Fiction: Ten minutes ago, you lost all hope

Ten minutes ago, you lost all hope.

You ate my socks, and then, to get the foot-stink out of your aperture, you gnawed off my candles. You’ve done things that only Charlie Manson or Charlie Rose would do. You’ve refused invitations to talk shows! You, who’s wanted so long to be asked about yourself! It’s as if you don’t even want that “Oh Henry” I bought just because it has your name, “ry,” on it. And there you go, bingeing on candy canes and ginger ale, when you know that just rots your fingernails and pulls the dent out of your dimple. You’ve become the Rumpelstiltskin of the fairy tale anthology that is my Facebook friends list.

I’ve owned so many antique carbines that dripped rust, grain by flakey grain, like the decrepit farmhouse faucets I had to use as a child. And now you’re reminding me of all of these things and more. You’re the 30-cent can of pineapple rings at the Aldi’s of my afternoon. Your despair smells like rotten pairs of pears, of tears in holy baby tears, or marked up, multicolored argyle socks of the imagination. Your wounded water buffalo of an ego was not hacked to death on Coppola’s filmstock; the King Kong of your enfeebled imagination retains its inner-ankle grip on the Empire State Building of our friendship. The ball-and-paddle game of our afternoon together has veered so far off a stability point that I’m running to make the next paddle-whack.

Now I see that I’ve stirred you to action, that you’re no longer luxuriating in the infinitesimals of my metaphor calculus. You’ve risen from your fabric-encrusted davenport and seized the pencil of your ventricular abdication. Like the nurse who advised you to take a half an hour apart the three lozenges she gave you–so as to avoid upsetting your stomach—I too have distorted the reality in which you live, in which we live, to further my own ends. “I don’t pay attention to you that much,” you finally retorted. “You never know. It might be the hardest thing I ever took,” I answered back, where “it” referred to the camaraderie I’d offered.

“I’m full of words of wisdom today,” you bragged, and I let you go toward the rainbow of macular degeneration. Now I too have lost all hope of our friendship surviving. You can take back your mix tapes (which were on CDs but which you called “tapes,” anyway).

“Man, we’re about to leave; I was about to look up ‘shenanigans,’” you appended.

Fare thee well, my former friend.