Is It Me or My Talent You See? By Cy Hill

I sit down at my desk to work on the script’s first draft and open my right-hand drawer.  A 25 cm man leaps out and slaps my face.  You might not think something that small could pack much of a wallop, but he does.  In the beginning I could handle him, but he grows larger and more brazen every day.  I put him in there to teach him who’s boss, but since that did not work, I grab him in my fist.

“Don’t ever do that again,” he says – after he is the one who struck me — so I squeeze him like a tube of toothpaste, and his pitch rises.  “Can’t we just try to get along?”

“I am trying.”

“I don’t like being in a drawer.  It’s dark in there.”

“The pens and pencils don’t complain.”

“They are inanimate.”

“I remember when you were small and I was proud of you.”

“I wish I could say the same.”

I turn him upside down.

There is a knock at the door.  I set him on the desk, he runs up my arm, and mounts my shoulders.

My wife of two years enters.  She sets a cup of coffee on a pad next to my laptop.  “Good luck.”

“J.P. will like this,” he says from my shoulders.

He is far more confident about this script than I.

She sighs, smiling at us.  She is young and blond and has curves and thinks that I am wonderful.  Then, she blurs.  My vision sees double.  Can it be?  Does she have a small being astride her shoulders as well?

“Do you,” I indicate the thing gripping my ears like reins, “have one of these, too?”

“He’s just kidding,” my rider says.

“Don’t tell me you don’t see it?” I ask him.

“Always joking,” she laughs and pats me on the head.  “You just keep writing winners,” she says, smiling; kisses him on the cheek; turns to go.  “I’ll let you get to work.”

She is not as pretty as she was.  She says things to please me, not out of conviction.  Her rider, who clings to her hair, flips us a saucy wink and wiggles her bottom, making an entrance as she leaves the room. 

“It is me she makes love to,” he says.

“Which one?”

“The big one.  You can’t let on that you see the little one, you idiot.”

“She cheats on me,” I laugh, “with you?”

“Who do you see when you make love to her?”

He slaps me on the back of the head and digs his heels into my flesh.  “Why are we here if not to work?”

Why, indeed?

Two weeks, twenty-two pizzas, and too many six-packs later, the first draft is complete.  I send it to J.P. and he likes it.  He likes it very much.  My wife is happy and I shower and we make love and go out for an expensive meal.  When we return, we make love again. 

She snores, contented.

“Will you win an Oscar?” asks the sated but wide-awake little blond extra being, nestled amongst the dark roots of my wife’s dyed blond hair.

“It’s not that kind of picture.”

Restless, I return to my desk.  He sits on the edge, idly swinging a leg.

“Have you grown?” I ask.

“Have you shrunk?”  He holds up my cell phone.  “J.P. texted.  Look at the actors he has interested, just on the basis of that first draft.”

A-listers, all.

He smirks.  “Who would you be without me?  Remember that when I put you in the desk drawer.”

Cy Hill

Image by DanceERB from Pixabay