Hiking to the Observatory
“This path had better get us there. Or else.”
“Or else what?”
“Or else…or else I will…I will feed you to the zombies, I don’t know. Why can’t you just let an ‘or else’ be an ‘or else’? Use your imagination.”
“I needed to know if you had an ‘or else’ in mind, or if you were just going to come up with some lame-ass ‘feed you to the zombies’ thing. And now I know.”
“Fuck you, sir.”
“No, no, fuck you, madame.”
“Later, love.”
“Promise?”
“Oh yes. Yes yes yes. Amen.”
“And anyway I have it on excellent authority that this path will, indeed, take us directly to the observatory, where you will find such mysteries and wonders as the delineated orbit of Pluto and a bust of James Dean.”
“James Dean? Really?”
She dipped her chin and accompanied her question with a single raised eyebrow, a look that drives me mad to this day.
“Oh yes. As someone I love once said, ‘yes yes yes. Amen.’”
“There certainly is a lot of up in this hike.”
“Sure. It’s those mountain-like things we saw when we parked. Way the fuck down there? We’ve been climbing them. That explains the ‘up’.”
“Maybe we should have taken the fire road.”
“Too late to think about that now. Remember the lesson learned by Lot’s wife: look back, lose everything.”
“I’m thinking ‘everything’ is not exactly what’s at stake here. Just my thighs, the tops of which are throbbing. And my calves, which, ouch.”
“But just think – when we get home I will gently and thoroughly rub the soreness away. A hot bath, complete with bubbles, will follow. Kingly rewards, sweetest girl.”
“Bubbles, eh?”
“Bubbles.”
“Well you were right about one thing – everyone else took the fire roads. We haven’t met anyone on this path.”
“True. It’s nice to pretend that we’re alone in the middle of a great big city.”
“All alone up here. And there’s that little clump of trees. And the grass beneath looks awfully soft.”
“And green. It’s because of the rains. It rains so little here that the grass gets all happy whenever it does.”
“Is it as soft as it looks, I wonder? We should go find out. And you can rub some of the soreness out of my thighs.”
“Hmm. A field test, as it were, of the softness of the grass. Okay.”
“Zip it, you. And come here.”
“Yes ma’am!”
“Fuck you, sir.”
“No, no, fuck you.”
“Yes please.”
Nicolas Papaconstantinou
How rude! But otherwise, what a delightful vignette… I do like a look into the lives of a couple of new characters.
It feels like somebody is supposed to ask for more somewhere around now ;-) But I think this is exactly as you intended it, and as such is dandy.
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