There are a dozen bagels strewn across the tracks leading through a subway station.
What if some man lost his mind over a distressing phone call and, in a fit of rage, hurled them off the platform?
What if that distressing phone call was from an irate wife, her voice becoming more nasal the more incensed she became, complaining that bagels were not what she wanted, but rather croissants?
What if the wife was so preoccupied with bread products because she was attempting, unconsciously to drive her relationship to a breaking point, a result of her guilty personality ( highly correlated with her sky blue eyes), to atone for the on-going affair she has been having with the neighbor next door?
What if the next door neighbor, bored to death, the former co-owner of a bagel store taken from him forcibly by his ex-wife (the other co-owner) only engaged in this affair to get back at his ex-wife, posting videos of himself fucking his neighbor after she sent him pictures of herself naked in the Caribbean with a new Don Juan?
What if, spurred on by his overwhelming hatred of his ex-wife, the neighbor went back to his bagel shop surreptitiously and filled a batch of bagels with a heavy, explosive diarrhea-inducing laxative?
What?
Would it be such a bad thing that these bagels ended up strewn across the tracks of a metro station?
posted by ferret at 9:49 pm
There’s a truth about history that only lowly listings editors know. They know history in all of its elliptical savagery. They know the way the great dreams and aspirations of men and women are so easily reduced to a blurb of 50 words or less. Rich, pleonastic adjectives overflowing with life are squeezed until they become sparse and dessicated. Fertile, courageous verbs are left neutered and sickly, only perfunctorily conveying their messages. Style is sacrificed to the great gods of formatting and orthology. Even legendary figures and the most proper of proper nouns must struggle for so much as a one-word epithet. In the end, all you are and all you wish to be is reduced to time, place and cost. History leaves you nothing else. Period.
posted by ferret at 6:29 pm
[Shanghai, night – Ferret is walking down the dark alley that connects his compound to the main road. There’s a Figure walking towards him in the shadows. He’s dressed nicely in a collared shirt and slacks with a light scarf slung around his neck. Ferret can’t make out his face so well, but he’s sure he’s a foreigner. Suddenly, in the dark light he appears to be Ferret‘s friend, Alex, a foreigner who recently moved into his alley. He calls to him as they pass each other.]
Ferret
Alex!
[The Figure stops, undoes his earplugs and turns to face Ferret.]
Figure
Yes?
[It’s not Alex.]
Ferret
Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you looked like someone I know. Somebody named Alex.
Figure
But my name is Alex.
Ferret
[very embarrassed]
It’s another Alex. Sorry.
[Ferret scuttles away, embarrassed.]
posted by ferret at 11:52 am
posted by ferret at 8:52 pm
