You ask the physicist to explain the Big Bang. With diagrams please so you can point and pontificate on forthwith and hereafter. But aren’t you the king of doctors, he replies. You use the initials, but history is not a science. True science trumps the humanities on any death bed you say as he says this shouldn’t hurt for long and swabs up your nostril into the cortex. Last time, the doctor spread your knees with hers and glovelessly grabbed the back of your neck and smothered your fear with mountainous cleavage. Happiness is the best deodorant.
Make sure to give us five stars, the physicist’s receptionist text arrives as Fernando the Uber mimes the perfect arm curl between gear shifts. Set. Repetition. Dumbbell size. You must always keep the elbow in front of the hip. You love the phonetics of elbow and hip. Keep driving Fernando. Keep talking doctor.
You ask if Monday is a holiday. It is here but not there. But there is only 10 minutes up the coast. Another town, another saint, another sausage sauce for the same sausage. They crush their grapes barefoot. We use paddles. You took the less expensive and that has made all the difference. Will you stay long? Fernando asks, pecking Use Me into the Spotify search window on the dashboard. Can you drive closer along the sea? Clearly, I can drive you anywhere, but there will be more traffic. Traffic is an illusion, you tell Fernando. So is gas and money and time he tells you and takes a right into the rising sun.
99% of all lyrics are false. He asks, can you be that 1%? Do that thing you do. The nose bridge retracts into the depressor muscle, your eyes close, and your throat opens involuntarily. Fernando rolls down your window. The joggers and cyclists and dog-walkers and yogis and disco-dancers doing that heels-in-hands smirky walk of shame with gulls fighting over chips shaking palms and street sweepers and shadow-boxers and churchgoers bible clutching best dresses draping all hear the clearest Big Bang report that ever rocked this coast.
Let’s drive as long as allowed.
David Morgan O’Connor is from a small village on Lake Huron. After many nomadic years, he is based in Albuquerque, where a novel and MFA progresses. His writing has appeared in; Barcelona Metropolitan, Collective Exiles, Across the Margin, Headland, Cecile’s Writers, Bohemia, Beechwood, Fiction Magazine, After the Pause, The Great American Lit Mag (Pushcart nomination) , The New Quarterly and The Guardian. Tweeting @dmoconnorwrites.