The Vending Machine

It was a painfully hot Saturday afternoon when Alan happened upon the vending machine. It was painfully hot because Alan was outside, in the sun, instead of somewhere cool and dark with an icy glass of soda. Alan wished he had a soda. Even one of those sickly sweet store brands would do. The real question, Alan said to himself, is why he was here.

As far back as the history of man extends, great thinkers have wrestled and argued with this problem. To Alan, these great thinkers were a bunch of mouldy potatoes. ‘Utterly useless,’ as his girlfriend would say. ‘Complete bollocks,’ she would continue. ‘Look at you, sitting there with your greasy fingers and fat bottom, looking at me all quizzical like. I don’t even know why I bother coming over when you’re just going to –’

The answer, of course, was that Alan was here because Melanie had put him out here.

Melanie was a woman of significant needs. Mostly, she needed Alan. She needed Alan to shape up, of course. What kind of girl had a slightly rotund boyfriend anyway? All the best looking girls had a boy with chiselled features and slabs of muscle. It’s true – she’d read it in Best Girls Weekly. ‘Alan,’ she would sigh, looking at him despondently, ‘don’t you think you ought to be like one of this lot?’ And then she would gesture vaguely at one of those male models one sees on the telly with an overdeveloped chest.

Alan would remark about someone compensating for something somewhere and then as Melanie glared at him, he would retreat meekly. At times, Melanie would cry. In the first stage, she would be a hiccupy sort of weeper, where words would get trapped in her throat. ‘Don’t you love me?’ she would stammer, ‘Don’t you care –‘

Then the second stage would set upon her suddenly, and she would dissolve into a puddle of tears and tissue paper and incoherent rages and refuse to be comforted. Alan’s bedroom would be her refuge. Alan, bewildered, would attempt to communicate. Of course he loved her. Of course he cared. He would say these things to her prostrate body, swaddled in the sheets, and she would roll around in response, her golden hair vibrating gently in time to her sobbing.

When Alan leaves, the door will inevitably be left open so that the sounds of her distress reach him.

The third stage: Alan, having dozed off on the lumpy couch, would awaken to faint noises. Melanie: a majestic yet slightly wet queen swamped in bedding and pillows, her neck held in a regal pose, would announce that she was sorry. She would be sorry for putting Alan through her moods, that she knew life was hard enough as it was, that if he could only do this one thing, this one simple thing for her, she would be eternally content, she would be ecstatic, and she knew that Alan could do it, because she loved Alan and knew Alan loved her, and wasn’t love the greatest power in the world? And her mam had always said that love could move mountains, and this were just a little molehill weren’t it?

Alan would apologize and she would swoop down like a graceful elephant and smother him with kisses and she would go into his kitchen and make pancakes for them to eat.

And then, as the aroma of maple syrup begins to curl in the air, she would announce that Alan needed to go out and get some exercise. ‘I don’t know,’ she would say, ‘just run around or something. Whatever you boys do.’

So after an hour of running up and down on a painfully hot Saturday afternoon, Alan happened upon the vending machine. His heart contracted with a sudden pang of joy, and he paused to wipe the sweat off his brow.

WISHES GRANTED, it said. DESTINIES FULFILLED!

Alan frowned. This was a non-standard vending machine in a non-standard vending machine location. It was at the side of the bloody forest trail. How did it get here, anyway? It wasn’t here… last week? Alan shrugged and prodded it with his index finger. The vending machine’s plastics had weathered in the sun, and its dramatic lettering had faded somewhat, but the colours and stars painted on it would have looked at home in a circus.

Alan put fifty cents in the slot, anyway. A can of soda rolled out, wispy vapours swirling around it. Icy cold. Perfect.

For a blissful moment, everything was right in the world.