Tandem

[This blog is dedicated to examining the absurd and anti-humanistic behaviors so often seen in advertisements and then extrapolating those behaviors out into short fictions. If we get a glimpse of the lives of the characters in commercials beyond the context of that serendipitous fifteen seconds of comic antics and blissful resolutions--if we take the behaviors evinced by such characters to their logical conclusions--we start to imagine the kinds of hellish lives that such people would have to lead. Each blog posting will start with a link to a commercial--most likely a television commercial, or perhaps a radio spot or a print ad. Watch/listen http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifthttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifo/look at the ad first, and then reahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifd the flash fiction that follows. I'll try to get a new fiction up every week, and I encourage you to send in links to ads that you want to see taken to their terrible, necessary conclusions. Maybe the shitty ad will be the next one I skewer.]

[I can't get the insert link option to work on this. I promise that I will endeavor to save you from the tedium of having to cut and paste the link into a new browser window next time around.]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L00p05j0pUk

Twenty years on. He sat in his chair, she lay strewn over the sofa. They watched television for some hours. They laughed sometimes, sometimes looked at one another, but most of these looks were one-sided: he caught her cheek, she took in his blankness, and when they actually made eye contact there was that embarrassing . Very often they sighed, expressing a discontentment so vague as to defy any further definition.


During a commercial with gratingly loud music, he hit the mute button. He looked over at her. She looked back. An energy transferred between them—each could feel it behind his or her eyes, a scratchy heat, and see it in the taut skin and compressed brow of the other.

With no further prompting, they surged up off their respective perches and rushed into the dark flat heat of the garage.

She beat him to it; she was the one who opened the freezer door and ripped two plastic bags scummed in frost from the diminishing pile. He grabbed one of the bags out of her hands; he tore open the outer storage bag and tore at the inner grocery bag that was wrapped in turn around the cardboard carton. Just opening the inner wrapper was enough to release some few scant bits of scent, trapped within for the eighteen years since the sandwich had been discontinued and then preserved against entropy to the best of the couple's ability. Through the scents of ice and plastic they breathed in the scents of frozen bacon and the cold-dulled scent of medium Swiss cheese still with some iota of sharpness in the aroma.

“Two-thousand and thirteen,” he and she said in unison. “It was a very good year.” They looked at each other, smiled.

They ran back into the kitchen, she sliding on the wooden floors in her socked feet and he slapping at the wooden floors with his bare, flat, fat feet.

They watched the sandwiches spin slowly in the yellow light of the operating microwave. The scents of reheating meat and that distinct, half-bitter odor of melting ice filled the kitchen. The couple inhaled deeply, smiled, exhaled, said “The speed of sound” in unison.

The microwave dinged done, and they got at their sandwiches like wolves at a ewe. They took one bite and then their heads reared back in an approximation of orgasm. Around the wilted reheated frozen eighteen-year-old lettuce, they spoke.

“Butterfly tongues! Dogs dreaming! An almond is not a nut!” they cried, the pitches of their two voices buzzing against each other.

They laughed, looked away, looked at each other, looked away, gulped another bite. “Kneecap! Pink ink! The first Miss America pageant was held in Atlantic City in 1921!”

Exhausted from the ecstasy, they fell back against the counter, laughing in breathless pants. It was just like it had been in the gold old days, for a moment; when everyone else in the park would stop and stare, when everyone else in the restaurant would stop and stare, when their synchronicity had been to the envy, amazement, or disgust of all.

They caught their breath and finished their unfrozen sandwiches in relative silence. Once he blatted out with a “Ferns have no flowers!” but it was no use; she looked at him and smiled a pitying smile, and he looked away and stuffed the rest of the sandwich into his mouth.

He went back to his chair, she to her couch. He turned the sound back on on the T.V.

There was little else to say.