Natural Blonde

While taking an extended bathroom break at the office, with my panties around my ankles and my thumb vigorously swiping through Tinder, my sado-masochist vaginal subconscious decided that I needed babies with Erik with a "k" who was 3 miles away and whose profile included a photo of him wearing a turtleneck under a polo shirt under a leather jacket.

Erik with a "k" was kind of a giant, over six feet and somewhere between ripped and fat, the way a thirteen-pound baby usually looks when they grow up. He had the kind of bigness that somehow hinted at his mother being frail and breakable. His hair was the color of banana

pudding down to the root, and was split down the middle with curated messiness. He was wearing a pair of crisp Chelsea ankle boots, making him look like a rescue pitbull forced into those little rubber shoes in the wintertime.

I don't understand natural blondes; their brains are wired dif-ferently, like they've been cybernetically controlled by a mega-blonde in the sky their whole lives. They do things that

brunettes just don't, like they make eye contact with you when telling you that they lost their job last March. Erik with a "k" had these truly horrifying gray-blue eyes that were the color of limp old ac-id-washed jeans, and darted around with quiet madness at any movement like a squirrel. I let my coffee go cold on our date because I was sick of watching his eyeballs lock in on my hand whenever I touched the mug. Instead, I asked if he had any siblings.

He smiled, and I wished he hadn't; he had those weird gappy teeth that unsettled you with how perfectly symmetrical yet so undeniably wrong they looked. He told me he was an identical twin;

I briefly felt like vomiting. My uterus contracted with the mere thought pushing out two bigass babies just for them BOTH to come out looking like Erik with a "k".

I asked him his brother's name, hoping it would be something that rhymed, which, to my partial satisfaction, it was.

"Erik," he said.

"No, that's your name," I said.

"No, I'm Erik with a 'k. My brother is Erik with a'c."

"Was your mother a drug addict?" I asked. My mother was a drug addict, so I felt like it was okay that I asked.

"No. She's a psychologist." I highly doubted this.

"Oh, okay."

"Erik only has one arm," Erik with a "k" said, and I bent sideways to see if he was talking about himself or his twin.

"My cat doesn't have a tail," I said, like it was the same thing.

"I ate my brother's arm in the womb," he said.

"Okay," I said, "do you smoke?"

"I'll have to, someday," he said, "my brother smoked for three years, so I will too."

I suspected this was part of an elaborate scheme for them both to die at the same time. Suddenly, I found myself yearning for that same beautiful imprisonment. I imagined meeting someone when we were both zygotes, having to share meals before we had stomachs, then desperately scrambling to avoid one of us leaving the other after decades of identical life.

As Erik with a "k" put on his leather jacket and told me he'd like to see me again, I mumbled some sort of agreement as I watched him leave a pitifully small tip for the "coffee artist" who'd served us on our date. I lingered behind, digging for a cigarette in my purse as he crumpled his awkwardly swollen blonde body into his black Nissan Cube. I found my pack of Camels and struggled to light one amid the wind, as Erik with a "k" streaked away with his knees folded like a mantis. The Cube turned a corner and disappeared, and I caught sight of myself in the window of the cafe.

Gray and warped in the thick plate glass, my mirror-self blew smoke between the two of us, obscuring her face from me for a moment. When the smoke cleared, I dropped the cigarette and put it out with my shoe, locking eyes with her. I slowly raised my right arm, watched her raise her left, and felt compelled for a moment to reach out. Instead, I tucked my arm behind my back and let it disappear.

At least the two of us would die at the same time.

Margaret Rose Smith