Flash Lit 8: Straight and Narrow

“A man was born.  He died.”

“That’s not how you tell a story!!!” Jessie protested, wagging a finger that still had orange marker on it despite her grandfather’s best efforts.  Truth be told, the tooth brushing had been a little sketchy, too, but bedtime was clearly not in his skill set.  He was all right at the daytime stuff, coloring and building with blocks and going to the park to watch Jessie swoop over the undulations of the slide over and over.  He liked the light.  He liked the clear definitions of things.  That was why he taught geometry.

“It only takes two points to define a story line,” he said.  “A beginning, and an end.”

“Grandpa!  I don’t want a story about lines.  What did the man do after he was born?”

“What do you think he did?”

Jessie considered, fingers now twirling a lock of her hair, her nose slightly scrunched up as she squinted to see this imaginary man.  “He had pizza for breakfast, except that it kept flopping around until he folded the corners in.  He put on a funny hat and went for a walk in the ocean and there were creatures in the ocean.”

Maybe he was getting the hang of this after all.  “And then what?”

“He found a guitar with one string that wobbled back and forth but he could hardly see it because the string was so skinny and it made a twanging noise like the radio.”  Jessie yawned.  “And then he died.”

He smoothed the covers over Jessie and Jessie’s bear and Jessie’s octopus.  He kissed her slightly sticky cheek, once with his lips, once with a brush of his nose like a bunny, and once with his eyelashes like a butterfly as she told him.

Downstairs in the cone of light from the overhead lamp, he flipped through the students’ papers, their carefully constructed triangles, parallel lines, and dimensionless points.  His red pencil traced through the line of logic in their proofs, sharp, narrow, direct, and straight.

And yet.  Somewhere between the two points of every line, he thought there might just be a squiggle.