The Ice Cream of the Now

Something Like a Fanfiction

“Please, Mr. Spicer!” trilled Jenni Dippindot. “Won’t you try just a spoonful?”

But the irritable, rhombus-shaped man only grimaced.

“Oh, come now. Don’t you want to end this silly feud?” she pressed.

After a long moment, his saurian features relaxed slightly, and his beady piranha eyes surveyed the five flavor choices laid out before him. Jenni Dippindot offered a plastic spoon, her modestly-sized teeth tuned to mathematical perfection in the glistening firmament of her smile.

Reaching into his inner left jacket pocket, Spicer retrieved his own spoon, kept for just such an occasion. It was of Damascus steel, the handle ornate sandalwood. Tentatively, he nudged into the tiny spheres of the out-of-season Spookies ’n’ Cream. The soft orange morsels clung to the spoon as by an unseen force, and then, swiftly, they were engulfed in his gaping maw, lost behind curling rhinoceros lips.

He pondered a moment, and a moment more. Swallowed, the sound of his saliva in the sphincter of his throat reverberating through the press office. And finally:

“Not bad.”

The first spasm looked almost natural. Yet within seconds, his fingers at odd angles, his legs giving way, he tumbled to the ground, hot thick off-white foam bubbling at the corners of the rhinoceros lips. Whatever falsehoods were left in him, they piled in a heap behind his dammed-up glottis, never to be heard. The beady eyes rolled back.

Jenni Dippindot loomed over him, the architectural excellence of her smile reflecting upside-down in the burnished Damascus steel of Spicer’s precious spoon. As the last weak pulses of his heart echoed dully in his ear, she whispered into it.

“Welcome to the future, punk.”