OTTAWA — Local woman Fran Hedge has decided not to roll the dice and wait for N95 masks to be back in stock at the pharmacy. “The government flip-flopped and told us to make our own masks,” said Mrs. Hedge via Zoom. Asked whether she thought her new mask would protect her from coronavirus as effectively as an N95 mask, Mrs. Hedge said, “I don’t know, but when I’m outside walking and people see me coming, they cross the street now.”
Your place is a pigsty and I caught you drinking out of a bowl earlier. I caught you drinking out of a bowl for want of a clean cup or mug. I caught you drinking your organic, fair-trade, flat white coffee out of a bowl. And I caught you eating your filet mignon off the back of a brown cardboard box, a soggy cardboard box with a shipping label from Amazon.com. For want of a clean plate, you placed your filet mignon right on top of the Amazon Prime sticker, and ate your steak right off the back of that box. And I caught you eating your Tiramisu coffee cake, lovingly homemade at the local bakery, off the back of a groundhog. Off the back of a live groundhog, no less. Off the back of a live groundhog that emerged from the pile of discarded paper towels and rags and cardboard boxes and empty soup cans and Coke cans and bottles and disposable plastic microwave meal bowls, all piled up in the corner on the floor in your kitchen, long since having overflown their individual recycling bins, themselves long since submerged by the sea of trash and recyclables atop them. I saw a groundhog come out of that pile; it came out of the pile, languidly, and appeared to yawn. Then it scratched its ear a few times with its rear leg. It sauntered up to you, apparently no worries in the world, and its little nose began sniffing and its little whiskers began twitching, and it walked up to you as you held the Tiramisu carton in your hands and looked around the kitchen for a clean plate. But there was nary a clean plate anywhere to be seen, for the kitchen sink overflowed with dirty plates with dried-on, crusted-on food, some of it sprouting those little forests of mold that emit a gray-green gossamer cloud when you disturb them. I saw that groundhog saunter up to you and then offer up its back, and I saw you crouch down and delicately place a piece of Tiramisu on it. You left the kitchen and walked toward your couch; you paused, and looked back over your shoulder, and the groundhog, who hadn’t yet moved, looked to you. You nodded, and the groundhog trotted after you. You resumed walking toward your couch and plopped yourself down amidst the crumpled T-shirts with the yellow pit stains and the torn chocolate bar wrappers that you swept to the floor with the back of your hand as you plopped down on your couch. The little guy trotted up to the couch and stopped. He stopped at the base of the couch and almost tripped over a banana peel, black and yellow and desiccated, which he momentarily looked down at and sniffed with his little blueberry nose. He looked up at you with his knowing brown hazelnut eyes, so dark and glossy and reflective that you can see your reflection in them. You gave him a nod, a little micro-nod, and he crouched low on his hind legs, and, like a slinky played in reverse, slowly coiled himself up and, with the speed of molasses, sprung up onto your couch and nestled into a little ball beside you, careful not to spill the Tiramisu. And you grabbed a cane that was leaning against your couch, and you used it to hook the television remote, which was on the broad wooden coffee table in front of you, just out of reach of your hand. You hooked the television remote using the handle of the wooden cane, a relic from your grandfather’s day that was signed by none other than Winston Churchill for some reason; you used the handle of the wooden cane to hook the television remote and drag it toward you. You dragged it to the edge of the coffee table, but not carefully enough, for the television remote tumbled to the rug on the floor underneath the coffee table. The groundhog looked to you with his dark knowing eyes, and you looked to him, and he waited for the nod, but you didn’t nod. Instead, you stretched out your leg, and you stretched out your foot, and you leaned with your leg as far as your leg could lean, and you reached for the television remote on the floor on the rug underneath your coffee table. You managed to make just enough contact with your pinky toe, your little pinky piglet toe, and dragged the remote toward you, and it swept aside the banana peel and the wrappers and what appeared to be a soft red jujube with hairs and lint stuck to it. Once the television remote was at the base of the couch you carefully leaned forward, mindful not to cause a wave in the couch from the decompressing suspension of the springs beneath the plush brown seat cushions, a wave that could topple your Tiramisu and send it tumbling to rest on the sofa amongst the stained T-shirts and torn magazines and the detritus of chips and popcorn of days past. You carefully picked up the remote and turned on your television. You opened the Netflix app, and scrolled through the list of titles until you come across the one you were looking for: Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. You took a little spoonful of Tiramisu off the back of the groundhog, careful not to scratch his back with the spoon, because when you do, he wiggles and arches his back and sticks out his little shoulder blades because he seems to love his back scratched so much. You scrolled to the fourth episode of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, and started it. You saw Marie Kondo all happy and bubbly and enthusiastic about tidying up. You looked to the groundhog and he looked to you with those knowing hazelnut eyes and you both laughed at her.
