A Little Ball Of Everything ( Archived) (4)

was a brilliant idea. But it didn’t last. A firefly zooming off the lawn; a spark, here, and then gone. He tried to catch it; bright sand, it slipped through his hands.
“Are you hungry?” She asked, poking her head through the study door. “Dinner’s almost ready.”
His response was angry, but she didn’t deserve that. It was his fault or nobody’s.
“Sorry.” He said, and meant it. “What are you cooking?”
“Meatloaf.” She replied. “With carrots, potatoes, and salad.”
Oh, yes. He was hungry. There was a fire, somewhere in his brain; but it needed fuel. Maybe, if he stoked it, the idea would come back. Maybe it would stay.
“Did you want a drink with dinner?”
“No!” He cried, afraid it would extinguish the fire, and then, softer, “Maybe later.”
“Well, I’m going to open a bottle of wine.” She said. “Come to the table. Maybe with a bite, you’ll change your mind.”
What’s on the table? Was it a small slice of infinity, perhaps? Nevertheless, everything on the table could be named, Bread, meat, vegetables; words describing things. There were no words for the idea. It was dangerous. He left his keyboard, the idea unfinished; staggered from his study under the weight of the idea, into the dining room. Here was the table with…what was it she said?
Meatloaf; it was food for thought. Did ideas fit into food groups? He didn’t know. The idea may have been dessert for all he could tell. Heavy with sugar, and yet light like a meringue.
“Rosalie called.” She told him while he chewed. “She wants to know if she can bring a friend along for Christmas dinner.”
Who was Rosalie? Oh. She was their daughter, who was away at college. A friend?
“What kind of friend?” He said, suspicious. A boyfriend? He wondered. How quickly life moves past us sometimes. He remembered changing her diapers like it was, well…yesterday. Yesterday? That was a category. Time was a food group wasn’t it? No, that wasn’t right…
“His name is Steve.” She said. “I told her it would be fine. Someone to watch TV with you…you know…football.”
“Yeah. Okay, fine.” He said; his mind was drifting. Drifting…As he finished up eating the idea came again. There was a shadow on it this time. He loved football. But it wouldn’t do to watch it with a stranger. Unknown allegiances; no guarantee they would not be hostile to his team, to the idea of a Super bowl shot this year.
“Thanks for dinner.” He said, and poured himself a glass of wine, there would be no danger of it putting out the idea this time. The fire was much hotter, even with the shadow of Christmas dinner casting a pall over his mind.
“Wait.” She protested, as he rose from his chair, intending to head back to the study. “Don’t you want dessert?”
“What?” He said, his mind torn from the dessert forming in his mind, the baked Alaska of ideas; a contradiction, the impossibility that, nevertheless, was alive.
“I baked a pie.” She said.
“Mmm.” He wanted something sweet, all of a sudden. The air was sour in his mind, there was too much room, and it was filled to capacity.
“Sure. What kind of pie?”
The Virgin Mary, in a crust; held to her son’s fate by the power of faith. It must be. The metaphors were running amok in his mind, and he was sacrificing his sanity to hold on to the immensity of the idea.
“Mince-meat pie with graham cracker crust.” She replied. A fitting metaphor for what was in his mind, and he remembered a joke he once heard and it summed up the idea quite well.
Question: What did the Buddhist monk order on his hot dog? Answer: A little of everything.
He ate his pie, and went back to his study to write a little ball of everything, trapping infinity onto a white page, using words like manacles to hold a muse hostage to understanding. He looked at the result, and deemed it good. Or as good as it could be. Art was never finished, merely abandoned. He was a writer. He took inspiration, nailed it to a cross, and then left it there to die a slow death.

I like pie .. except when I'm thinking about it, then I like thinking about pie.

Wow