Leave it to Sherry

Sherry has a unique take on the world, which is reflected in how she spends her days.

         Sherry admired her reflection in the mirror; something she did with some regularity. She was a believer in many theories, some convoluted, some outlandish, but all were what she experienced to be her truth, and Sherry's truth was she was gorgeous. Where others saw a short, dumpy mess of a human being, Sherry saw a voluptuous pint sized woman ready to roar at a moment's notice.

A tiny voice whispered from inside, your fat complexion could be clearer.

"Shut up, bitch you are fierce and if your skin were anymore glumering, you'd be a firefly"

         Sherry talked out loud to her image in the mirror, because she found words spoken and written were more substantial than words thought. The words of thought were easy. But it took effort to construct sentences, put them to paper after hunting down a pen, and then sound classy and educated, and whatnot. Sherry was never at a loss for words because if she ever found herself coming up short on vocabulary, she would just make up a new word, or say the first thing that came to her mind regardless of whether or not it related. With enough volume and emphasis in the right places, no one questioned Sherry's words.

Sherry was always telling her friend, Michelle, "Dazzle them with your words, bitch."

"But you don't make sense half the time," Michelle would object.

"Irregardless! Not the point and objection!" Sherry would counter, "Leave people dazzled enough and they'll fill in the gaps for you. Nobody remembers what Abraham Lincoln said after he chopped down that cherry tree. They just remembered that he did it and tried to be disjointed with the circumspects. They fill in their own words."

Sherry liked to pause for dramatic effect a lot.

"Besides, why do you think his nose was so big? From putting his political stank on an otherwise truthical happenstamp. That's why everyone thinks politicians lie, and where that Walt Disney got the idea for Pinocchio."

"Nothing about any of that is correct, Sherry," Michelle would say.

"Missing! The! Point! Michelle! God!" Sherry would get exasperated at that point and change the topic.

         She was confident that one day Michelle would get the message she was trying to send. The problem being that Michelle's mind just needed to be pried open like a virgin's knees. Sherry smiled at the thought of coming up with such an expression, and was sad that she had not yet remembered to put it to good use in front of other people. She was salacious!

Sherry puckered her lips and blew herself a kiss. Her mama taught her a lot growing up; most of it Sherry either never heard, or had since dismissed as not being useful information. Sherry was fascinated with trivial bits of knowledge, but had an unreasonable fear of her brain clogging up like a public toilet burdened with useless and unnecessary loads. Her mother was a fan of clichés like "a penny saved is penny earned" or "laugh and the world laughs with you" and "fake it until you make it." Sherry experienced the latter two to be true, but tried to come up with another way of getting the same idea across. The best she had come up with was telling Michelle, "A whore can be a housewife if she believes she can be."

         That thought reminded her: it was time to make her daily phone call to her husband at work. He did something with numbers at a bank. The only thing Sherry could be certain of was that whatever he did sounded boring, so she just told people he was a successful hedge fund manager. She did not know what that was, but she heard it on Sex and the City, and if it was good enough for one of those fools to be suitably impressed by, then it was good enough for her.

         Most of the people she knew, or met down at her hang out, The Man Pit, were not aware that Sherry had taken a husband, or if they were, they thought she was a wild tramp, and that's how she liked it. Besides, Trevor didn't seem to mind, and Sherry just knew that news of her "falling in love" or something sappy like that would ruin her awesome reputation as the fun girl who did not play by anyone's rules, except maybe the rules she made up, and even then, it depended on if she felt like it or not. How would that fly down at the Man Pit on "Double Dude Tuesday?" That Sherry was some kind of old matron bound by the rules of matrimony? Like a lead duck, that turkey would not hunt; Sherry knew that for a fact.

"Lucy. Sherry. Hey girl! Catch me up on the dramarama with your mama's eye patched boyfriend, but first what's Trevor doing?"

"Hey Sherry girl! He's with a client, and no, it's a man. He might be gay though; he didn't try to look down my shirt once," Lucy was Trevor's large breasted secretary (in reality a large breasted teller at the bank where Trevor was a loan officer). She had learned to anticipate and shorthand conversations with Sherry.

"Really, oh well, gays are okay then," Sherry said, "Now, girl, tell me the skinny on Patch."

"Which one? Larry, Rick, or Herman?"

"Nope. Nuh huh. Girl, your mama has seen three men with one eye? I need to let that perculate before I will be ready to comment. Preview: that sounds like a fetish. In addition, she needs to nip that in butt. To be continued!"

         Sherry hung up, prank called Michelle at her job doing something boring at a law firm, and struggled to stifle laughter when Michelle began to threaten to involve law enforcement. Three months, and Michelle had not caught on to Sherry.

"But you look so good in that, er, pant suit...like a sexy giraffe mon," Sherry said disguising her voice with an accent oscillating between Italian and Jamaican.

"I'm serious! My boss knows the DA, and…" Click.

         Sherry was bored with that. Besides, she could not listen too long otherwise, she would not be properly shocked by the news of Michelle's phone stalker's latest incident when Sherry learned of it from Michelle later. Sherry checked out her fuzzy clock that purred every hour on the hour. She had had an exhausting morning going through her routine of putting on her face and taking care of business. It was time for her to go across the street to Michelle's where she would steal lunch out of the refrigerator after which, she would nap somewhere cozy in Michelle's house. Maybe the sofa in the den today. She would figure it out when she got there. All she knew for certain is that she would be there when Michelle got home and yelled at her about boundaries. And that was Monday for Sherry.



Word Count: 1157