Inside Inside

Flash Fiction

The coffee was like a car battery clipped to a child’s windup toy, except that windup toy was Melanie’s brain.

Beth warned her it was potent, but Beth had oversold the flavor and undersold the caffeine content.

Melanie thought the downstairs neighbors could probably hear her nails clicking against her laptop, like a thousand ants were tap dancing in aluminum clogs.

She scrolled down a work email she was shocked hadn’t been a meeting, clicked on a tab about volleyball league, then saw an ad for a pet trimmer she had considered buying.

Her nails again.

It was the worst sound.

She began to close the laptop just so she could get her own fingernails away from it and there was an ad for a cruise with some animated expressions of joy, and one of those words reminded her of her days as a server at Marigold’s, and Tom with the bad mustache and that nonsense word he made up so that he could insult lousy customers without them knowing and that time after work on that one Thursday…they told that bus driver, then… and Melanie utterly exploded with laughter, slipping from the futon and nearly shrieking from the hilarious juxtaposition of the words she remembered, the scene, how it related to the present and the friends and the schemes and…

She was on the floor now, her fingernails forgotten, the pet trimmer that had been a click away lost inside the laptop and she laughed until the muscles in her neck felt like they would pinch a nerve and…

…who could she call?

The laugh was too real, too warm, too rib rattling to keep to herself, but…

…who could she tell?

It would be impossible to walk another human back through her memories of cold Fettucine Alfredo and nonsense words and bus drivers, then fast forward them to the cruise advertisement that had triggered the mish-mash of scenes and phrases that made her laugh like she hadn’t laughed in months, maybe years.

The thought that the laugh would die alone inside her threw a blanket over the fire of the laughter itself, and sadness settled in where the laughter had been extinguished.

But wait! She thought, like an infomercial pitchman, But wait! 

There was more, more to it.

How often was she asked to share something she’d rather not?

How often does a comedian perform a private show?

How many times had something in her life been truly, truly her own?

That laugh was one.

Just hers.

It was a dragonfly that landed, tickled, and flew away, and Melanie didn’t have to share the moment with anyone.

***

Have you ever wasted someone’s time (and your own) trying to explain something that was hilarious to you?

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