Framing Elvis

	FOR THE PAST THREE HOURS, I’ve been full of gas. And I don’t mean that in a crude way. I mean that I feel like I’m full of compressed air from my pelvis to my shoulders. Nothing really helps—not eating, not drinking, not even farting—except for lying on the floor of the antique store. Somehow, it brings me to a homeostasis, which evaporates as soon as I stand. I would live on the floor if I could. 
	It was supposed to be a quiet day at the store. John told me January is a slow season, second only to the dead of summer. Regardless of the season, this town would be practically silent if it weren’t for the state highway that impersonates a Main Street, carrying commuters from the west and depositing them in the east, dashing away any wandering pedestrians. Nothing’s in reach but the prairie and the pulsing artery of the monstrous interstate ruthlessly splintering the state into unequal halves. Even the mountains, purple and majestic as they are, seem further away than they should be. People stay inside. I think they’re afraid of the wind and the cold, although they’d never admit it. 
	And for the most part, it has been a quiet day at the store. But it’s ten minutes to close, and I’ve got a customer standing in front of me and asking for the impossible, and I want nothing more than to clock out and lie on my own floor. She has impeccable timing. I heard the bell above the door jingle to signal her arrival while I was—you guessed it—lying on the floor between bookshelves like they’re tall grass. I’m working alone with no one to pass this off to, as John anticipates slow days with executive precision as a defense mechanism against paying a cent more for labor than absolutely necessary. He’s a short, barrel-chested man with a proclivity for wearing jorts peppered with sawdust, even in the January wind. His large hands have only grown larger from years of calluses. I imagine he even wears his toolbelt at home. If he weren’t tinkering away back in his workshop right now, he’d tell me I should’ve swept the floor already. I’m waiting for the day I develop an all-seeing eye and can lock this place up before a customer can breach the door. 
	This is the kind of customer I find the most difficult to get mad at: a little old lady. Short and stooped, with a quiet and babyish voice, and bird-boned limbs that look like they’d be easier to crush than eggshells. A brown wig almost covers a sparsely-growing gray field of hair. Her fuchsia lipstick is carefully painted within the thin confines of her lips. There’s nothing to hate here. Yet, this job has made me short-tempered and irritable to the point of exhaustion. Well, the job and the gas. The job would be more bearable, I guess, if I didn’t feel like I’m literally, physically about to explode at any given moment. 
	“I drove myself down from Laramie,” the old woman says. “None of the antique stores in Wyoming had what I wanted. My son did some searching for me on the internet and he said you’re the best antique store in the Front Range.” 
	“That’s nice of him to say,” I reply, not listening as I begin to count the change in the cash register. 
	“Isn’t it? Anyway, I have an important picture and I need a frame for it.” 
	This piques my interest, despite my annoyance. We don’t sell old photos because they depress John. (“Those should be in someone’s photo album,” he says, before tossing them in the dumpster). She produces a wrinkled and coffee-stained Walmart Photo Center envelope. I imagine truly anything—a photo of a faded ancestor, a long-lost love, or even a sonogram of a future grandchild—could be inside. She pulls a single glossy paper out of the envelope. 
	It’s a picture of Elvis. Well, not just of Elvis, but Elvis is the centerpiece. He’s from some year between Comeback Elvis and Fat Elvis, clad in a dark purple suit with golden goggle sunglasses and brilliantined hair. He’s flanked by two men, maybe lackeys, maybe other musicians I don’t recognize. Memphis Mafia. It’s of terrible quality: a little bit muddled and very pixelated, like it could be a still from a documentary, or was snapped haphazardly by someone on too much coke and then blown up to modern proportions.
	“Oh! It’s Elvis,” I say. I close the cash register. 
	“Do you know who Elvis is?” 
	This is without a doubt the stupidest question I’ve heard in a while.
	“Of course,” I say as politely as I can bear. “Did you take this picture?” 
	“Dear me, no,” she laughs. “I had my son print it off of the internet.” 
	That explains some things, but not everything.
	“I’m thinking something gold, maybe with gems, for the King,” she interjects. “Maybe purple gems to match his suit.” 
	There’s no way that’s happening.
	“I don’t think we have anything exactly like that, I’m afraid. We don’t have many frames…mmmm…most of them are going to be wood.”
