CHAPTER ONE
“Fewer.”
Her eyes followed mine up to the TV then back. “Huh?”
“He said 'less players'. It’s fewer.” I turned a little to look at her straight on.
A stare has never been blanker. “What?”
“If you can count something, then you use fewer. Otherwise less.”
She studied the scene on the TV for moment. Sportscasters in a booth. She spoke without looking back at me.
“Money” she said softly.
My turn to give her an empty look.
“You can count money but, like, I have less money now that I just paid for this drink.”
“You can count dollars, I said, ten dollars, twenty dollars… And when you spend some you have fewer of them. Now if all the rupees on earth should somehow vanish,” I spread the fingers of my two hands in a poof gesture, “you could say there were fewer monies in the world--”
“Well I guess it’s a common mistake” she cut me off. “Why nit-pick?”
“It’s just not that hard to get it right, but they all do that nowadays, politicians, talk show hosts, even best-selling authors - you’d think they’d have a better ear for the language.” I shrugged. I wasn't even sure of my premise, but now I was all-in.
The barman slid her drink across to her. She took a small sip and looked back towards the group she‘d come in with.
“Nits are the little, tiny eggs of head lice” I said, “They lay hundreds of them and they stick to the hair shafts down near the scalp. So someone would have to sort through another’s hair - strand by strand practically - and grab the nits and slide them off one at a time…”
I mimicked the gesture pinching thumbnail to index.
“…you can see chimpanzees doing it for each other in the zoo. Nit-picking. We forget about how it used to be. People, poor people rich people, had lice. In their hair, in their pillows and beds and clothes… That’s where lousy came from, you know? Full of lice. We, our culture, today, we forget these things, the origins…”
Her hand was moving up to her scalp but stopped suddenly when I glanced over at her. I smiled. This was going well, I thought.
She was much more interesting to look at up close, long black hair like a Cherokee squaw in an old childhood picture book and a nose I might be tempted to call equine, but softer.
Yes, I liked her nose. It was not the norm of the day, re-sculpted in some clinic from the same picture-perfect insipid model and I liked her better for that. That was a good sign. It probably meant the rest of her was natural too. Her lips were a pulpy pout of gloss with — at this very moment — more than a hint of disgust. That was fine.
“Gross.”
She turned away and rejoined her crowd and I elbowed back in to the bar. The barman, who had been watching this exchange looked me up and down.
“Dude?”
“You have no idea.”
Interesting. I submitted this once before and was likened unto the writing of David Foster Wallace.
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