Flash! Fiction 3 by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

45

The Game

I hadn't been back to the cafeteria since, but today I needed something substantial to tide me over because I had three straight exams in the afternoon.

Sitting there alone with my meatloaf and mashed potatoes, I remembered bumping into Willard just two days after we'd met. It was meatloaf then, too, though I think it was chicken or turkey meatloaf.

He had salad.

#

Willard was going on about what separated him — us, as somehow I got included — from the rest. Late lunchtime in the dining hall and the rest was a group of diehard linemen, 300-pound guards and tackles from the football team who were clearly eating from a different menu.

"Orwell, Golding, Huxley, Beckett, Kafka, Koestler, Ionesco, Sol-zhenitsyn, Borges, Camus, Miller, Sartre, Pinter — these and probably another 40 are the authors that every freshman should have read before coming to college," he said.

I didn't dare tell him that I had only heard of a couple myself. Our English teacher doubled as a PE instructor, and his repertoire was limited to a couple of works each by Shakespeare and Dickens.

Afterwards, I tried to remember some of the names so I could look them up in the library.

#