Copyright CWG Kemp, 2019
Men around the world frequently ask, “How do I get Kit Harington’s hair?” Fortunately, all is explained in this convenient, four-step how-to guide:
Now, a caveat. Consider again Step 3: Apply the exact hair product(s) that Kit Harington actually uses. This is easily the most problematic step, for the exact nature of Kit Harington’s hair product mix is veiled in a shocking amount of secrecy and is subject to endless — and often contradictory — rumor and speculation in the media. We suggest that you type “How to get Kit Harington’s hair” into Google, and read one of the sundry articles on the topic. Most of these dubious “articles” are certain to discuss various brands of hair cremes, hair pastes, hair gels, hair putties, hair sprays, hair relaxers, hair revitalizers, hair fibers, and hair pomades, that Kit Harington is theorized to currently use and/or have used in the past. If the article speaks authoritatively on the matter, you should exercise a healthy degree of skepticism — for Kit Harington’s hair product mix is a secret so carefully guarded that it rivals only two other existing secrets: the series finale of HBO’s Game of Thrones, and one existing secret: the KFC spice mix. Many have tried and failed to learn the secret of Kit Harington’s hair products. Many women, for instance, have attempted to seduce him and dupe him into revealing the secret of his legendary coif, under the false pretense that he is either:
A) Handsome;
B) Rich;
C) Famous; or
D) A really nice guy
Needless to say, option D is the phoniest pretense of them all, and even Kit Harington is likely to suspect that something is awry if a potential romantic interest expresses his or her affection for him based on his nice-guyness. As far as celebrities go, Kit Harington is undoubtedly not the most handsome, nor the most rich, nor the most famous, nor the nicest; nevertheless, hapless hair-diggers often erroneously think that he is susceptible to flattery in these regards.
To recap: many men and/or women have tried to date Kit Harington, under patently false pretenses, in order to possess the secret of his hair product mix. And all, hitherto, have failed.
Kit Harington keeps the secret of his hair products so closely guarded that not even his most trusted family members know the truth. Even his very own mother is compelled to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) each and every time she visits his mansion, in the unlikely event that she stumbles upon his hair products and/or any revealing tangential information, such as receipts for hair products or orders thereof (likely made through a series of anonymous shell companies). Even nation-states desire to possess the secret behind Kit Harington’s hair. For example, one Russian secret agent allegedly seduced Kit Harington and applied truth serum (actually a kind of barbiturate) in order to pry the secret from his mind, but to no avail — for Kit Harington has trained with the Navy Seals on how to resist interrogation, hypnosis, and truth serum, during a months-long conduct after capture course with the elite special operations unit. He is so good at safeguarding classified information, it turns out, that the U.S. government decided to entrust him with the nation’s nuclear launch codes. And even then, it is questionable whether, during a geopolitical escalation, Kit Harington will turn over the coveted launch codes to the Commander and Chief — that’s just how good he is at keeping secrets.
Now, none of this prevents men’s magazines from wildly and inappropriately speculating about which products Kit Harington actually applies to his hair. It is hypothesized in one such magazine article that he uses pelican oil — a kind of pink slime that is extracted by crushing live pelicans in bespoke pelican oil extractors. This is probably nonsense, but the article nevertheless led to a temporary global demand spike and subsequent shortage and run on pelican oil. Another magazine speculated that Kit Harington uses margarine in his hair, but only the kind of margarine that is precariously high in trans-fats; this article resulted in a temporary spike in Uruguay’s gross domestic product until the FDA banned imports of their famed trans-fatty butter substitute.
Meanwhile, what is Taylor Lautner doing? He is desperately trying to get in touch with Kit Harington to inform him of what awaits him after the series finale of GoT — namely gloom and obscurity. Mr. Lautner contends that Kit Harington is the rightful heir to the coveted throne of “Flavour of the decade of the 2010s”, and once GoT has ended, he will likely end up in sundry made-in-Eastern-Europe Netflix productions, relegated to middling supporting roles that cater to his great hair. Mr. Lautner does not wish Kit Harington to suffer from the same post-fame melancholy that befell him — that, or he’s using this blatantly false pretense to win Kit Harington’s trust, find the secret to his famed locks, appropriate his hair products, apply them to his own hair, and pull a John Travoltaesque career reincarnation. But Kit Harington knows that his would-be enemies lurk at every corner, and will protect, with his very life if necessary, the secret of his famous coif, even if a buff Taylor Lautner corners him in his mansion and threatens the use of force and/or any other available means of coercion to extract the secret of those lustrous flowing locks. In such a situation, Kit Harington is likely to dupe Taylor Lautner by sending him to his decoy stash of ersatz hair products, while the former escapes to his safe room — picture a heavily-fortified vault with rows and rows and rows and rows of A______ brand hair products, as far as the eye can see, like Cerci’s massive stockpile of wildfire in Season 2, Episode 5 of GoT.