	“Wood? I don’t want wood.” 
	“I understand.”

	Strange requests come with the territory. Antique stores tend to attract two types of people: the very old, and the profoundly weird. They’re not mutually exclusive. We get frequent phone calls from old people looking to unload their possessions onto us. They’re typically downsizing their house, or trying to make some cash, or the family heirloom they’ve been holding onto for their kids was rejected. Sometimes, their spouse just died, and they have to get rid of their things, somehow. 
	About a month ago this other old woman came into the store with a very specific purpose. John, who’s prone to exaggerating or even straight-up lying to customers, had told her that he had “a chest from the Civil War era, which could’ve belonged to a soldier who fought the local Indians.” What she heard, for some reason, was that he had a cedar chest that was at Sand Creek, and if you looked closely enough, you could still see the little bullet holes. He purchased it at an estate sale in Denver from another eccentric—a millionaire with a mansion full of antique odds and ends. Some of it was deeply ugly and worth nothing more than potential firewood. Other pieces, though, either had some sort of charm or were secretly worth a great deal of money. Those cases tended to be tucked away. 
	Anyway, this old lady was after the chest. She was that kind of elderly woman who’s scarily thin and more essential oil than flesh, but still manages to reek of body odor. All stringy gray hair and no bra and transition lenses. Twice divorced, maybe once widowed, yet still a live wire under the right circumstances. She came in on a particularly busy day during the Christmas shopping season—always a delight for the clerks. This was long before my ever-present internal gas, but the holiday season can have a similar effect on any store clerk, too. 
	“John told me you have a cedar chest from that estate sale over in Denver that was at Sand Creek and belonged to Chivington. Or one of his men. Something like that,” she said with a wave of her bony hand. 
	Unfortunately, I knew exactly what she was talking about. 
	“Yes. Right this way,” I said, gently putting down the delicate dish I’d been haphazardly wrapping in bubble wrap for another customer. I gestured at her and headed into the Big Room. 
	The Big Room is where we keep the Big Stuff, as you may have guessed, like bedroom sets, armoires, curved china cabinets, hall trees, and any other things that wouldn’t fit in the Display Room. Not that we have much in the way of bric-a-brac and knickknacks to begin with. (John prefers furniture, and, as he likes to say, “this is a classy establishment”). The brick walls are lined with mirrors that need resilvering, old saws and other farm tools, and one kraut cutter presumably pried from the hands of a long-dead Volga German. There’s a distinct smell of mothy decay that seems to be embedded in the carpeting that won’t release no matter how many times I run the steam cleaner. John once told me that the room above the Big Room was the site of the first Evangelical church in town. That room now has tenants, and those tenants sometimes complain of bats. 
	The chest, an ugly, square thing of about two feet by two feet, was wedged between a quarter-sawn oak filing cabinet and a dining room table of no consequence. I pulled it out from its wooden canyon and flipped the lid. 
	“It’s a nice chest,” I said to the woman. 
	“Oh, it’s gorgeous!” she squealed. “It’s just what I’m looking for!” 
	She shifted her strings of hair away from her eyes and leaned over to peer into the chest. Her braless breasts moved to hang low. Suddenly, she lurched forward. Her head disappeared into the belly of the chest, and I heard a deep inhale. 
	“Ma’am?” I said.
	Her arms braced the sides of the box as she pulled herself out from inside, teetering a little. She parted her hair again as she stood and made a reflexive grab at her breasts. I tried not to stare. 
	“I’m sorry, I was just checking,” she said. “Can you do me a favor?”
	Oh, great.
	“Of course,” I say.
	“Can you stick your head into the chest and tell me if it smells musty?” 
	I stared at her blankly. The audacity of customers, I swear. If I stood very still, she might change her mind. 
	“It’s really the darnedest thing. All of a sudden, one day, I couldn’t smell anything anymore. Please, can you tell me if it’s musty? It’ll only take you a second.” 
	I wanted to point out that if she doesn’t have a sense of smell, what does it matter to her if it’s musty? People expect too much from their antiques.
	“It’s a Christmas present for my daughter,” she continued as if reading my thoughts. “I don’t want to give her a musty chest.” 
