Shiraz drunk off of my ass. But not before sending a parable to the woman I'm dating now, to teach her a fucking lesson she desperately needs to learn.
***
She had a lollipop head; an enormous, perfectly spherical head that sat atop a limber, slim body with lanky, spindly arms and legs. But it wasn’t important, her tremendously disproportionate head that which maintained its own field of gravity. Important was the cruel, tragic deficiency that she carried within that gigantic head: she could not hold his hand. His hands were softer than they should be. Veiny, to be sure, but softer than that of other men of his age. Not because he hadn’t abused them by laying brickwork – though he hadn’t – or because he had always made sure to open beer bottles with his shirt – though he had – but because he moisturized, daily, religiously, because that is what you do when you’re a vain motherfucker. “Hold my hand,” he asked, feeling his own brow turning upward, knowing his eyes turn into the large half-moon eyes of a small puppy wallowing over an empty food dish. “No! What’s the rush?” She loved puppies. She loved old dogs who maintained a small size that which still categorized them as puppies, so long as they fit into her purse. That was her gauge: The Puppy-To-Purse Gauge. She ironically named her puppies diametrically opposite to their traits. A black dog would be named “Whitey.” A silent dog would be “Yappy.” A dog with equilateral triangular markings would be named “Isosceles Triangle Markings Dog.” She would name her puppies in the same manner as prison inmates nickname each other, like how the 300lbs motherfucker would inevitably be nicked, “Tiny.” He loved large dogs; large, brown dogs with a looming presence that couldn’t be ignored. Dogs so large that their feces looked like that of a human. Dogs so enormous that they even sat on a toilet, read a newspaper, flushed. Dogs that would kiss back. “Kiss me,” he asked, in a vein of desperation he never knew existed, to kiss her small mouth, with her sharp lips, that could never, ever wrap themselves around an adult-sized sandwich. “No! What’s the rush?” He gave up. He acquiesced. What’s the rush, he finally agreed, told himself. There’s all the time in the world. The next day the Great Zombie Attack of 2010 struck. She died immediately, distracted by needing to remark “Ewww” at this corpse and “Ewww” at that corpse. A tattered, one-armed zombie had devoured her small, lollipop-stem of a neck in one thorough bite, severing her lollipop head from the rest of her lollipop body as a pack of cute zombie puppies chewed at her sharp, pointy lips. He survived and found her body, stood over it and remarked, “That’s the rush, motherfucker!” | 
