CNF: People Just Assume You Do

What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “People Just Assume You Do”?

When I look for help in cleaning, cooking, preparing home remedies, this is the advice I find: It’s easy to do using ordinary household items you already have. Only I don’t have. Most of these so-called common items aren’t even included in my story because they are uncommon enough I couldn’t tell you what they look like.

It’s like the day I was working with asylum seekers, recently arrived in the US, some destitute and some nearly so, and a volunteer offered to give them tips on making ends meet. Do you really need that morning latte? Why did you order that avocado toast? Don’t do all your shopping at Whole Foods. The migrants listened politely and attentively but once the session was over they surrounded me. What’s a latte? What does whole foods mean? Luckily, they didn’t ask me for specifics because I don’t actually know what makes a coffee drink qualify as a latte, and I’ve never tasted or even seen avocado toast.

The piece started out with the words I don’t have repeated over and over. It went on to include what I do have… Then I hated that part and deleted it, except I didn’t realize the document had switched to Read Only. I submitted the story and after it was rejected, I opened the file because I wanted to check the word count – and discovered nothing had been deleted. Then JD Vance started blathering about childless cat ladies. All over the country, single women without kids stood up and declared themselves –which kind of ruined my story. People weren’t going to make the automatic assumption about husband and children anymore. I put the story aside.

But damn! Yesterday I had to go in-person to the bank when they mistakenly froze my account so my rent check didn’t go through. I showed up with my bank statements and check book and several forms of ID, but they wanted to see the account on my cell phone. This caused a bit of consternation when I told them I don’t have one. Bank problem did get sorted, but I was still annoyed enough, I went back to the story because, really, why am I expected to have all this shit?!?! I just want what’s necessary. With that in mind, I got rid of excess words and compressed the piece further.

Now I’ve taken a whole page to decompress a one-sentence story. So much for confining myself to what’s necessary.