Flash! Fiction by Peter McMillan - HTML preview
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60
The coffee was cold. One side of the glass coffee table was littered with letters meticulously torn from the folded newspaper. In the midst of the abecedarian jumble was the word 'labyrinth' in the past tense—'labyrinthed.'
Two bald heads reflected the overdone fluorescent lighting. The younger wore frameless glasses, while the other, his eyes squeezed into slits when looking down at his notebook, should have.
"It's not a word, you know, but I think it should be,” said the younger one. “To labyrinth—to arrange things in a spatiotemporal puzzle so that others must figure out or stumble on the hidden meaning.
Labyrinth, labyrinthine, maybe labyrinthinely, as in 'He labyrinthinely constructed an alternative scenario—"
The older one wrote the word 'labyrinthed' and underlined it with two strokes. Looking up, his eyelids separated, and he nodded for the other to proceed.
"In high school we mooned and lettered. My parents radioed and telephoned. In grammar school we bused and rocketed, and now we google and text and tweet, so why not labyrinth? English is a bastard language—etymologically deficient—so what do I care about linguistic niceties?"
"And do you feel that other people understand you?" answered the older flaccid bald head.
"Do you?" asked the bespectacled bald head.