ANOTHER GUNPOWDER BARREL

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

According to a notice taped to the front door of the Scrape Street home, the Lansings have cancelled their renovation as a result of their impending divorce, a circumstance which may permit Mrs. Lansing—a sitcom actress turned novelist who is perhaps best known for her collaboration with the dance musician Blockade on his bestselling memoir Blockade’d—to complete one of her pet projects, the refurbishment of the community garden and especially the white wooden gazebo that sits dead center inside it. Mr. Lansing, a lawyer, has never stepped foot in the garden and does not intend to do so, nor has he read either Blockade’d or his wife’s two novels, Down the Stairs Too Slowly and What Is Heard But Not Understood. He is, however, a fan of the show in which she starred as a child, Factory Reset, in which she played a young girl who, as a result of winning a national contest, became the CEO of a floundering office-supply company. “You might even call me a fanboy,” he was fond of saying at neighborhood parties. The show was popular for six years, during which time her character evolved from a precocious twelve-year-old to a teenage pinup, a process she said in interviews “would have been painful and confusing even if it hadn’t been played out in public. My character had a catch phrase on the show: ‘Another gunpowder barrel,’ which she said any time she sensed trouble. It’s a contraction of an old saying: ‘He who sits on a gunpowder barrel with a lighted cigar in his mouth must not complain when the bad thing happens.’ I must have said that a hundred times, turned toward the camera and shrugging. But the show was the bad thing happening. Can you imagine what it’s like to be fifteen, sixteen, and be perceived as a sex symbol by men twice your age, who are watching the show with their small children?” Her husband did not see that interview, as it was in support of her first novel.