Here is how I met the love of my life:
    I was working in agricultural norm-modelling, the dubious art of
measuring and examining thousands of, in this case, chickens in order to
draw a composite image of the true average chicken rather than
idealizing specific traits the way many agricultural scientists do.
    Anyway.
    The four of us in Intake, near-unemployable English majors all,
worked as an assembly line. Jennifer carefully inked a serial number
onto each chick. Gregory looked them over to see which of several broad
physical categories they fell into. Alba, constantly humming the latest
pop songs imported from home, would photograph the chick from two angles
for our records, and I would pop them into a tiny cage and set them on a
conveyor belt to where the real study took place. Twice a day a lab tech
would come by to pick up Alba's negatives and Gregory's handwritten
notes--this was some time ago; now of course there would be
computers--but other than that we saw only each other.
    One morning in June we were all on a break, sitting on the steps.
    Gregory, gay and eternally single on our half-liberated campus, was
complaining about the jabs he took from bigoted graduate students at his
other job, in the library; "they're studying Tchaikovsky or Copland, or
Whitman or Hemingway, and yet they give me shit. They treat me like
shit." I could tell Jen was about to ask about Hemingway and I nudged
her gently to stop her, taking care not to burn her with my cigarette as
I did so.
    While I took successively less-satisfying drags on the Marlboro Greg
went on, detailing not for the first time the boyfriend or ex-boyfriend 
he had in California who never wrote and never called and for whom
Gregory waited only because he barely had a choice, but who kissed him
in a way that he worried nobody else ever would. The 'kissing' may have
been metonymy; Alba, I knew, was uncomfortable to hear him talk about
even something that innocuous, though as we were stuck with each other
she would never say so.
    Jennifer eventually spoke up, whistling faintly through a chipped
front tooth she didn't remember getting at a party the previous weekend.
She counselled patience and cynicism, the latter of which I think she
was just discovering herself. "You never get what you expect," she said;
"better to expect nothing and leave open the chance of getting what you
wanted." Gregory fixed us each with a sad stare as she said this,
finally settling back on me.

    As we all left for our dorms a few hours later, Jennifer grabbed my
sleeve and said low, "You have to explain it to me. Is it The Old Man
And The Sea? What?" we had barely talked alone before and it quickly
became predictably, cheerfully flirtatious. Her hands were covered in
yellow fuzz from her work, tiny feathers, and when she touched my shirt
it left a visible light mark.
    But the longer I spend with Jennifer now--and at this point it'll be
the Reaper that breaks us up, not wanderlust or miserliness or the cute
neighbor or whatever other mistakes one of us nearly made once upon a
time--the more I regret the decision I made that day not to go over and
give Gregory the kiss I think he wanted. Whenever he got sad I saw
something in him that reminded me of myself, something I never went out
of my way to look for, and so never saw, in my fellow men. I had
consciously admitted it to myself once before, shortly after I met him,
and on the steps finishing my smoke I thought, you know, maybe.
    Gregory didn't like smokers, though, so perhaps I flatter myself.
His beloved cad on the west coast smoked, and if there was anything he
seemed inclined not to forgive, it was that.

written for Raphael Blue while standing up 8/4/03

The first line wasn't supposed to be clever. By the time I got to the end it had become ambiguous, or at least had started seeming like it was meant to be ambiguous; oh well. As you can see, I had one kind of story in my head at first -- the implausible stuff with chickens -- and got sidetracked by more serious, even sappy, ideas. I also tried to do something with the time-flow that may or may not have worked; the sense of the story being told from a much later vantage point comes through at first, but the quick jump to "now Jen and I have been together for decades" and them BACK to the frame of the original story may not make work.

I also neglected to ever make it clear the narrator was male. Hm. I like a lot of the details in this one, but the more I think about it, the less the thing as a whole holds up. That's been happening recently.

Jennifer's chipped tooth was from an abandoned notion I had about her being a nude model who was on the verge of giving it up. She was going to nibble on someone's shoulder with the chipped tooth at the end.

I wish I had not used the phrase "kissed him in a way that [...] no one else ever would". I was conscious of it at the time, and tried to inject the fact that it was a corny thing to say into the story itself, but there still seems like a better way to handle that bit.

I get awkward when someone's word list has such strong ideas about where it wants me to go. Even after I subverted two of the phrases from their (I assume) intended meanings it still ended up being a relationship story.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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