	There was no way out of it. I had to submit. I bowed down low and plunged my head into the open box. I didn’t even need to inhale. The pungent scent of something stale and unclean surrounded me instantly. I suppressed a gag. Pulling myself upright, I faked a smile. 
	“No, not musty at all. You can still smell the cedar,” I lied. “Your daughter will be fine.” 
	“Wonderful!” she said. She shut the chest and ran her wrinkled hands over the glossy wood. Then she stopped, suddenly, and probed a flaw in the wood. 
	“This must be a bullet hole,” she said. 
	“Yeah.” 
	“You know about Sand Creek?” 
	“Heard of it. I think I went there on a field trip once in high school.” 
	“I’m sure you did, with all the Critical Race Theory in schools nowadays.” 
	“Well, I graduated years ago.” 
	“You went to college?” 
	“Yeah.” 
	“Animal science? Aren’t you from a ranching family north of here?” 
	“Yeah. I mean, no. Philosophy.”
	“Oh, honey. What a waste.” 
	I didn’t really know how to respond to that. 
	So, I filled out an itemized receipt for a “Sand Creek chest” for $575 on our carbon paper notepad—John insists that everything be appropriately antiquated at the store, from our hefty analog cash register that malfunctions better than it calculates to our punch clock with the paper cards that he orders in bulk. I doubt he’d own a cell phone if it weren’t an imperative nowadays. But the woman produced her own purple gel pen to sign her receipt. Althea Something, I think she wrote. I pulled off the two sheets of the receipt and was careful to hand her the copy, not the original, so she wouldn’t be able to come back and claim she’d been swindled. (As John likes to say, “You can send a horse an invoice, but you can’t make him pay.” Whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean).
	“I hope my daughter likes this,” Althea said to no one in particular as she signed her receipt. “It’s a shame that young people aren’t buying antiques nowadays. When I visit my grandchildren, their apartments are packed with that cheap IKEA crud.” 
	It took all of my restraint not to retort that I’d love to have enough money to buy my own cheap IKEA crud instead of my salvaged Goodwill monstrosities. 
	“I have a couple of antiques, but they’re hand-me-downs from my relatives,” I offered. 
	“I suppose they don’t make houses big enough for antiques nowadays,” she said. “The ceilings aren’t high enough and the rooms aren’t wide enough for hall trees and big dining room tables. It’s a shame. Houses aren’t what they were.” 
	“Mmhm.”
	Althea dropped her gel pen back into her handbag and closed it forcefully. “Tell John ‘thanks!’ I’m sure I’ll be back for more after Christmas.” 
	After she left, John gave me a firm handshake. 
	“To be honest,” he said, “that thing was a piece of crap. Definitely 20th-century, if not 21st-, even. Probably pine stained to look like cedar. And the hinge was all wrong.”
	“I had a feeling.” 
	“That guy had a bunch of fakes in his collection,” he revealed nonchalantly. “Oh! Next time, tell her that if she stuffs a bunch of newspapers inside the chest, the musty smell will go away.” 

	Frankly, all of that was a piece of cake compared to this. We’ve been at it for half an hour now. 
	“No, it’s not good enough. It’s not good enough for the King,” the old Elvis woman says. 
	“I’m sorry.” 
	I’ve handed her the best thing I could find: a wooden frame with rudimentary spoon-carving. I have the urge to drive it deep into my abdomen to force some of this compacted air out of me in either direction. 
	“I’m thinking gold for the King,” she repeats. “It just seems fitting.”
	“Yeah, that makes sense,” I say, suppressing my exasperation. “It’ll match his accessories nicely.” 
	You know how cows get full of air? Well, if you don’t spend a lot of time around farm animals, I suppose you wouldn’t. Sometimes, animals get air stuck in the cavities between their lungs and torso. Humans can get this too, of course. But it’s pretty common among big barnyard animals. You have to stick a needle in their skin to release the air—a cannula, like for an IV. You let the air flow out and can literally see the cow’s skin contracting back into place with a soft hissing sound as the gas escapes. The methane can even cause a little blue flame. I used to watch my grandpa do this to his beef cattle when he couldn’t afford to call the vet. Anyway, that’s what I wish this woman would do to me, rather than force me to keep up this pretense. Stick me with a needle and watch me contract. Put me out of my misery.
