The Audition
Roxanne was a character in a story but she was also a real person and she sometimes felt confused about which was which. Her boyfriend Tom was a poet who wrote sonnets on demand for a greeting card company called Sonnets on Demand. Roxanne and Tom had met seven months earlier when Tom had left his phone in a bathroom stall in the men’s restroom at the Davenport Hotel and Roxanne, very drunk and fairly disoriented, had mistakenly entered the wrong restroom to pee, found the phone — which looked exactly like hers — sitting there on top of the stainless steel toilet paper dispenser, and had absent-mindedly slipped it into her purse. She had been surprised to find the extra phone in her purse the next morning, and intrigued by the half-written Elizabethan sonnet that appeared on the screen when she turned it on.
But that’s another story for another day. Right now Roxanne was lying in bed next to Tom, plagued by insomnia, staring at the ceiling as insomniacs so often do, and trying to find a foothold somewhere in the chaos of her swirling thoughts.
When I was squinting at a spotlight on the ceiling of a hotel and realised that what I was seeing was what one saw looking into a microscope I was thinking about something interesting as well but I can’t now remember what, although my diary says, ‘Who are the belligerents?’, and something else I can’t read for that day.
Great story.
Is Sonnets on Demand hiring?