Flash (Non) Fiction

I am taking a tax prep course this year in order to increase my financial literacy (and eventually take over the world). The first class session was today, and I'm pretty sure I've just located the IRS Publication 17 equivalent of the flash fiction novel commonly attributed to Ernest Hemingway -- For sale: Baby shoes, never worn:

Speaks volumes in just a few words.

The Meat Deal and Meeting Mr. Wonderful

Lately, my journeys home from the studio at the end of the day have been... interesting. Here are two true-life stories that I wish I was creative enough to make up:

The Meat Deal:

This is the result of a Google image search for "Trunk full of meat." This isn't the trunk that I experienced, but it shares a few striking, meaty similarities.  Source: asiawheeling.com

There's no great way to set the stage for this one. I was walking in the Powderhorn neighborhood of Minneapolis, and drew near a man who was leaning down to furtively speak with the driver of a  parked minivan. The Minivan Man, noticing me, looked startled and abruptly tore ass away into the night -- with literal screeching tires. The Sidewalk Man straightened up, walked up the driveway to his own car, and slammed the trunk closed -- not before I had time to see that the trunk of his car was packed with meats of various shapes and sizes. The Sidewalk Man scowled at me.

So, I can only conclude that I interrupted some sort of high-stakes meat deal. Which is like a drug deal, only with meat. 

Meeting Mr. Wonderful:

For our purposes, when you imagine Mr. Wonderful, you can imagine this guy. (Source unknown, my apologies.)

Mr. Wonderful boarded the bus outside of the Downtown Library. He immediately and loudly began telling the woman sitting near him about how he'd just proposed marriage to a girl via Facebook, and that she'd said yes. Now he had to go buy a ring in the morning. He also bragged about belonging to the church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and about being Nearly (but not quite) featured as "The Guy in the Speedo" in a VH1 photo recap of some music festival. 

He exchanged phone numbers with the woman he'd been talking to, she disembarked, and he immediately began talking to me. It was a little spectacular to see a guy so actively demanding the attention of every female in his general vicinity. I never felt so lucky to be able to deliver the conversation-ending "I'm an artist. I make art." when asked what I do for a living. Those were some of the most entertainingly stilted, awkward pauses of my life. Then he shook my hand and got off the bus.

But wait a minute, isn't he engaged?

A Summer Anecdote to Share with Loved Ones

This story has some major metaphoric parallels with the way my whole summer has gone (Except for the parts of it that were good.) I'll leave you to wonder what those parallels could possibly even be! Here goes:

It happened in the park on a hot July day. I was leaning toward a public drinking fountain when a man in an inexplicable sweatsuit ran up to me shouting, “Don’t drink from that fountain! People pee in that fountain!” Then he stared at me intently. After a moment of confused silence, I said “Oh, ok.”

Next, the man said, “You know, I just saved your life by warning you about that pee fountain. Now you owe me a minute of your time to conversate with me.”

At this point I turned around and walked away quickly, because things were getting weird.

—

The conclusion of this story probably would’ve been more interesting if I’d stuck it out and actually conversated with that wonderful, considerate, dressed-like-it-was-winter-for-some-reason man. But now we'll never know.

Oh well. Next time.