	I need to focus, because if I can’t clock out soon, someone’s going to have to call a hazmat team. We definitely don’t have any gold frames. I consider running back into John’s workshop and spray-painting our cheapest pine frame.
	“Let me see if I’ve got anything in the Big Room,” I sigh. We’ve combed through every nook and cranny of the Display Room, and it’s now well past close. It’s not that we don’t have frames, it’s just that nothing in the Display Room is to her liking. Everything is either too plain (most of it) or too ornate in the wrong sort of way (the rest of it). The Big Room, full of Big Things, can’t possibly meet her needs. I lead her there anyway, though, as it’s my duty to at least present a charade of effort. Some dusty crevasse could contain something, I suppose. We occasionally find old documents in a desk drawer, or a pen, or even the occasional tooth. But I’ve never seen anything of interest to this Elvis fanatic. 
	“I’ll start looking around,” I say. 
	She nods. 
	I begin to open every drawer in every desk and dresser I can find, but it’s what I expected: nothing but dust bunnies and pencil shavings. No teeth this time, at least. Perhaps drawers aren’t the way to go. The little old lady stands idly as I continue methodically opening drawers like an obsessive file clerk. And yet, I can’t speed, because John will chew me out for any scratches he finds. Okay, forget the drawers. 	Also, can I send this woman back to the Display Room and get away with curling up in a ball on the floor for a minute? I’m feeling so nauseous that I don’t even care about the decaying carpet. Well, maybe I can give myself a quicker remedy. I open the door of my favorite piece in the Big Room, a massive walnut wardrobe with a burl wood veneer.
	“I’ll be back in a moment,” I say, chuckling to diffuse the strangeness of what I’m about to do. I climb up inside the wardrobe and grip the edges of the wood with my fingertips like a talon to shut the door behind me. Standing as straight as I can, I take a deep breath, ball my right hand into a fist and place my left hand above it, and set them both just above my belly button, where my diaphragm allegedly resides. Upward thrusts, I think. I slam my fist into myself. Repeat. Pretend I’m holding a delicate knife, puncturing my excess air. Wait for something to jostle and shift inside of me. But nothing’s happening. Can I ask this lady to sling me over her shoulder and burp me like a baby? 
	“Miss?” I hear her soft voice say from outside of the wardrobe. 
	“Sorry!” I half-shout. I open the door a crack and stick my head out of the wardrobe. Her slight finger points at the wall. Dovetailed between a dirty mirror and a washboard is a small, golden, rhinestoned frame. 
	Holy shit. 
	I’ve literally never seen this thing before. I fully open the door and step out of the wardrobe, walking toward the wall. I’m tall enough to grab it from its perch unassisted. It’s gilded, cool to the touch, studded, patinaed – it’s the exact level of gaudiness she desires. Perfectly befitting the King. Where did this come from? I couldn’t be more surprised if we’d found Elvis himself in one of the cabinets. What luck. The little old lady hastily hands me the photo and I slip Elvis into the frame. 
	“Yes!” she practically screams. “It’s just what I was picturing!”
	I can see another firm handshake from John in my future.
 	“Oh, this is wonderful. I can’t thank you enough, dear.”
	“Oh, no problem at all, I’m happy to help,” I say, and I really mean it, for once. “Please tell your son to leave us a good Yelp review.” 
	She fingers the picture of Elvis tenderly.
	“What’s the price?” she asks. It’s the first time she’s discussed money, as if up until now it’s been immaterial. Anything for the King, naturally.
	“You know, I’m not sure. There’s no tag, but—” I begin to say.
	And then, of course, the bell above the door jingles. At this hour of the night, it’s the most sinister sound in the world. I’ve had no time to lock the door. I can’t keep the customers at bay. 
	“Excuse me, I’ll be right back,” I say, gesturing at the old woman and Elvis. I leave the Big Room and head for the front door. As I enter the Display Room, the bell dings again. And again. Despite the store lights, the darkness outside and the weak streetlamps keep the front door and its plate glass windows in a shadow. Something is struggling to batter down the door, ramming its back into the glass over and over again, turning the bell into a distress signal. Finally, it turns around and heaves with all of its strength.
	Would you fucking believe it? It’s Althea Something. 
