“Man, I hate waiting,” he mumbled, scuffing his shoe on the porch-step.
“Yeah,” agreed his bemused friend, who swung in the hammock behind him and puffed on a homemade cigar.
“You’re one to talk, Dave,” he scowled. “Mr. white-picket-fence, happily married with four kids.”
Dave stretched and breathed out a sloppy smoke-ring.
“Five, actually. We just found out.”
“What? Good grief, man!”
Dave laughed at his perplexed friend’s response.
“But, Kevan, I do understand your dilemma. It’s like hoping for a date with a lovely girl and she's not calling you back,” Dave produced his philosophy more sloppily than his smoke-rings. “But you still think she might, so you spend your whole day on pins and needles.”
“Screw dating,” Kevan interjected. “The chase is getting old. I just want a wife.”
“And then she never calls,” Dave proceeded with his monologue, dismissing his friend's. He was too deep in thought by now to turn back. “But you think - maybe she forgot... or maybe something happened to her!”
“I know she's out there,” Kevan carried on quietly to himself. The second-hand cigar smoke was making him a little light-headed.
“But deep inside,” Dave continued in rhythm, gazing dimly at the bug-zapper above his head. “You think – I freak her out... she's gun shy.”
“And she is on her way,” Kevan added with a glimmer of hope, paying no mind to Dave’s growing story. Dave took a long silent drag of his cigar, allowing his celibate friend to share the next step in his own thought-process. “But maybe she has a limp.”
Dave sat up slowly and his face grew solemn.
“And then you hunt her down and kill her,” he whispered in a trance, as if his own narration was coming to life before his smokey eyes. “Carefully cutting her into tiny pieces and disposing of them.”
Unaware of the sudden twist in his friend’s plot, Kevan stood to declare, “Maybe she just stopped for ice cream! You know, that impulse that comes when you pass a Haagen Dazs stand... because she’s taking a long time in getting here.”
He sighed and kicked the porch-step pathetically, returning from his wild fantasy. He looked up to where Dave sat with the cigar ashing between shaky fingers.
“And then you wait by the phone,” Dave concluded with a raspy voice. “Nervous that someone found some of those pieces...”
He then turned to Kevan and shrugged, “And it's the same old thing all over again.”
Kevan stared with confusion at his comatose friend.
“Wow... And you’re the married one. I don’t understand.”
“The world is a twisted place, my friend,” Dave exclaimed with a smile. “Let's go inside. I gotta read some Jules Verne to the kids before they go to sleep. They have cooler dreams when I do that.”
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