A THING by TIM FRANK
Health and Happiness
The slasher flick I downloaded yesterday is running laps around my local park in flip-flops and a gas mask.
Neighbourhood crackheads are knitting socks for their dealers and milking cows for loose change.
There’s a filling in my back tooth that has paid over £60 million to travel to Mars in a drunken lifeboat. In a former life I had a toothbrush that worked.
I’m reading a book backwards and the spoilers are making me queasy. The pages are made of wrought iron fences and the typeface is full of hippies sinking pitchers of German beer.
I want a doormat for Christmas. Looks aren’t that important to me.
If I have children, I’ll name them after homeopathic remedies and when they’re old enough I’ll explain to them why they have no basis in scientific fact.
I live in a quiet area, except for the bongo-playing Uber driver squatting above me, and the Palestinians and Israelis who lob moisturiser at each other from across the street, lubricating the pavements.
My wife is getting more and more beautiful. She’s had six facelifts and is beginning to look like a firefighter or a fireplace or an autumn breeze. Either way, I’m broke.
My TV is too small, it can’t be seen from space. I keep losing the remote but because it’s been baptised, I pray briefly and find it within an hour. Every time I jab a button, I ascend to another level of heaven where angels listen to vinyl and gaze at their Morrissey posters.
I can’t cook, bake, fry, barbecue, or grill but my microwave is highly advanced—it can make infertile women pregnant and heal cancer within twenty seconds if you set it to defrost.
I’m happy with that.
Tim Frank’s short stories have been published in Bourbon Penn, Eunoia Review, Menacing Hedge, Maudlin House and elsewhere. He is the associate fiction editor for Able Muse Literary Journal.