Short shorts, but the motion of the ocean...
(and the depth...)
A Man Desperately in Love
A man offended all the trees with his desperation. Oak, Elm, it didn’t matter to him. He brought heart-shaped boxes full of colorful birds to every tree in the woods. They turned their backs to him, not wanting to be regarded like any other tree. This went on for a long time.
Suddenly, the man stopped coming to the woods. Though not in love with him, the trees started to wonder if maybe he had finally hung himself.
Later that night, they crowded before his sliding glass door. He was slow dancing with an artificial tree that was about his height. A big, pre-tied red ribbon adorned the tree’s top. Pleased with the audience he caught glimpses of as he twirled, the man reached his hand further down the back of his artificial tree and squeezed.
The Butcher
There was a butcher with a terrible secret: his lover was a pig. This secret was terrible both in that it was the sort of information that might damage a person’s standing within a community; and terrible in that the village where the butcher lived and worked already had suspicions. He tried to talk his customers into buying turkey sausage rather than pork. He trembled when he packaged ribs. He wept at the sight of hog jowls.
Despite suspicions, the villagers had enough decency to let the butcher be. No one asked questions, no one watched him walk home in the evenings to see who or what would greet him at the door with a kiss. Besides, his meats were fantastic, his prices more than reasonable. There was no need to spoil a good thing.
The Great Chef
The great chef, the head chef, had never tasted a pear. It was one of many things he’d never tasted that he bragged about to the other cooks in the hectic kitchen of the upscale restaurant. “Peas, calamari, poppy seed bagels,” he laughed. “To think: they let me play with these knives when there’s so much I don’t know.” Ah, but he looked good in his white garb—that could not be debated. He had just the right amount of body fat to suggest credibility, taste, but not so much as to cause worry that he fell prone to excess, a most dissatisfactory characteristic. His skin was naturally dark and so carried connotations of a summer on a beach which both relaxed management and customers and added to his already considerably strong credibility, as though he were travelled, well experienced in diverse cuisine, or that he was exotic, non-Anglo, and therefore had more sense of flavor.
If ever one cook thought of challenging him to his rank in the kitchen, one need only catch her reflection in the silver, suspended pot and then look at him; she would then understand why it is best for her to hide her face behind the steam rising from the lobster pot.