getting laid

"On pain of death," he said.

Bruce was a very literal person. If he truly meant that this experience, of peeling eggs for salad, was to be conducted so meticulously as to necessitate that the gouging of a single shard of shell into the soft flesh of the boiled white would strike a knife into the soul of the peeler, then I believed him.

But, too, Bruce hated eggs. So he might, on this rare occasion, simply have been expressing his hyperbolic disdain for the perfect bicolor conglomeration of all essential nutrients, innocuously smelling of the suggestion of sulfur.

"They all get chopped up and slathered in mayonnaise anyway," I noted. I was much more interested in the potential characteristic of the salad to contain crunchy bits of red onion and celery, which sadly had to exist in suspended contrast to miscellaneous white, squishy stuff. And then there was potato salad to be considered.

"No one else will know," agreed Bruce. "But I will."

"That's a horrible curse!" I exclaimed, but I didn't really feel as frightened as I made myself out to be. Maybe I could learn to control this much feigned terror at other times, and by omission or osmosis become a much calmer individual.

But I, too, was somewhat literal. I did, thus, think it unconscionable that someone could be so doomed to complete and everlasting knowledge of the number of facets belonging to infinite and myriad egg-white prisms.

"Sometimes," said Bruce, "I imagine how my muscles must look, inside my arms. Dented and dilapidated."

"I thought they repaired themselves. I thought that was what muscles were supposed to do."

Bruce raised one index finger and pressed it to the flat of the middle knuckle of the other, conducting a slow-motion procession of what in any other universe would have merited a crack. But Bruce didn't want it to, because that would mean that his body was engaging in a Natural Process.

Bruce couldn't stand natural processes. Bruce defied them in any way he could contrive.

And the eggs, of course, once peeled and chopped, would not repair themselves. Deviled eggs, paradoxically, hid many more sins.

"Why don't you just slice the eggs, and eat them with salt?"

And pepper, black or red, or sriracha sauce; sugar, if you were feeling that bizarre. Eggs' divinity lay in the fact that they were bland. Could people possess this same power?

"The slicer wires are dull."

"So the mayonnaise is the operative ingredient," I mused. The mayonnaise, as with devilry, served to hide the sins of the fingers and the pointers and the farmer and the mum, all.

"On pain of death," admitted Bruce. He nodded solemnly and tapped the round end of the egg once, twice, three times on the counter. The formica responded with a dull, unsatisfying buzz.