Rachel Marcy’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.

My mom and I were in our front yard when the Environmental Police pulled over their pick-up truck. The officer in the passenger seat leaned out the window.

“Do you have a bear in your house?” he asked.

They’d received a 911 call about a bear in the caller’s home, but the line went dead before they got a location.

I have no idea how this story ends.

*

We were afraid we would lose power in an ice storm, so we filled the bathtub with snow, in order to have water to flush the toilet. We never lost power, and the snow never melted.

*

In my life I have only been unerringly good at one thing, and that was English MACC. “MACC” stood for “Mountain Academic Competition Conference,” and “English” designated the subject matter of which I – a four-time MACC champion – was master. “It was like Quiz Bowl,” is what I’ve mumbled, wanting to change the subject, on the few occasions I’ve tried to explain MACC in my adult life. But that’s not true. It wasn’t like Quiz Bowl. There were teams and buzzers, sure, but MACC was all about narrow expertise. You had to be a hedgehog, not a fox.

English MACC worked like this: at the start of the academic year, team members received the List, a document containing the titles and authors of fifty-two (or maybe fifty-four?) works of literature. The bulk of these were poems, short stories, and essays, but there were also eight or ten novels and the same number of plays. Every year, a few titles were added, and a few cycled out. Matches between area high schools were held in the winter and spring, on Mondays, and they culminated in a championship (bracket-style) and then a Superbowl, when champion MACCers from different regions faced off. The first half of an English MACC match consisted of a number of questions asked to two competing teams; if Team A missed their question, Team B got a shot. The second half was a buzzer round. And the best questions, the ones I lived for, began like this:

“Name the source and the author of the following quotation…”

“He finally come into his manhood today, didn’t he? Kind of like a rainbow after the rain -” BZZZZ. A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry. Bring it.

“Reader, I forgave him at the moment and on the spot. There was such a deep remorse in his -” BZZZZ. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. Bring it harder.

“Oh, the carnage of August-!”  BZZZZZZ. “A Christmas Memory,” by Truman Capote. I MYSELF AM BRINGING IT.

“Cannon to th- ”  BZZZ. “The Charge of the Light Brigade,”  Alfred Lord Tennyson. Come on come on come on COME ON.

“So we b-” BZZZZ. The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald. Yes.

I’d get pretty worked up, and the more questions I got right, the louder and more incoherent my inner monologue would become. I tended to channel my aggression at the luckless individual – usually a school administrator – stuck at the podium reading the questions that I was determined to interrupt.

Heather Seggel’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.

Some people may be born to misandry, but I’ve always been happiest when I have some male energy in my life, my only rule being pants of all parties remaining on at all times. Guys are cat-like in their independence and long silences and more likely than the women I know (as opposed to Women in General) to obsessively quote from The Simpsons at any opportunity. I recall a dead-end gig from years back and a coworker who I was slowly getting to know; the day I said, “That’ll learn him to bust my tomater,” and he laughed, boom: Friends. So it took a little doing for me to want to pulp the whole lousy lot of them into manburger. And it happened because of handymen.

Here’s everything you need to know about mobile homes: They are compact, affordable housing and likely to play a bigger part in our collective future as the population ages and people have less to live on. The newer ones are well-designed and pretty luxe, though sometimes made with dodgy chemicals (looking at you, FEMA). But the old ones, oh my. As they fall into disrepair, trailers built before their components were standardized are impossible to fix. Home Depot doesn’t carry lilliputian doorknobs from 1962, or pentagonal screen doors with rollers made of unicorn hooves. NOTHING about them is easy or makes any sense. And that’s where I lived for almost a decade—in sheer impossibility.

I moved from one trailer to another within the same park because the landlord was a guy with a reputation for making fast, thorough repairs. The park staff didn’t do a great job on the unit my dad and I were in before, and as he got sicker I couldn’t take care of him AND fix everything myself, or finish the repairs left half undone in the worst way possible. When the kitchen sink was fixed the pipes weren’t reconnected afterward; I was blithely washing dishes and flooding our cabinets and floor with dirty dishwater.

This new guy used a local company that was supposed to be hot stuff, so even though my dad died a week before our move date I elected to go for it, thinking I could at least grieve in peace. Famous last words.

Morgan Leigh Davies’ previous work for The Toast can be found here.

Recently, I slept on the ground for the first time in maybe ten years, and I didn’t do it in a campground in the middle of the wilderness but instead on a small strip of grass in-between a busy street and the San Diego Convention Center, under a fleece blanket with someone I had met around six hours before.

“Well, that moved fast,” she said, as we settled in for the night, peering down at the row of other nerds sleeping – or trying to sleep – packed into the small space like sardines. One or another of our large group had been in line since nine-thirty that morning, so we got to sleep on grass. Less dedicated – or, you might say, less insane – people, who had gotten there at any time in the day before nine PM, when the line was capped, mostly wound up on concrete.

When we finally stumbled into Hall H – the Convention Center’s largest venue, which according to the Convention Center’s website holds 6,700 people – the next morning, the staff waving us in cheered encouragingly, as though we had undergone some test of endurance. I suppose this is true, if you consider the number of stories that went around that day about people vomiting in line, or the fact that we were mostly getting by on protein bars and adrenaline. Still, the entire thing seemed surreal: we had, collectively, waited in line for a total of twenty-four hours in order to sit in a large dark room, watch movie trailers, and listen to famous people talk.

The day was characterized by varying states of delirium, extreme boredom, and intense discomfort. But we didn’t really care about any of that: we just needed to make it to 5:30, when the Marvel Studios panel – the biggest ticket event of the weekend and the real reason we had slept outside overnight in the middle of a major city – would start.

They were late. Everybody started getting restless. “We want Marvel, we want Marvel,” one of the sections at the back started chanting. The front of the room tried to do the wave. Finally, at 5:45, the lights dimmed, and all six thousand-plus people in the room started screaming so loudly you could practically feel the floor move.

“Gav this is so bonkers and it hasn’t even started yet I feel like I am in an actual cult situation,” I had tweeted at my friend only moments before.

“probably because you are in an actual cult situation,” she replied, which was true.

*