Two friends, one clever and the other dull-witted, find themselves in a heated dispute, during the course of which the clever one says various unkind things to his counterpart who, too dull-witted to devise an appropriate response on such short notice but vaguely aware, in his own dull-witted way, of a certain imperative to do so, replies:

“You can’t

even imagine
what nasty things

I’d say to you
if only I could
think of them.”

Being clever, of course, the clever one has no trouble whatsoever imagining all manner of nasty things the dull-witted one might, under these circumstances, say to him, some of which he finds so hurtful that, lacking a commensurate capacity for forgiveness, he soon finds himself forced to put an end to their friendship once and for all.

Eli S. Evans

has been seasoning the internet with his work since 2001. His chapbook A Partial List of Things I Thought Might Kill Me Before I Started Taking a Daily Dose of Benzodiazepines was published in August 2020 by Analog Submission Press, and all copies have since been sold or incinerated. His small book of small stories from 2021, Obscure & Irregular, remains available from Moon Rabbit Books & Ephemera and other online retail behemoths.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ The Father, The Son, and the Jigglers, a 499-word story by Eli S. Evans in Drunk Monkeys (21 September 2020)

⚡ Fourteen Stories Submitted as Poems by Mr. Evans in E•ratio Postmodern Poetry (date unknown); note from MacQ publisher Clare MacQueen: “I laughed out loud numerous times while reading these.”