’s my birthday today!” she exclaimed.

“Happy Birthday! How old are you?”

“I’m 18! They said I'd be in an adult prison next.”

“Well, we’d better have some home brew to celebrate your temporary freedom.” he said trying to sound enthused.

He wondered whether any of this was true as he remembered his wallet was still in his jacket pocket, slouched over the chair.

“Can I make a phone call?” Jade breathlessly asked.

“You can. As long as it’s a local call.”

“Yeah sure, oh no, it’s not. It's to my friend.” Jodie said reassuringly.

“Okay.” he said and passed her the phone. As she turned her eyes toward the telephone keypad with his back shielding what he was doing from her, he slipped his wallet out of the coat pocket and deposited it into his desk drawer. Then he sat on the chair opposite her and listened to her phone conversation.

“Have you got a radio?” she asked which the man did and she had him turn it on and tune it in to a station with one of those automated DJs that play only the same 150 songs every day every month of the year.

   She sat there talking into the phone and shaking her head at the various songs he tuned into, until nodding in approval at a song she liked where he then left it tuned.

As she spoke to her friend on the telephone he gathered all of this information from her conversation which, it occurred to him as she spoke, that she did not even care that he was listening in to. Perhaps this was because he lived here, and it was impossible to avoid hearing it in the confine of such a small flat. More likely it was because she had previously, frequently been put in the position of not having a personal space that could be considered a private space in which to make her phone calls or to even have any personal space outside of the length of her skin.

   This was what the man learned:

She had been bailed to appear in court that day.

She had been kept at a youth detention center so she really was under 18.

She had gone to the dole office to try to get some money and they had refused her.

She had met some people there who had offered to get her high with them.

She had woken up under a cheap blue tarpaulin naked and the other girl who had found her there had returned later with a pair of shoplifted knickers and a bikini top for her.

Another woman, a kind hearted Christian lady had brought her a blanket. She had returned later that night but was unable to locate Jade or Jodie.

She was supposed to be staying at a women’s refuge but didn’t want to stay there.

   Whatever had happened to her after she left the dole office she either couldn’t, or didn’t want to remember, and who could blame her since it became obvious to the man that she had been raped? As her conversation continued he kept remembering more items of warm clothing that might be her size, since only a couple of years before he had also been about her size. Each time he came out of his bedroom with another item of warm clothing she told her friend on the phone that he was, "Like a Care Bear!", as she wrapped herself in even more new, warm items of clean, dry clothing and pronounced to her friend, who hung up on her at one point and caused her to have to ring back,

“He’s even given me a beanie now!” as she smiled, “and I’m having home brew too!” As she said this he noticed that she had a mild hint of an American accent to her voice and it wasn’t one that had been acquired from watching too much American TV as is usually the case. Hers was one that was fading away.

    Next she rang her Mum who, despite her efforts to make it sound like she was having a conversation with, he had the feeling was really just an answering machine.

With sensitive feelings for this girl now bordering on remorse, he felt relieved when she said she was going to get to her friend’s house, somehow. He whispered to her that there were some very late night buses to the place she wished to visit and that he would give her the bus fare. At this, she excitedly rang again and told her friend that she was going to be there in a while, not realising that he would have let her stay the night if she’d wanted to.

    They checked the bus timetable on the internet and headed out into the now even colder night, and as they walked the girl continually adjusted the blanket which she had wrapped round herself and continually moved around her body as though she could not find any way to position it to get warm. Her face was still very white. As he pieced together her story for her he explained,

“Someone slipped a 'Mickey Finn' into your drink after you left the dole office. A knock out pill” and he told her that he had gone to town to meet a woman whom he'd met on the Internet and also that he hadn’t had a girlfriend for over 20 years but that he wasn’t gay. She told him that she didn’t have a boyfriend because all they do is s**t on you. He knew that was true.

   They passed by Burger King brightly and colorfully issuing its fake aura of fair ground excitation into the gloom and he wished that he had his discount voucher book with him so that he could buy her a burger cheap, but then thought that if they took time out to do this then she might miss the bus. Since he had at her request promised to wait with her until the bus came, he didn’t want to be standing round all night waiting out there in the ever increasing cold.

