First Morning Coffee After Math Final Day, short short story by Jim Meirose
Jim Meirose’s short work has appeared in numerous venues. His published books include Understanding Franklin Thompson (JEF pubs (2018)), Sunday Dinner With Father Dwyer(Scarlet Leaf Press (2018)), and Le Overgivers au Club de la Résurrection
(Adelaide Books (2018)). www.jimmeirose.com.
Mouse, here’s something to consider, now that the big math final’s behind you; you ought to be thanking God you don’t need to be bothered with horridly torturous logically intertangled mathematical word problems no more no more. You know? You ought to be glad as shit. Yah as shit; sheeeeit! I sip.
This is so, Rat. Like, here’s one so wild I had to carve it out on my thigh to be able to throw it in your face when we got together after the horrible day was done; here—let me drop my pants and read to you, thusly; here’s the kind of brainpoop I don’t got to tussle wit’ no mo’; Hey good looking nimble jointed sub-cretinistic Summa-cum-Francine has a spiny sticky time wasting silly-spinner with countless over even more so multiplicable quasi-segmented silly sections which we take it’s because the officially sanctioned test manual verifies that exactly three but no less than five its most remote and thus most frigid and far-out rocky dead sections are completely unalike and totally separate but actually pseudo-combinatorially invalid and illogical but perfectly formed textbook classic examples of perfect sections that at the same time are equal and unequal in area from every known similarly cut out sections sentiently having dominion over their own granted and certified wasteland-like killing field acrewide land plots, all totally lifeless and barren, as shown. The sections are loudly labeled with fat blasts of letterhorn soundies tones of which all differ from the bureau of standards pedestaled classically perfect standard samples tagged off sequentially with the letters G, I, and P. The nearest lady of the night just pardoned from prison and whose grabbed off her striding from the big house main exitgate is commanded to spin the spinner three times and to write down the chosen letter each time, with the handicap given that this is to be done both with no hands and with no paper and pencil or nothing like that at all while looking up up and away elsewhere perhaps at some random bouncyballed clusters of beautifully windblown balloons. If this is done properly as she was commanded, the arrow is equally likely to land on any one of the three letters for any given spin. If not, she is to be marched back through the prison gate immediately and begin serving the first of ten consecutive sentences of life in solitary confinement without possibility of parole, unless she can recite, with no prior study, the probability that she writes the word PIG? chord endpoints P G I correctly without prejudice without saying in exasperation, How the hell am I supposed to be able to do that?
That it Mousie? That all? Or is that just half and you ran out of thigh?
Hah! Out of thigh—indeed. Rat, Rat, Rat—I swear to God, I don’t think there’s been a richer lode of enharmonic relationships any place between Gesualdo and Wagner. Do you?
Hell no. As a matter of fact, while you were reading off that big slice of words I was thinking that, looked at rationally, and looking at as we are, over these multiple fast-cooling sixteen ounce cheaper than shit fastfoodjoint morningcoffees, the whole thing starts to gel together into something like a total counter-exposition—you know; like a secondary exposition of a musical fugue with the subject and answer usually in reverse order, but in this case mashed up into the verbal prosidy-dactycal space.
Hey, said the waitress swishing up—what are you two mental buffoons planning on ordering further sometime within the next ten moon-cycles?
I—we, ut oh we I don’t think are quite sure, Graceahol.
That’s not my name bub. Try Ginny.
Okay Ginny. But we don’t want no more. As in Sir Thomas.
At that gales of laughter from the imaginary studio audience boiled roiling upward around and down in scarlet bloody billows equaling the volume of all the world’s blood-test tubes in just a five minute window all gathered into a single black cast iron hundred-ton stadium-sized single-use bucket and splashed over Mouse Rat and Ginny by Mister Jolly Green big-guy yah the big-guy all come to his night job after the green valley his day job’s within is daily locked tight-shut from twilight to twidark, whose laughter turns out to be more effective than that of a dozen fully staffed beered-up jolly cheap crime scene cleanup toxi-slopcrews mopsloshing disinfecting and dumpsterizing the resultant overly-giddy display of pseudo-hilarity, returning the earlier calm Mouse and Rat pre-dawn coffee sipping scenario where Ginny the blaze waitress is still waiting to know if they need more of her pricetagged consumables which she can provide them if the menu so prescribes, or if they just want the whitewad of a price-slip to be slid out before them, which when paid will signal them to promptly clear their present space; the answer comes; came; was; will be, and—circling and circling and settling down by some force called gravity, down soft dead into the center of the now, which is; is; is, this; more coffee please, Ginny. More coffee café joe hot-juice wakey-wakey drinque, or what you want to call it please big-gingal, as long as it is what we want which was plainly told to you out back in the middle of this at last complete, over the top, top top top, superhot dump of a prose-flow.
© Jim Meirose