By Prospero Dae
You are kind and will sympathize…
Maybe it was his erratic heartbeat, but he had a knack for getting into trouble. Here’s what I mean. Yesterday he made a snap decision—take the elevator or the stairs. Lazily, he chose the former. The darned elevator got stuck between floors. Claustrophobic, he began to fidget. Out of the breast pocket of his jacket he withdrew a picture: his mother. His hand shook. The picture dropped. The chap sharing the elevator was a bouncer in a club. He was annoyed. That’s when ‘Fidgety’ got punched in the nose.
Now you get the picture.
Some people are just so pick-on-able.
Appalling isn’t it? But this is where you come in. You, kind, sympathetic, pick up the photograph for him…
This is where I come in? But I don’t come in here. The meretricious assumption that my reading of this event puts me in the elevator with it, is all too postmodern for my liking. And since I am not in the elevator with Fidgety and the bouncer, I can’t possibly retrieve the picture of his mamma for him, your flattery about my supposed benevolent temperament notwithstanding.
But you, the reader, have been cast by a maniacal cranberry-loving author/director to play a teensy-weensy part.
When the cranberries come down the shute in the Ocean Spray factory, some bounce and some do not. The non-bouncing ones are made into Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice. (A lovely potion, especially tonic for those with gall bladder problems.) To us who are tender hearted but nevertheless cynical cranberry lovers… that’s life.
Ah. Yes, now I get the picture. So much hangs on emphasis.
From the Lorrie Moore playbook.
Now I get the picture. What a “punch” line.
It’s a hard sell.
I loved it, and I didn’t it was a hard sell, either. Well done!
Thank you, Christina.