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I
Hate Jonathan Redhorse (# 1: His Mother's Obstetrician)
By Jonathan Redhorse
____________________
I hated the little shit the moment we did the ultrasound.
There he was on the screen, a fuzzy mishmash of molecules dancing about. My head
swam with pain and its veins throbbed in rhythmic synchronization with the
ultrasound scanner.
My wife and I were having trouble in our marriage. We were destroying
each other's nerves. I disdained the manner in which she ate her
food. Her mastication of meat created a sickening, squishy sound which made me
think she was chewing on sponges.
"Stella," I told her, "You are going to have to stop eating meat
or I'm leaving."
Stella, my wife, looked up from her meal with a perplexed mix of surprise and
anguish. Her favorite dishes included pork chops, mutton, roast beef,
ground beef, and assorted varieties of steak. She was the only woman
I'd ever known to be an outright meat enthusiast and her fork hung in the air, a
square of pinkish steak pierced on its tines.
"The table?" she asked.
"No. I mean our marriage," I replied.
"Our marriage?"
"Yes, the whole shebang. I'm outta here."
"But you haven't touched your soup," she eyed my bowl of clam chowder
with sadness, "and since when are you a vegetarian?"
"This isn't ideological," I explained, making an open-palmed,
knife-hand, gesture at her, for emphasis, "It's about the sound you make
when you chew."
"What? This?"
Squish,
squish, squish.
I shuddered and said:
"Yes, that."
"Well
that's certainly nothing I can help."
"Exactly
my point. If you can't fix it, then there's obviously no cure for it. And
frankly I don't think I can live with that."
"You've never said anything about it before. There has to be
something bigger on your mind. Is work alright?"
"I. My work's fine. No I mean, everything is fine. Great,
maybe I'd go so far as to say that. But I can't stand the way you
eat."
At that moment my pager went off. A waiter glared at me from across the room. He
was wearing a tuxedo. A cheap tuxedo. There were some stains on
it. I resisted giving him the finger and instead shook my fist. He
looked away.
"I've
gotta go," I said, looking at my watch.
"I can try to change dear. I'll try. But where am I
to get my protein? Tofu's just as squishy."
My mind's focus had switched to delivering babies. I couldn't think
about my wife chewing meat. The images contaminated each other.
"I've got to go. Is it okay if you take a taxi?" I asked
her.
"Yes, I. I suppose," she said, her steak sitting dejectedly on a bed
of lettuce.
The birth was routine. By this time births had become so habitual
that my mind often wandered away from the business at hand. I
considered the precision of the metric system. My thoughts focused
around its unpopularity in mainstream American measuring. In my
profession, centimeters, and on occasion, millimeters, were absolutely crucial. As
far as I was concerned, the metric system represented the miracle of birth.
So out popped the kid.
He didn't cry. It was eerie. The nurse assisting me said
something along the lines of, "I'll get him started." And
she made a theatrical gesture of pretending to almost drop him. Crying
marks a healthy child who can breathe and survive in the world. When
there is nothing but silence in a delivery, we're forced to take drastic
measures to ensure
that the child can cry. But this infant refused, and appeared
absolutely perturbed by the whole matter.
Meanwhile, love blossomed in a taxi cab. Stella had found herself a
real stand-up cab driver. No more would she tolerate the pretentious
musings of a scientific licensed professional. No, she would instead
settle for the gritty street smarts of a transportation licensed professional. One
might blame this on me. After all, I had been the one to place the
idea of marriage termination into her meat-chewing head. And I'd even
gone so far as to suggest she take a cab instead of mass public transportation.
But
I know this event occurred because at that moment, a woman somewhere had decided
to enter labor and subsequently deliver Jonathan Redhorse into the world.
I could've saved my marriage.
All would've been remedied. Strides were being made in the dental
field. Maybe they were making sound absorbent enamel. I
could wear earphones to the table. Something.
Jonathan, the name, loosely means:
Gift
of God.
In my later, lonely years I've interpreted it to mean:
Hellspawn.
____________________
Jonathan
Redhorse is a student at the University of Denver. His name, in certain
quarters, is synonymous with quality windshield replacement. In other regions,
he is known for his smooth handling of ice dispensers. Other than the occasional
mistaken wave he receives in public, he is not very popular and wishes to
remains this way. As such, he now scurries about disguised as a giant
semicolon to deter well-wishers, wherever they may lurk. People often
mistakenly refer to him as "Melvin" when he wears this disguise.
Please send him no postcards. Thank you.
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