3 Microscopic Fictions
by Jonathan Ullyot
On Specificity and Robert Ludlum
For a man, sleeping with a woman is satisfying. But sleeping with a beautiful woman is even more satisfying. Most satisfying of all, however, is killing a man in Marseille after he makes you a passport, then stealing a boat, kidnapping a tourist, later getting shot while saving her life, and then sleeping with that beautiful woman.
Divorce
During their divorce trial he asked her why she had kept so many secrets and lovers from him. She told him that she needed secrets and lovers, because he had bored her and she never felt like she was alive. He told her that she should have tried to talk to him instead of living out a statistic and blaming him for her unhappiness. She told him that they were both statistics—that he had worked too much, that they were the kind of couple who had taken the dullest path and believed in a vague idea of love that had turned brown like an apricot you keep in your bag too long. He told her that she had never been this lucid when they were married, but that he thought their love had been less like a soft apricot and more like one of those stupid theories by Plato some failed grad student taught them in their first year of college that had no application to the real world. She told him that she was lucid and even happy now because she had thrown the apricot away and nothing smelled like rotten fruit anymore. He told her that he was happy too—that he had started rereading Plato and realized it was quite beautiful as long as one thought of it as poetry.
Adding Value
Watching pornography is not as good as having sex. Having sex is not as good as watching pornography while having sex. Watching pornography while having sex is not as good as taping oneself having sex watching pornography and then projecting that beside the pornographic image while still having sex.
Jonathan Ullyot has been published in many small journals and wrote the feature film Crime Fiction. He is finishing a dissertation at the University of Chicago on failure.