Say
three people. Say two of them women. One gets a weekend bag and starts
to put in a toothbrush. The other wrests the weekend bag away in played-up
anger, gets out a hairbrush, and mimes to beat the first or to beat off. The third
is a man, taller than either woman and taller than either woman remembers remembers, a little soft around the
shoulders, “well five years from my last boxing match,” he says, laughing a
little, though there’s never been boxing. He works at a grocery and a
bookstore, two different stores—he is weekends at the bookstore. He switches on the radio, country soul. Both women begin to dance. One of them touches the man on the face. He touches her back on the thigh.
This transpires near a doorway though the door is closed so the electricity generated dolphin-leaps over the transom. The man withdraws his hand. He has felt the weight of what might be. The two women look at each other, electricity still passing, and darkly wish the man to be out of the room, out of the house, to “put a goddamned hamburger on a
grill or something,” says one, and when that happens, as soon as they can imagine smelling the smoke, the two look at each other across space that a moment
before was a space of blockage but is now a space of possibility and
they commence to ask questions with no answers. “Why’d you do that thing
with your eyes?” one might say. And the other one will do it again at
the same time saying “What do you mean?” or “Whatever do you mean?” And
then the first will lift a finger and the second will laugh and the
first will not anymore deny that there is anger regarding the
touching of the shoulder and the thigh. “I thought this would go like
this,” will say the second. The first will say “Eff you. Since I was sixteen I
knew that the juice would come out of the fruit this way if you know
what I mean.” The second will say “Say again.” The first will say “The juice,”
but the second will then interrupt to say “The first part I mean” and the first will say “Eff you” and the second will make to bat her eyelids, got your invitation
in the mail, and a voice on the radio will say “Baby it’s not like that.”
©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
