Wet Socks

ALEX PRONG

Aweek ago one of those Amnesty International activists stopped me. Normally, I have a strategy for avoiding them. I put my headphones in and cross to the sidewalk on the other side of the street. This time, I turned the corner of Peace Street and walked right into one of them. I knocked her pamphlets all over the wet pavement, and even though we hurried to pick them up, they were still tragically soggy when she went to restack them.

Stacking my half of the drooping pamphlets on the table, I could see the words CASCADE OF STRUGGLES, fuzzy from the moisture. Feeling terrible for ruining her handouts, and almost positive that I had hit her hard enough to form a bruise, I apologized and feigned interest in her cause.

“I’m so sorry. Are you okay? Can I hear about the cascading struggles? Tell me about this.” I gestured to the wet stack of papers.

“It’s okay,” she raised her eyes from the wet pamphlets, “People probably just throw them away anyway. I’m Alice. Do you actually want to hear? It’s okay if you were just walking past. I don’t want to take up your time if you aren’t really interested.”

Alice looked like a child in an adult’s body. Her gaze was vaguely bored, her hands were now both clasped around her reusable water bottle, and her mouth seemed like it was trying to blow bubbles from gum even though she wasn’t chewing any. I was thankful for the easy out, and I took it.

“I’m interested, but you’re right about me being in a rush. I promise I will give it a Google when I get home. Here, give me one of those,” I said, grabbing a pamphlet by the top left corner where the ink had not yet run, “I promise I won’t just throw it away.”

She smiled, but the smile seemed to stop at the corners of her mouth, not touching the rest of her face, not nearly making it to her bored eyes. She didn’t say anything. I turned to go, tempted to crumple the struggles into my fist, but not wanting to get wet ink on my hands.

When I returned to my house later that night, the struggles had dried and I could now properly crumple them without getting my hands dirty. I tossed them in my recycling bin, but it made me uncomfortable to look at them sitting on top of last night’s pizza box. I opened the pizza box and put the struggles inside, but I could still see them through the square holes that had previously been home to a garlic and a chipotle cheddar dip. I took out the whole bag of recycling and put it on the street even though it was only a quarter full and the garbage truck had just come the morning before.

After returning inside and catching up on Facebook, I scrolled onto a sponsored ad for Amnesty International’s Cascade of Struggles Campaign. No kidding. I clicked on it.

The Cascade referred to the structural way in which technology companies abuse human rights globally. Further research. The struggles were everywhere. Female sweatshop labourers in China, telephone help center workers in India. Further research. Before sweatshop workers in China could assemble raw materials, they had to be mined. Actual children mined coltan in the Congo. Profits from selling coltan funded the country’s civil war. I closed my laptop. It was 4:28am and my eyes were stinging. The campaign was urging people to go without their Macs and iPhones for 48 hours and use that time to write to Apple urging them to reconsider the structure of their production line. “To Think Differently.”

It was Friday when I collided with Alice, and for the next week the struggles continued to scuffle around in my conscience. I decided to travel to my cottage a couple hours north of Raleigh for the weekend to reflect and to write my letter.

Truthfully, I could have used 48 hours without technology anyway. It was relaxing despite the rain all weekend. I reread some of my old books that I had left up there, I made use of the old record player, and I carefully wrote my letter. I thought about Alice and wondered what she would think if she saw me there, heatedly writing to Tim Cook, citing Amnesty’s reports, really getting into it. I hoped I could find her on that same corner when I got back in town. Maybe she would even want to go out for fair trade coffee with me or smash some iPods at the Apple store in an act of protest.

On my way back, the rain was coming down hard. Pouring really. The storm must have been the reason there was nobody else on my side of the highway, although the northbound side seemed to be strangely busy to the point of standstill. Maybe they had all just read about the struggles and needed some time at their cottages to think. When I got into town, the wind was so strong that I had to fight to open my car door. My legs were drenched up to the ankle, and I was cursing the weather, because I was pretty sure I had no clean socks left. I was supposed to do laundry that weekend, before I had decided to go on my little retreat. Before heading inside, I noticed the absolute greyness of the sky, like someone had forgotten to open the blinds. My neighbor had had an American flag attached to his verandah, but it had detached and was now lodged between the branches of his poplar tree. I shivered and closed the door.

I untied my soaking Converse and pulled them off with my wet socks still stuck inside. Grabbing a blanket and a bag of Ruffles from the cupboard, I sprawled on the couch and turned on the news that I was craving after 48 hours of radio silence. The image on the screen was an aerial shot of the highway I had just been on, with all those cars jammed up bumper-to-bumper going north. I choked on a chip, seeing my lone car on the southbound side of the highway, going the opposite direction to every other car. The tagline across the bottom of the screen read: “Mass Evacuations as Hurricane Matthew Targets North Carolina.”

Alex Prong is a bartender, fern enthusiast, and writer. He prefers writing pieces that blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction: autobiographical fiction or fictional memoir, for example. He enjoys finding newer and truer routes to the truth. He also writes poetry and comedy. He tends to ascribe cosmic significance to trivial events and people—you can find him sitting at a kitchen island, wearing cabin socks and lingerie, and writing erotica about the (fictional, or not) woman who delivers his mail.