Maple, Honey

Fumbling things to a catastrophic degree had been Maple’s style since the day she was born. She was so prone to mistakes that practically every third word out of her mouth was a mournfully intoned sorry or some other overly-worded apology. As she grew older, the very word itself– sorry– began to sound less sincere, less meaningful, less even like a word anymore. It was more like a sibilant moan that she’d involuntarily utter – a meaningless, nervous tick. It was apparent that half the time she uttered the word– sorry, she didn’t really mean it. Consequently, after a while, she simply decided to stop saying it altogether. By the time she neared thirty, she was almost never sorry about anything, be it in conversation, in a business transaction; whether she broke something, said something rude, or just failed to make good on a promise. Regardless of the situation, Maple would merely go about her day, in all its predictably faulty ways, expecting everyone to just deal with it and move on. For a time, the world seemed very tolerant of her bumbling shortcomings. But now that world was over.

“Motherfucker,” Maple screeched through clenched teeth, ‘I forgot an SD card!’ This last part she quietly muttered to herself, punctuating it with a string of vivid expletives and self-pitying remarks. The old folks seated nearby looked off at opposite corners, towards the stage, at their brochures, speaking now only in hushed, discomforted tones. Crazy camera girl, they seemed to have thought. It was less than a quarter of an hour before the big marine biology conference was to start. Hundreds of experts, scientists, investors, and other such enthusiasts came flooding in through the doors and into their chairs, a chattering cacophony, seemingly unaware of the internal torment that poor Maple was suffering. At that very moment, there was nothing more menacing in Maple’s life than the bright red text flickering across her camera’s screen. NO MEMORY CARD, it read.

Shit, she thought. It was kind of a big deal. The lack of a card meant that she could not fulfill the very basic requirements of her job. Without it, there was nothing for that camera to record video onto. It was like the shit cherry on top of a big shit sandwich of a morning. Her day up to that point was so full of little fuck-ups that she couldn’t even bother to realize how little sense that metaphor made. She had already begun the day on the wrong foot. That is to say: very late. About forty minutes late. It wasn’t that she hadn’t set the alarm on her phone. In fact, the night before, she had very responsibly set it to wake her up at seven— PM, not AM. It was the sort of foolish mistake she tended to make any time she was zonked out of her mind on her nightly cocktail of blended cucumbers and red-leaf kratom, while listening to the gory descriptions of a true crime podcast. By the time her opioid-frazzled brain was up and running again the very next day, Maple had barely any time to get her equipment ready. Nor did she find time to practice basic hygiene, such as bathing or brushing her teeth. When she arrived at the venue, the event organizer, a tall, severe woman by the name of Mindy, was quick to point out that her big, horse-like teeth were encrusted in a green, grainy gunk, the very remnants of the Taiwanese drug powder she had ingested the night before. She licked her teeth clean and flashed a big, toothy grin. “Does that make it better?”

It didn’t.

She brought her camera into her assigned middle section of the auditorium, a place where she could get a decent wide shot and then zoom in on the speaker for a medium close-up. The slowly-accumulating crowd was a sea of older folks and bookish types, uniformly dressed in fleece  anoraks and brightly-colored sneakers. Maple, with her long, green-dyed hair, sleeveless army surplus shirt, and heavily tattooed arms, stood out like a canker sore on the bloated cheek of germy intellectuals. She knew how she was supposed to be dressed: all black clothes. Black shirt, black pants (and black shoes, if she wanted extra credit). It was the freelance videographer’s uniform, universally known, and she had neglected to wear it. She would have dressed more appropriately, if only the one black garment she owned hadn’t been stained and used as a makeshift handkerchief, with the dried-up, luminous mucus stains from a particularly bad cold she had recently endured.

Now the problem at hand, the forgotten SD card, was something she had to resolve. Realizing that it was her only option, Maple decided to quickly leave the venue and go out and buy a new one. She stepped away from her tripod and approached a man a few seats behind her. He wore large-rimmed glasses over his puffy, pock-marked cheeks, and his hair was little more than a few black strands combed over a shiny white dome. “Excuse me,” Maple said to the strange-looking man, “can you watch my shit while I go to the bathroom really quick?” The man appeared unenthused about the propositions, yet he agreed with a terse nod and a polite grimace, which Maple chose to read as a sign of friendship. Finally, with no time to lose, she ran out of the venue, past the tables of busy volunteers, and out to the big chain pharmacy store across the street.

