Isosceles and Equilateral by Chris Cottom
In a quadrangle of Cambridge sunshine I tangle my fingers through your tight-spiralled hair while you enthuse about Euclid. You’re square-jawed and strike my chord and we sketch the shape of our lives together.
It doesn’t matter that, ideologically, we’re diagonally opposed – you’re isosceles while I’m equilateral – because we’re sexually congruent and my tummy’s soon spherical.
At the school gate, clutching the pug we’ve called Pythagoras, I inch into the circle while smooth-curved mummies moan about nannies and flex their radial muscles.
You hurry to get me horizontal after yet another stag party and I cling to the perimeter of our super king size. But three months later my circumference is growing again and, for a while at least, I’m your centre.
You’re braggy and belligerent at dinner parties. You’ve always got an angle. Always right.
You call to say you’re working late and will kip in the company flat. I whisper that we’re leading parallel lives, but you’ve already gone. You’ve become a closed figure with several sides.
I measure the arc of our marriage to its next anniversary, but we’re way beyond the midpoint. We’re on the edge and I’m protracting the impossible.
The evidence is acute and proves my assertion, so I make a new rule: tangential touching only.
I’m not obtuse; you’ve crossed a line. We agree on equidistant parenting but bisect the rest. Everything except Pythagoras.
Dust motes hover in a rhomboid of sunlight as, listening for your car, I snip your suits into an infinite number of eternal triangles.
Chris Cottom lives near Macclesfield, UK. His work features in 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, Flash Frontier, Gooseberry Pie, Leon Literary Review, MoonPark Review, NFFD NZ, Oxford Flash Fiction, Oyster River Pages, Roi Fainéant, The Lascaux Review, and other fine places.
chriscottom.wixsite.com/chriscottom
Isosceles and Equilateral was Long-listed in FFF Competition Fourteen
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
FLASH FICTION / MAILING LIST / SUBMIT / CURRENT COMPETITION / PREVIOUS COMPETITIONS / CRITIQUE SERVICE / BOOKSHOP / TWITTER / INSTAGRAM / BSKY.SOCIAL / DONATE / LINKS/COMPS/INFO / THE FREE FUTURE FOUNDATION
*
Tags: