But the Lake of Hope Remained by Rex Wilder

Early Morning Rush

Christopher Kim

Wednesday. Seven AM. 62 degrees F. Mostly cloudy. Traffic on 695 West is starting to get congested and the little man driving the sun damaged hatchback is looking rough. The bags under his eyes are showing he did not have enough REM sleep for at least four days. Either his boss is riding his ass about the sale leads from the CRM system again or he’s been comparing himself to his ex-girlfriends on social media. But, going back to his dog-tired face, we can see that he missed shaving under his chin and there’s a little red on the corner of his mouth. Have to be careful there, folks. You don’t want to be sliding that razor around so carelessly or else you’ll look like THAT.

Oh, boy. Did you see that? Someone just cut him off. Not even a last second signal to pretend like they cared. That person flat out bullied their way in front of our poor boy Ted. And Ted is now cursing up a storm. I’m actually surprised he didn’t smash his horn a thousand times. Check out those veins on the side of his neck! I think Ted needs to give Dr. Santiago a call. If we take a look at his personal calendar, we can see that he has cancelled the last three appointments with the doc. Speaking of health, Ted is looking chunkier than before. The way the seatbelt kind of disappears into his fat chest might be an indicator that he’s hitting the drive-thru more than the gym.

Speak of the devil. He pulled a Slim Jim from the center console. I was wrong. It’s worse. He’s living off of salt and meat by-products. Come on, Ted. Your food is as ugly as your cheap suit. Get it together.

Looks like traffic is smoothing out and Ted is calmer now that he is satisfied by a breakfast the World Health Organization would deem unfit for most humans. That’s it for now. We’ll be back to check in during Ted’s morning conference meeting when he will most likely embarrass himself by pulling up the wrong PowerPoint presentation. Stay classy, Ted.

Chris Kim is an undergraduate in UBalt’s English program with a focus in Creative Writing. He enjoys reading and writing satire and dystopian stories. After he graduates from the English program, he plans on transferring to College Park to study library sciences in order to become a librarian. His best friend is a long-haired, calico cat named Butters.

Rex Wilder is an artmaker and poet living in Benedict Canyon, California. He considers both vocations interchangeable, or at least sharing the same gallery in his mind. His artwork has been honored with many awards and featured both on magazine covers and within them. Three full-length books of his poetry have been published, and his poems have been widely printed and anthologized, including aboard Knopf’s recent Together in a Sudden Strangeness, which showed up on many must-read lists last year, from Entertainment Weekly to The New Yorker.