A Very Short Story
By Peter Cook
Copy Editor

Edsel met Belinda at the beach.

Hello.

Pardon?

I'm not sure if you're aware but, uhh, you seem to have lost the top part of your two piece bathing suit.

This is a topless beach.

Ahhhh. That would explain all the other women without tops.

Edsel was fascinated by Belinda's nipples, particularly her aerolae, which had a variegated pattern of bumps that, under close scrutiny, evoked the delicate, nacreous spiral of the nautilus, most mysterious of shells saving, perhaps, the huge, spiny trumpet-shell of the moon-footed conch.

Ummm…, excuse me?

Yes?

Would you mind not staring so pointedly at my chest? It's making me a little uncomfortable.

Of course! It's just… well, why are you at a topless beach if you don't want people to look at your chest?

Belinda rolled her tawny eyes - catlike, Edsel noted, in their shape and color, and slightly unsettling in their unblinking intensity.

Look, (Belinda explained a great deal of old-guard, french, new-wave, and post-modern feminist theory to Edsel, her treatise culminating in a rather elegant exegesis of the construction of gender modes and the irrelevancy of primary and secondary sex characteristics.)

I see. My name is Edsel.

Belinda, Edsel.

Enchante!

Oh my god. Belinda looked around with the trapped look that signifies one who wants to be rescued from a particularly sticky or unpleasant social situation. Her still-unblinking eyes found the muscular eyes of Ferd. Ferd was six three, two hundred thirty pounds, and garbed in coconut-oiled flesh and a pair of pink and white, fleur-de-lis printed Speedos. Belinda's eyes pleaded. Ferd heeded her call.

Out of the way, shrimp!

Oh dear! How rude!

Shut it! Hi, my name is Ferd.

Hi Ferd, Belinda.

Belinda, I like your knockers - they are globular and glisten like grapefruit in this fine, hot Carribean sun.

Ferd, I like a straight shooter.

Edsel, spitting sand, got back to his feet and left, but while he left he reflected on the impossiblity of ever saying what you mean. If I say what I mean then people plead with their unblinking, amber, cat-like eyes for help, and muscular eyes and bulging Speedos answer. They eyes and Speedos shove me to the ground and kick sand in my face in an act as old as sand, feet, and faces. If men like Ferd say what they mean then grapefruit-chested women saunter off with them through the hot, Caribbean sun to stripey-umbrella shaded cabanas where they feed each other chilled grapes and margarita mix, until the grapes and margarita mix have made them easy enough with each other that one places a hand on the other in a certain, to me unfathomable, way. What happens next? I have never seen it, because then they go off in their shiny cars to their sterile, white-sheeted hotel rooms, out of the reach of inquisitve eyes.

Belinda, wetting a grape in her mouth and then sliding it slowly below the waist-band of Ferd's fleur-de-lis Speedos, wondered what it was to live in a world of pure, sweeping love, unbearable-in-its-bittersweet-perfection.