Joel Golby is a man from the Internet who writes tiny little love stories over on his hipster-dude tumblr. They’re funny and rude and sometimes gross, and for Valentine’s Day he let a bunch of nerds submit guest stories. I wrote three.
Pea & Ham
The scab on her lip was close to lift-off, curling at the sides, wings enough to cast a shadow. He watched, silently repulsed, as spoon after careful spoon was tipped gently past her pavement-kissed lips. A sliver of pea washed ashore on the dead crust. It hung there, quivering, gross.
“Maybe people will think I had cornflakes a week ago and ate them kind of messily,” he supposed she mumbled, through her accident strewn face. “Or maybe I just look like I have mouth herpes?”
The scab fell into the pea & ham, landing with barely a ripple. It floated there like a crouton.
Glass Slipper
Cars screeched on Theobalds Road, double-deckers honked and swerved. A young dude flailed apologetically while darting between the vehicles, scrabbling desperately for his lost quarry: a plastic banana-holder, now snapped, still salvageable.
She stood at the bus stop watching the scene, a single unbruised banana nestled gently in her coat pocket. She wondered if it would fit. It was February 12th.
She figured: bananas bend.
Torso
“KIRKAM AND WESHAM. NEXT STOP IS KIRKHAM AND WESHAM,” the announcer said. Our young protagonist checked her deceivingly slow watch, saw a missed train and a cold night in a grim Northern train station roll out like a rug in her immediate future.
The thin haggard man across the aisle sat in an oversized sport coat, hunched like an owl, holding in his hand a single drooped and rapidly browning daffodil. He handed it to her, publicly adjusted the heft of his balls. She would never correct the time.