Copyright CWG Kemp, 2019
I recently read a book entitled Quiet: The Power of Introverts in A World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain. Quiet is a book written for introverts, by an introvert. It is a soft-spoken and sententious diatribe about the putative moral supremacy of introverts in a world that (justifiably!) favors extroverts.
The first problem with this book (aside from the fact that it was written by an introvert) is that the font is so small I could scarcely read it. The entire book is written in the kind of small print that is normally reserved for the voluminous stipulations that accompany anti-anxiety medications (i.e., introvert pills), ones written on those little folded up, tissue-paper-thin pamphlets, that nobody but an introvert bothers to read. A fellow professional book reviewer (an introvert, sadly) recommended that I use a magnifying glass to read Quiet, but I scoffed at the suggestion because magnifying glasses are the instruments of geeks and nerds (i.e., introverts), and I have a reputation as an extrovert to maintain. I said so as I consumed my rare and bloody T-bone steak, one with a side of potatoes and a prodigious serving of ice-cold beer in an enormous and ornate pewter beer stein (leaded, of course) whose lid opens with the push of a little button at the top of the handle.
“It’s as if the author were whispering”, I said to my sheepish colleague, a bolus of steak in my mouth. I pointed at the book with my two-pronged, Bill-the-Butcher-style fork. “Speak up, introvert!” I said to the book, and my introverted colleague blushed and apologized and genuflected, and then crouched and retreated toward the door, genuflecting and apologizing all the way, until he was out in the hallway, out of sight and out of mind, where, no doubt, he fumbled, hands shaking, with a prescription pill bottle to retrieve a blue Ativan tablet or two, as he rebuked and excoriated himself for his magnifying glass suggestion. And rightfully so — it was an embarrassing remark. I don’t trust introverts, nor do I particularly like them. Nevertheless, I will proceed with an unabashedly non-tendentious review of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in A World That Can’t Stop Talking.
Now, on to the book review. As I couldn’t read the book given its minuscule fluxion font, I decided to procure the audiobook version. But again, the narrator — a professional voice actor, the back of the box proclaims — spoke so softly that I could scarcely hear him! I even played the audiobook through my 15,000 watt floor-to-ceiling speakers that I usually reserve to play Ride the Lightning to lull myself to sleep after a long (but never long enough) day of socializing, networking, brainstorming, and debating, with my fellow Harvard Business School alumni (all extroverts). Nonetheless, I could scarcely hear the narrator — even after boosting the signal through my enormous THX 5.1 amplifier; you know, the model that runs on diesel power and has dual-exhaust pipes and generates enough bass to crack the foundation of mindfulness meditation studio.
At this point, I was at a loss, so I decided to have an introvert read the book to me; I thought this to be a good idea, seeing as introverts are capable of discerning small fonts, their eyes being particularly attuned to discriminating tiny letters and numbers after years of solitary stamp and coin collecting. Thus, I recalled my introverted colleague. Before he started reading, I told him, “When you read, do so with conviction and purpose! And no stuttering!”
He was so nervous at the prospect of reading the entire book to me that he vomited (luckily, I had a bucket ready for the occasion). His hands shook so violently, in fact, that had I placed a carton of fresh heavy cream in them, the liquid would have swiftly solidified into a slab of solid butter. “Stop shaking!” I told him, but this just seemed to exacerbate his condition.
At this point the open book was flapping and fluttering with so much force that the very pages began to tear away from their binding and the volume itself began to disintegrate! Evidently, a runaway train of harmonic motion was transpiring before my very eyes — like in that old Technicolor video of the Tacoma Narrows bridge (a.k.a., “Gallopin’ Gertie”) as it rolls back and forth, accumulating momentum, until its very superstructure shatters and the bridge collapses. I realized that the amount of energy that my introverted colleague was transferring into the volume of Quiet was about to reach a potentially-lethal tipping point, so I cut my losses and bolted for the exit. I scarcely escaped the room when there was an ear-shattering and earth-shaking explosion; a blast of dust and detritus blew out from the doorway in a horizontal mushroom cloud formation.
At my colleague’s funeral, I spoke of his final moments. “He was a quiet man, an introvert. But died a very, very, very, very…loud…death. An extrovert’s death.”
His parents were very proud.
Copyright CWG Kemp, 2019
Flash Fiction City 