Make Someone's Life A Really Short Story

THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF LITTLE WHITE LIES CAN MAIM AND EVEN KILL - Jonathan Swift

Here's something a little off-key for a super-serious blog: 

TINY BITT: KEPT IT SHORT

Exactly.  We were making out absolutely fine, love nibbles on the first date, little cheeky brushes of teeth against the sweeter part of my neck.  Suddenly, before finishing, the bitch latched a rash munch on my lower lip.  

Tiny masticated me.  

What a sweetheart.  Platinum blonde.  Still lived in an old Ford Falcon.  "Daddy bought it in the junkyard!  Engine parts too!  Ain't it beautiful?"

"Definitely".  

Most of us men know how it goes: Never disagree with the target until ready to terminate contact.  

Then the chomp: 

"Oww...!" I could hardly swallow after her three-and-a-half teeth of love got my upper lip.    

"Like it?" 

"I, I guess.  Yeah sure.  I do, I guess."  

"Well, that's my name!" 

"What?"

"Sounds like a joke!  I'm Tiny.  Tiny Bitt!"  

This is where you laugh through sudden and abject pain, pain as delivered by an expert.  Not that my near-severed upper lip wasn't throbbing. The gnash of love often makes even the best among the lowlifes of the blinking yellow-light jungle gag a little because, you know, blood in the mouth is like speaking with sanguinary.  Not that a love-nothing was not right enough.  No pain, no gain, correct?

Even all gain can result in all pain.  Remember that next time you hit one of the clubs.  Not the ones with blinking neon; the clubs inside the bar.  

But who am I to think about this...what?  Why do such thoughts and ponderous psychic lurkings infect the tongue of man? Think of me, another skillful if too-deep diver as an idea stuck on the roof of a mouth come itching into my brainiac of a cranium.  Especially when ripped into several pieces into the kind of rumination my doctorate in physiology trained me to grasp.  OK. I'm stoned.  Hell, man, what's that supposed to even mean? 

Like, ooh la lah, dude.  

Back on point: She bit me.  

"Like that?  There's more where that came from..." 

"I guess I can get into a little ache this time know what I mean?" 

Wham!  Another bite!  This time an unsolicited exclamation, instinctual, erupted.  "Man!  That turned me inside-out!  Could you, like, stop it?"

Another crunch.  Like I'm meat.  Chewable. I know, I know.  We live in a consumer society and shit.  

Where the devil did the place I found Tiny Bitt come in from?  Why the hell does a club, if I can be witty a second, that bites brandish a mirror ball rolling clockwise like a dangling star hung on the underside of a crazy sidewalk overhang?  Next door, typically, a one-buck theater broadcasted an ancient movie: The Deerhunter.  Only the "n" was missing all in lights: DEERHU TER.  

And it was subtitled.  For Italians.  

DEERHU TER.  The second "E" prior to the missing "N" is probably still blinking like a fritzed out bulb of Morse Code from the wrong side of the wrong side of a very wrong capital.    

Ford Falcon.  Steely carapace. Rusty.  Like living in a bad egg.  Living?  Tiny Bitt, The Autobiography Of A Person Dying For A Life.    

In the car, as she held a tissue to my face, she told me a little about herself.  Tiny Bitt likes driving around.  "I plow all over town," she told me.  I almost began to feel shock through the numbness of my vocal machine.  Nah. No assumptions allowed here. Just the facts.  Holy Mother of God: Tiny then bit it again.  

And I? I practically leapt out of that box of hers.  A smelly place, backseat filled with musty books, one about mystery religions.  What?  A critical look at Eliot Ness?  Sam Spade?  Hopper's "Nighthawks"?  Those aren't freakin' religions.  Those are mysteries and coy portraits of the love of mysteries.  

Tiny: "Wanna joint?" Hollered out the front window of that flippin' Falcon I'd just cut loose of. Looking back in angst, I note it: It's that auto where the green smoke-infested driver-side window is only capable of rolling up halfway.  You've seen a million of them.  Hell.  I've even copped looks at a few outside the last boat show.  Which, coupled with possible lockjaw, and now, as I ponder Sunday night, has me fully enlightened about what duct tape and a scrap of frosted plastic sheeting means to a hottie with only three extant teeth.  In the back of her mouth.  And "forever tits": all hers.  

Haute.  It's haute. No, really.  High culture.  You have to realize the angle here: one man's physiological doctorate is another one's Ford Falcon.  

Now, class.  I suggest we all begin our essay assignments on the littoral aspects of how salt and sea advance the ability of the Mediterranean sun worshiper to fight off infection.  Advice?  Stay away from Ford Falcon pickups or the temptation to label those times a first date.  Which is no way to begin or end every little thing.  

Ouch!  Maybe it'll be Webster's buzzword of the year--like the infamous Gen Z stare.  I wanna go on, but nope, no can do.  

Have a nice day.

Illustration: David Swain