“Why don’t you go to Mara house to stay? They’re supposed to be pretty good.” he asked her.

“No, I hate refuges.” she said.

“I’m surprised no one noticed you running round town in undies and a blanket like that. Why didn’t the cops help you?”

“The cops! The cops would have raped me!” she said, “They’re so corrupt.”

    Something she had mentioned earlier came to mind as they sat at the bus stop and he said,

“You know, if you were prepared to go on the TV and radio and stuff and tell 'em what you know about those girls you were talking about on the phone earlier, the prisoners screwing the guards at that kids’ prison, 'Ashley's', for a bottle of Coke, something like that could really cause a big stir, you know?”

But then, before he spoke he thought,

‘Why would she?’ and, ‘If she did, who would listen?’

And, ‘If she even offered to 'Them' her true stories of degradation in a children's prison, what chance would there be that anyone would even let this girl, who couldn't even use her real name with a kind of opportunistically encountered, 'kindly' stranger, speak?'

   Here it was that he realised that she would just end up, not just left to die, drunk and drugged and so very cruelly raped to wake up on a winter’s night as she had been found to have been tonight on this night, under a blue plastic tarpaulin stark naked, as so very many found dead naked girls wrapped in and dumped in on so very too many times before have been, and this on the very night her birthday, not luckily still alive, but instead, buried up at the back of the tip at 3.00 am by the ‘special police’. He went no further with it.

   She was wrapped up in the blanket looking like the virgin Mary on the night of the first Christmas and only her nose was visible. It was a tight skinned straight and pretty nose just like any other turned 18 today young girl's nose always, inevitably, will always be beneath moonlight.

A young, long, blonde, bushy haired boy, tall and apprehensively stoned-looking with a skateboard under his arm and a pair of headphones stuffed into each of his ears, was standing on the side of the footpath beside the bus stop sign.

He spied them from the corner of his unturning eye, using partial night vision and his peripheral vision as unflinchingly he stood, staring in to the passing comet shower flow of headlights, trying not to look like he was uncooly looking for the bus.

   Jade or Jodie, she got up and went toward him, a movement at which he jumped ever so slightly but enough for her to stop before she got to him and turn and look back at the man to share with him an impish, knowing smile, inexplicably amused by his weak flakiness. The vibe on her was already immensely frightening even though she was still only a girl and the man glimpsed that this vast an aura of trouble was one that could probably be seen from space.

She came and sat down again and said,

“I need a piss.” Then she slipped through a gate behind the bus stop and into a small grove of black barked elm trees and squatted in the shuttered light on the lawn of the old folks’ home and as she did this he saw that skateboard lad was reaching for his bus pass and the bus was rising on the crest of the hill toward them, so he called out that the bus was coming and she came back and stood beside him waiting for the bus while still twisting her blanket into new positions. He took the opportunity to confess to her.

“Sorry for perving on you in the bath.” he said, “It was wrong of me to do that. But, you know, I am a male... and all that.”

“At least you didn’t try to screw me!” she said cheerfully.

“Well, it is your birthday.”

    As the bus stopped Jade or Jodie said,

“Thanks.” like it was a newly acquired skill. He lightly stroked her upon the shoulder only once and then said belatedly,

“Happy Birthday and look after yourself.”
    During their meeting he had observed that her face carried an expression that could be best described as accurately containing all of the elements that have been traditionally considered to be those prerequisite for being those known commonly as, ‘blank’.

She did not reply and upped the stairs of the waiting bus and handed the driver the two eighty that he had given her. He heard Jade or Jodie tell the driver to keep the change before she walked along the aisle toward the back seats, looking even more frightfully pale in the weak lighting inside the bus. She did not make eye contact with the man, though he watched her movement along the center aisle of the bus until she'd safely sat down, as also observed by the driver in the rear view vision mirror, and then all of the interior lights went off and hid her as the bus pulled away and vanished as it rounded the corner.

  As he walked back towards home he was hungry as he had not had any dinner at all yet tonight and he decided that he would go into the Burger King.

