Camille Meyer
This Woman from Boston was unable to get a boyfriend so she decided to create an army to get him for her. She was not good at making things either but she did know someone that was. She stole her dear friend Thomas’s thesis, which anyways, after six years she presumed he would never going to finish.
The Woman arrived at her friend’s office on a sunny afternoon when, owing to the pleasant weather, Thomas was likely to be out. The secretary let her wait in his office.
The Woman did not have to look for his manuscript. It was stacked between two piles of books on his desk. She lifted it off the desk and placed it in her handbag. The Woman scribbled a hasty note and left it on the keyboard so that Thomas would know she had stopped by.
“I can no longer wait,” she told the secretary.
She walked home via Staples in order to buy the material for her army. They will fear her because she assembled them. Thomas’s words were necessary to animate her men.
She sat facing the computer at her desk. Thomas’s thesis was on her left, the new paper already loaded in the printer. To raise the army from her oblivion the Woman begin to type word-for-word Thomas’s thesis into her computer: Times New Roman, size 12, double-spaced. She did not stir for eighty pages. She got up to use the bathroom only after her copy was printed. She put Thomas’s thesis in the trash because if they met their maker they would swear allegiance to him. She cleared everything else off the desk except her copy.
She folded each soldier in the same way: she began with a triangle and ended standing him on his own in the order that She made him. Eighty pages are as many soldiers. The Woman finished folding the last man in time to see the first one come alive. He about faced as the soldier standing next to him animated and so on down the line. The army then saluted her.
“Find me the Lover, ” She commanded.
Eighty right arms dropped their salute and the soldiers huddled to strategize. Now that there was room on the table, She laid her head down to rest. The Woman slept through the army’s departure. She supervised them in a dream.
Fitted with black uniforms because the color is slimming, the army filed onto the street. They held their rifles at the ready because life is dangerous for a 3-inch soldier.
Several hours later She awoke and lifted her head from the desk. What to the Woman’s sleepy eyes appeared but her eighty tiny soldiers plus One in tow. The man the army decided to be her Boyfriend was strong and about her height. He stood before Her with his hands bound. The first soldier Page 1—and they all look a little different for the words from which they came were related in sequence and in theme, but not in kind—insisted on telling her the story of how they caught Him. For this She crushed Page 1 under her fist. The army must fear her until their end. She asked the Page 80 for his field report. This is what he said:
“Woman, if we are wrong about Him we will have had to go further than the end of the earth to find another. For you we simply marched across town to the store where He always buys a pack of cigarettes at 3pm. We had to hurry because if you had taken any longer in making us we would have missed him. There is no other Man for you.
With forty men to a leg, we brought him to his knees. Then twenty soldiers were diverted to a each arm and we bound his wrists together. The comrade you just killed informed him that we were not to keep his Woman waiting. Half of us marched ahead of him and with the rest walked behind.”
With this Page 11 cut her Man’s shackles. He came over to Her and wrapped his arm around his Woman.
The army was to be leveled. She beckoned the army closer so that her Man did not have to lose his grip on her waist to crush them beneath his boots. Eighty soldiers were dead on her apartment floor. And the Woman loved her Boyfriend forever because he was made just for her.
Camille Meyer was raised on a farm in Rhode Island. She resides and writes from the great city of Boston.