| About the Author |
|
Enrique Diaz has been writing stories since the age of eight and currently edits Nuvein Magazine. In A Garden Of Explicit Mantras is his fifth short story in Nuvein.
|
|
Carefully, Aaron urinated into the toilet bowl, making sure that no drops fell all over the toilet seat. He’d heard some of the women complain about “men splattering their piss on the toilet seat!” and Maggie Fulton adding, “And we have to sit on it! Yeeoow!” Gina Chernin agreed by saying, “It’s disgusting the things we have to put up with because of men.” It turned into a free for all against the male animal, and shouldn’t have bothered Aaron, but a year after the incident, he still felt almost traumatized by it. He couldn’t pee standing up without thinking about it.
This morning he was especially nervous because he was meeting Eloisa for coffee and he wanted to impress her. On his way to meet her, he had to pee and had once again started thinking about what he now referred to as the “P” incident. He had not told anyone about it, but felt an urge to do so. Maybe he’d tell his best friend Toby.
After washing his hands, he stared at himself in the mirror. Nice face, he guessed. He had trouble judging human attractiveness in both men and women, especially when it came to him, but not with Eloisa. To Aaron, she was the most beautiful woman ever to come into his life. He just hoped she felt similarly about him. His blue eyes stared back at him and he pushed his golden blond hair back with his hand. He did everything he was told to maintain an attractive appearance. He worked out at the gym, and played on a local soccer team. Stepping back from the mirror, he noticed a stain on his shirt from coffee he’d spilled earlier that morning, and hoped Eloisa wouldn’t notice. She seemed so disinterested in him. Not like other women who often seemed predatory in pursuit of him. Checking his breath, he walked out of the bathroom into the coffee shop and saw that Eloisa was already there, sitting at a table, reading the newspaper.
“Hi, Eli,” he said to her as he walked to her table and sat next to her. He tried to kiss but she turned away.
“Hi Aaron,” she said, her smile showing an imperfect set of teeth. She wore a tight, black Lycra blouse which held her large, soft breasts tightly and denim hip huggers which wrapped around her ample hips, allowing a clear view of her belly button, squished into a slit by her fleshy abdomen.
“I’m glad you came Eli,” he told her, thinking about how she had been on his mind all week, making it hard to concentrate on anything else. By the end of the week he had wanted to see her so much, it hurt. “What’s new?” He asked her.
“Lots of things,” Eli responded, “bad things. The media, the government further controlling our minds.” She pointed at the newspaper, “All you have to do is read about what’s going on.”
He looked into her round, brown eyes and said, “It can’t be that bad.”
She held his look for seconds and he almost felt a positive response before she looked away.
“It is,” Eloisa continued, “from body politics to racial politics, none of us have the freedom to determine our destinies.”
She takes things too seriously, Aaron thought, saying, “You may be right, Eli. Did you order yet?”
“No.”
“What do you want? I’ll go order.”
“A cappuccino, please.”
“Good, I’ll be right back.”
He walked to the coffee counter while Eloisa went back to the looking at the newspaper. But she wasn’t reading it. Her thoughts were on Aaron and how beautiful she thought he was. To Eloisa, he was the perfect man, not only handsome, but also intelligent and thoughtful. But could he ever get to like a fat girl like her? Someone with bad teeth and such a plain face? Probably not. Still, she would enjoy his company as long he as he wanted to talk to her. He’s only interested in what I think, she thought, he’s hungry for stimulating, intellectual conversation, after all, he had all those hotties after him for when he needed romance.
“Here we are,” Aaron said, putting down two cups of hot coffee on the table.
“What did you get, Aaron?”
“Plain coffee.”
“You always get plain coffee. Don’t you ever feel adventurous enough to order something else?”
“I don’t think those over-sweetened, over-marketed coffees are adventurous. I think they’re for pretentious people.”
“So you think I’m pretentious?”
“Oh no, Eli, I think you really like those coffees. You don’t order them because you want to impress, but because you really enjoy their taste.”
“You’re right,” Eli said, taking a sip of her cappuccino. He is so insightful, she thought. If only we lived in a world where advertising tells him not to love only thin, pretty girls. It would be like living in a wonderful garden, like the Garden of Eden…
Eloisa’s foot stepped on the soft green grass, under a tall, leafy, green tree, surrounded by flowers of all colors, walking towards Aaron, who lay leisurely, nude, on the grass under the tree. She lay, nude also, next to him, and tenderly kissed his lips. He wrapped his arms around her, pressing her breasts against his, delicately, lovingly. Then a large leaf fell off the tree onto the couple. Aaron picked it up and noticed that there was writing and an image on it. The leaf said: “pretty woman” and had an image of a tall, thin, large breasted woman with a beautiful, delicate face. Many other leaves began falling from the tree, lots of them identical to the first one, but others said “fat equals ugly” and had a picture of Eloisa on them.
Suddenly, the entire garden around them teemed with messages. There were messages on the petals of the multi-colored flowers, and even on the blades of grass, repeating messages like incessant mantras, explicitly demanding attention. “Rich People are Hard-Working, Smart, and Good”, “Poor People are Lazy, Stupid, and Bad”, “Sex is Bad”, “War is Good”, “Eat, Eat, Eat”, “Fat Equals Ugly”, “Ignorance is Bliss”, “Intelligent People are Nerds”, “Intelligence is Pretentious”, “Men are Pigs”, “Women are Whores”, and many more…
“Eli!” Aaron raised his voice, “can you hear me?”
She came out of her thoughts, “Yes, I’m sorry… I was thinking.”
“You haven’t heard a word I said.”
“No, sorry, what did you say?”
“Nothing important,” Aaron told her, as two young women walked in with T-Shirts sporting popular brand-names, and a man who appeared to be homeless was ushered out by the coffee shop staff. Twenty minutes had passed, and the coffee shop had a policy of allowing customers to sit in the shop for only twenty minutes. “I guess we’d better go.”
“Yeah,” Eloisa said, “we can talk again next week.”
“OK, maybe,” Aaron said, as they walked outside, past the “NO LOITERING” sign. “Although we didn’t get to talk much today. You were somewhere else, Eli.”
“Yeah, I know, I’m sorry. I had a lot on my mind.”
“Like what?”
“Well, we have a problem at work. Some of the men there are pigs these days.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s nothing big, but it’s so disgusting. We hadn’t really noticed it until Maggie Fulton and Gina Chernin brought it up because it’s also happening in their department. Isn’t that the department where you work, Aaron?”
“Yes. I work with Maggie and Gina.”
“Well, the girls from my department had lunch with them last week and they were talking about men and Maggie and Gina mentioned that in their staff bathroom some men splatter urine on the toilet seat and leave the drops for others to sit on. Well, after she said it, we noticed some of the men in our department do the same.”
“Wow,” Aaron said, as they reached Eloisa’s car. She got in, said goodbye and drove away.
He slowly walked to his own car thinking that he would never again pee standing up. Not only would he think about the “P” incident, Eloisa would now be connected to the “P”. He still liked her very much, but it might be a long time, if ever, before he again got the courage he had today of confessing his love for her. Too bad she had been distracted by something else and had not heard a word of it.
Internet