	“Where’s John!?” Althea shrieks as soon as she has her body wedged through a crack in the door before I can spew my automated niceties. Her arms are full of her Sand Creek chest, and it practically crushes her and smushes her ungirded breasts. She stumbles into the Display Room, bringing the wind in with her, and shoves the Sand Creek chest onto the counter in the middle of the room.
	“Hello. The store’s closed. And he’s not in today,” I half-lie. He’s just hidden deep in the annals of his workshop, working late as per usual, and doesn’t like to be disturbed by customers, especially at this hour. 
	“Get him now, you little bitch,” Althea says. 
	I flush like a cranberry. Jesus Christ, this woman. To stop myself from screaming back at her, I break into a big old rictus grin.
	“He’s not here,” I repeat. “And we open again tomorrow morning.” 
	“I know he is! His truck is parked out back next to mine. Get him now.” 
	I wish I could burp into her face. Not just for personal satisfaction, but also because I’m about to implode from all of this gas sitting inside of me like a peach pit. It’s not like she’d be able to smell it. Whatever. I turn on my heels, head to the back of the room and straight through the double doors to the workshop, and find John powering away at the industrial sink, resilvering a mirror. He’s got his noise-canceling headphones on, oblivious to our present danger. I tap him on the shoulder. 
	“What?” he snaps. 
	“Customer up front to see you,” I say, the words getting caught in my throat.
	John groans. 
	“This’d better be good.” He turns off the sink, rests his headphones around his neck, and puts down the mirror. I lead him back out to the Display Room, walking in front of him without turning back to glance at him, not unlike how I used to lead Grandpa’s cattle to the slaughter shed. 
	As I open the double doors, I’m amazed to see that the little old Elvis woman is still here, eyes wide, still clutching her precious picture in her bitsy hands. She’s ignored my directive to stay in the Big Room, probably in pursuit of the noise, and has planted herself on a stout leather chair near the counter. I wonder if it’s inquisitiveness or her unwavering dedication to the King that’s keeping her here. 
	Before John can greet Althea, she launches.
	“Do you know what my daughter told me? This chest is musty. Smell it for yourself. A month ago, this clerk of yours told me it smelled fine. She took advantage of an old woman with no sense of smell. You’re a dirty liar, young lady. John, you’d better fire this girl and refund me before I report you to the Chamber of Commerce and the Better Business Bureau!” 
	John turns and looks at me stonily.
	“Is this true?” he seethes.
	Is this true? John fucking knows it’s true. I could say as much right now. Yes, of course, the chest is musty, you stupid old bitch. The fucking nerve of him. 
	It’s not even real! 
	What now? 
	I take as deep a breath as I can, under the circumstances. 
	“Well, it didn’t smell musty to me,” I offer. God, in this case, maybe doubling down is the best I can do. Smell is objective, isn’t it? This woman doesn’t even know that she smells like something crawled into her armpit and died. She’s not contesting us about the provenance of the chest, after all. That would be another story. This is a lie of opinion. 
	“John, you smell this! Tell me if you think it’s musty,” Althea says. 
	“I’m not smelling the damn chest,” John says. “I think the question is whether or not the chest smelled musty at the point of sale. Which was nearly a month ago. Why did you wait so long?” 
	Ah. So John is beginning to catch my drift. 
	The little old lady is still sitting in her chair, Elvis on her lap, watching us intently.
Althea scowls. 
	“The Christmas season. Ever heard of it? I have grandchildren, after all. It shouldn’t matter! I’m within the 30-day return period.”
	“The 30-day return period is for small merchandise, not furniture.”
	“I have my receipt right here!” she shouts, producing the carbon shadow of her purple gel pen strokes on her slip—and thank God for my sake that it’s the copy! “One cedar Sand Creek chest for $575 plus tax. Filled out by that clerk over there.” Althea points her bony finger at me.
	“C’mon, now. You’ve been a customer for how many years?” John says. “You know I don’t give refunds on furniture. All sales final. End of story.”
	“It’s fraud!” Althea continues. 
	“Nowhere on that receipt does it say anything about the chest being musty or not musty.” John says. The veins in his stocky neck begin to bulge. “There’s no grounds here for you to accuse me of fraud.” 