The place was woefully understaffed, as most stores had been as of late. There was a long line of customers waiting to buy hand creams, diet colas, and frozen lunch meats. As the ticking clock of her dilemma grew ever direr, Maple retreated to some meditation techniques she’s picked up from watching YouTube videos, breathing in, breathing out, thinking of pleasant things like ponies and heavy metal shows, trying her very best not to lose her shit at the CVS (or was it a Walgreens?). She soon realized that what was meant to be a quick, convenient purchase of a memory card would be anything but. She scattered about, running back and forth, upwards and downwards across every aisle of candy bars and school supplies until, at last, she reached her point of salvation, the place where all the electronics were kept. To her utter dismay, she saw that everything was locked behind a protective, impenetrable glass anti-theft shield. Here, she found what she sought: a 16-gigabyte SD card capable of recording enough hours of 4K video. Now she just needed an employee to grant her access. Against the enclosure, there was a large red button meant for the summoning of employees who could come and unlock it for her. She hit that button so many times, like an impatient guest hammering away at the bell of a two-star motel, until finally, someone in a red vest arrived. With a raspy grunt, he asked what she wanted. “That memory card right there,” she said, “the one that says sixteen gigs.”

After an ordeal which lasted about fifteen minutes, Maple successfully made her way back to her camera, just in time, before the conference was literally starting the minute the second she inserted the new SD cards and put it into her camera. There were many places at which Maple would like to have been at that time, but working behind a camera at a Marine Biology conference was not one of them. As the conference attendants began circulating into the large auditorium, she allowed herself a few quick glances to see what they looked like. Unsurprisingly, the crowd was full of scholarly, bookish types – people with advanced degrees in eschatology and other fish-related sciences. 

As she began working, she very quickly got bored. To describe the conference as boring would be an understatement. It was dull beyond belief. Maple sat behind the camera, watching the minutes go dwindling ever so slowly by, as speaker after speaker went up talking on that large empty stage about ocean acidification and mass extinction events. It was like being in class again. The horror. It was such an excruciatingly banal affair that as the show went on, Maple could feel the dreaded sandman seducing her into a pleasant time in dreamland. The warm embrace of a much-needed if not ill-timed nap had beckoned towards her, quietly, at first, until gradually the urge to sleep on the job became so great that it was actually painful, most aggravating if the few bits of drowsy head bobs and rejuvenating winks didn’t feel so good as well. Maple chewed on the untrimmed nails of her chubby fingers to keep herself awake. Through the periphery of her cinematoger’s eye, Maple could sense that some invasive bullshit was afoot. Even though her attention was divided ninety percent on the conversation that was happening on her phone, and ten percent towards the camera pointed towards the stage. She could still plainly perceive that the audience member sitting next to her was snapping her picture. Who the hell is doing that, she thought. The nerve.

As the conference dragged on, she started to ponder her choices in life. Maple had dreamed of a job in media since she was a little girl. That was her aspiration in life: to do something creative as opposed to something real and stable like finance or real estate. The very thought of dedicating her life to something uncreative and in service of others was a prospect that seemed to her even more frightening than any tall- tales of vindictive lloronas or malevolent cucuys. The thought of a real job always kept her up at night, disturbing her and chilling her to the very marrow of her core.

In the blink of an eye, Maple was slowly regaining consciousness. She could see that the audience was rising from their seats.She could see saw that the audience was rising from their seats and talking soberingly amongst themselves. She saw that not only was her camera still on and recording, it was pointed, not at the stage, but at the floor, in an extreme close-up of the blue fibers on the carpet. How long had she been filming nothing? She checked the time on her phone. It seemed that only a second ago it had been morning, and now she was well into the afternoon. Maple could not recall the last time she felt such horror. How was she going to explain this to her employer? Things did not look good.