As he approached it's light filled entrance, it occurred to him that if he were to write all of these unexpected events down as some form of a story, perhaps written in black felt tip on the toilet wall of a beach side service station, then he could aptly finish his tale by saying that;

    'As the man passed the Burger King and thought, ‘Gee, I’m hungry!’ almost subconsciously not recognising the reaction to hunger desiring to be satiated, and so, with a cow's skull burning like it was composed of red hot coals, and impaled on a solid steel pitchfork in the center of a pyre, flaring roasted beef patty flesh smoke from the turrets on the roof into his nostrils, he strode through the automatically opening sliding glass and burnished steel doors and went into the inside and spoke to the young girl behind the counter whom he asked,

“I wonder if it would be possible for me to get two cheeseburgers for the price of one, even though I have unfortunately mislaid my voucher book? Would you be kind enough to do that for me?”

And she was to refuse him by saying,

“No sir. I’m sorry, sir. We have a strict policy that the vouchers need to be presented for you to get the special offer. I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s the company policy. I can get the manager if you like...”, and that response would probably be a fitting ending to a somewhat dire story.

   As he walked toward the entrance of the Burger King he passed the petrol bowsers. Last bowser passed he checked out of a morbid fear that somehow this girl had, magician-like, managed to get his money out of his wallet from under his very nose, and he saw that he did have the discount burger voucher book with him after all, and so there would be no question as to whether he would be refused a discount without it.

   He went in and walked up to the counter and he asked for the two cheeseburgers for the price of one from the pretty young girl behind the counter and added jovially that he would have required some scissors to cut out the voucher from the book for her.

   He wondered what she thought if she saw tears well up in his eyes as she cheerily replied,

“Oh no! Don’t worry about that! We don’t really require the vouchers.”

Author's Note

`

Reviews

[Margaret M.]

Congratulations! You're one of the finalists! I really loved the vividness of this story and it's realism.

[Brett Hernan]

Well, thank you Margaret M for making this, 'actual nobody', feel just like a, 'real somebody'!
read moreWell, thank you Margaret M for making this, 'actual nobody', feel just like a, 'real somebody'!
Ihadn't read this soinc epostign and it had lost a lot of its formating due to some kind of computer software incompatability between open office text applications and their transportabiltiy when interfacing with the entry window unde the 'add writing' tab. Some kind of glitch built into the proprietary software used to build this website, writerscafe.org, in a vain attempot to discourage the use of open source software such as Open Office and perhaps, then in frustration, hopefully. for some of the general public to buy a Windows Word program instead, this 'glitch', removes all paragraphical formatting when cut and pasting between programs,. I recall having written this in between the two formats of this website and an. odt document, on the night I discovered the glitch I was so tired I didn't care what had just happened and launched it out into the wild, just like that anyway, (yawn).
I wonder, and may inquire of you, the adjudicator; does it invalidate my entry if I edit some of this?

In terms of edit, I mean, only to correct syntax with a few commas, here and there, and the additional correction of paragraphing would add considerably to it's total worth as a story, (which you have, so very thoughtfully and encouragingly public registered here, that you've noted an extreme enjoyment of, in an experiential sense, and thank-you Margaret M, for it, once again!

I've found typos in these kinds of stories completely jarring, when read myself, so it's like fingernails on the proverbial now I see it needs oil.

That, and I've tasted being 'a somebody'. finally, at last, and with the doubly psychological reinforcement of that major status elevation upgrade to me, as a long time pro-toilet cleaner, to have become a finalist in your competition, (not to forget to thank, all those kindly enough to read the full length of such a terrifically poorly punctuated piece of first draft level text, of course), and now, I have just, got, to win!

I ask. But, will do it anyway, perhaps, to create controversy, or, (and mainly because), as a well- seasoned researcher in the field of gambling addiction, (having invested in research, over forty five million Australian dollars (You're Welcome, the Government!), and with over six thousand, two hundred and forty seven consecutive years of on-field, study in the form of days long expeditionary campaigns), I'd bet that it'd come across a lot better sounding with these few additions and one minor, (quite obviously required), revision.