Entry #42 The Big One

If you're the editor of an online publication that features flash fiction or poetry, you've probably already read this...it's the new flood item.  For the rest of you, though - a new story:

Me and D by Colin Winnette

            I decided to ask That Desert Island Question if she saw our open relationship going anywhere less open than just ‘open.’  She said I could tie her up, and then she couldn’t go anywhere.  She said I could cast her in cement and stare at her all day long and read books with my back propped against her.  That Desert Island Question said I would have to come up with some way of keeping the pigeons off, or else some way of cleaning her that wouldn’t wear away at the cement.  That Desert Island Question said I could wrap her in barbed wire and put a sneeze guard around her head like a visor.  I would need to keep her inside, she said, elevated on a milk crate to keep the insects at bay.  She said I should trace an oval around the base of the crate or pedestal or wooden box, in diatomaceous earth.  She said she would help me go and get it, but then she might escape. 

            “Oh,” I realized, “you’re making fun of me.”

            “I’m not,” That Desert Island Question told me, “but, really, what are you thinking, asking a silly thing like that?”

            Then we had phone sex and I felt so false afterward that I said,

            “You should dream of me because I’m going to dream of you.”  It was somehow easier to sleep then, knowing I could have thought of nothing sillier, or less amenable, to say.

***

I've been thinking about the author series I wrote a little while ago (stories from which will be featured this January at ), and a conversation Damon and I had about the authors we might not want to be left alone with.  There are many, I'm sure, but Bernhard just occurred to me.  He often writes about groups of three, in which he is somehow always in the middle talent/intelligence-wise.  The Loser, Wittgenstein's Nephew, Old Masters, The Cheap Eaters (if you count the whole of the The Cheap Eaters as a singular entity, which they more or less are for the first two-thirds of the book).  So, if I were left alone with Bernhard, I think it likely that he would cast me in the role of inferior, whereas if there was a third, I might have a shot at winding up on top...depending, of course, on who the third was.  I'm writing this because I haven't the faintest clue where to start as far as writing a story about it goes...so maybe I'll leave it at this...and curse it's always being Sunday when it occurs to me to mail these belated packages/gifts.