	“Well!” Althea says. “If it's going to be like that—”
	“Yes, it’s going to be like that,” John interrupts. I sense that John is about to spin into the kind of screaming fit he usually reserves for his wife. 
	“Then in that case, you can forget about getting a lick of business from anyone else in this town again!” Althea screams. Tears begin to trickle down her face now, probably crocodile. “I’m getting right on the Facebook when I get home. And everyone’s going to know that you’re a fraud and you sell MUSTY FURNITURE.” 
	“Go ahead and try that, Althea,” John says, his tone dipping into a barely-concealed mockery. “I’ll call the Chamber myself and explain the situation.”
	“Like hell you will!” Althea yells. “I’ll even call your wife and tell her about you and Kath—”
	“Get OUUUUUUUUUUT!” John bellows. His barrel chest expands beyond limits I previously thought possible. John unhooks his hammer from his toolbelt. What happens next feels like it transpires in slow motion. 
	Bits of imitation cedar fly through the air, ricocheting off of us like small wooden bullets. I fling my hands up to my eyes. Swirls of dust and flaking paint fill the room, and there’s an unmistakable smell of dank, putrid mildew in the air. John is clobbering the chest to death. He’s attacking it with the vigor and desperation of a man digging his way out of prison. Shards of wood knick and puncture John’s great big hands and thick forearms. He begins to bleed, but pays no attention. 
	“Jesus Christ,” I whisper. The Display Room looks like John ran the Sand Creek chest through a woodchipper and threw his fingers in to boot. And I’ve never felt so fucking ill in my entire life. 
	Despite having just weathered what was functionally a detonation, there’s a strangely distinct lack of dust in the room now. In fact, everything’s a little too painfully clear to see. That’s how I realize the door is ajar. The January wind is sucking most of the debris out of the store and into the street, on a long walk to the prairie. And she’s gone. The frame is gone. Elvis has left the building. I didn’t even hear the bell jingle as she left. Althea’s infantile wailing fills in an otherwise intolerable silence. John turns to me, sweating and bleeding, his eyes at once glassy and cutting with rage. 
	“Go home, Veronica,” he hisses. 
	“J—”
	“No. I’ll clean up. I’ll lock up. Go home now.” 
	Somehow, the composure with which he speaks to me, despite his clear and barely-repressed fury, frightens me more than his brutal outburst and his sudden annihilation of the Sand Creek chest. 
	I turn, run, and push through the double doors. 
	Am I in shock? I don’t think I’m in shock, but I do feel awful. My stomach’s doing something new. Then it happens: I get that spicy, sour, hot taste in my mouth as my cheeks flood with cautionary saliva. I think I’m out of control. I stumble through John’s deathtrap of a workshop and try not to trip on a board or a basin. My whole face flushes again, I can feel it. How soon before my vision goes out? The heaving starts. I reach out my arms, fumble, and brace the edge of the industrial sink. I’m out of control. I can’t hold on any longer. It happens like an acidic, fetid burp. Like another creature emerging from within my walls and making itself known. A monstrous birth, over and over again. I’m out of control.  But there’s also that remarkable release of pressure, like a bottle popping, or a zit. I’m shaking. I’m inverted and emptied and I’ve never felt better. 
	The contents of my stomach are now clearly visible to me, like a cannulated cow. Have you ever heard of that? It’s different from a cow with a cannula stuck in it to let out the air, believe it or not. You take a healthy cow and you put a big hole the size of a saucer in the cow’s side. Then you put a thick plastic ring around the wound, like a porthole, so you can look right into the cow’s stomach—well, rumen. The cow doesn’t seem to mind it, although I don’t think anyone asks the cow how they really feel about it. They just walk around with a hole in their side and people put their hands in the hole. A see-through cow that’s open for business. Stick your head in the chest. Stick your hand in my side. Be not faithless, but believing. Whatever. 

— MARNIE MONOGUE

Marnie Monogue is a writer and visual artist. She earned a BA in English from Grinnell College in 2021. Originally from rural Wisconsin, she has lived in Iowa, London, and Colorado, but now calls Chicago home. Her art has appeared in Beaver Magazine and her plays have been developed by Make/Shift Theatre and performed at West Texas A&M University. She is a member of the PlayGround-Chicago Writers Pool.