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Malicious Use of Prawns
"Never," he thought, "have I seen them organised in such a malicious manner."
"It's not so much the way they're organised, really, I mean, it's not the arrangement which makes them malicious," she said.
"Wow! You can hear what I think?" He pulled back slightly from her and in doing so removed his arm from her shoulder. He blinked a few times and thought of this act of blinking, for lack of anything else publicly suitable to think of.
"No, it's just that you said that out loud." She looked at him in that way women look at men when they're hoping to high heaven that they're joking or perhaps talking about something or perhaps to someone else. "And I don't think it's the way they're organised but rather the blatant disregard for where and when prawns have their place that's malicious. And that is obviously such a case." Her raised arm nostril as she pointed served a dual purpose as a sign of contempt and an attempt to banish the smell of prawns from her nostrils.
The prawns sat sullenly in their bowl, flagrantly at eye level on a shelf towards the back of the library. They sat wedged by a few editions of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds and a literary theory piece on the same.
"Ah." He thought of the texture of a canvas sack. "Of course."
She sniffed the air cautiously and made a bit of a face, which is what you do when you sniff a few day old bowl of prawns. Or even don't smell them directly but happen to be standing in the general vicinity. The prawns appeared to slouch down further into the bowl.
"But who would do such a thing." He began to think about how he was going to put his arm back around her shoulder without her noticing it had been removed. "Erm, I mean, who would do such a thing?" He thought of a typewriter. Oh, he liked that one, plenty of letters and keys and ribbons and, ehm... probably other things, as well, to think of.
She stopped dead still, not sniffing, not breathing, or breathing very little and trying not to gag on the smell of prawns as discreetly as possible, putting her hand gently to the covers of the book on the shelf to their right and holding him up with her other hand, which transitioned seamlessly into a sort of shushing sort of motion aimed, presumably, at him.
A shadow moved at the bottom of the massive shelf.
The prawns still sat in the bowl, and the editions of At Swim-Two-Birds and the theory also remained unmoved.
"What?" He realised this wasn't so quiet and that he might be best off in this situation emulating herself. He went back to thinking about the letter 'S' and occasionally about how bad prawns smelled when left out for a while.
His question, which had been left abandoned acquired a certain urgency when the shadows converged and convulsed at the foot of the prawn shelf and out of the agitation suddenly he was struck wetly in the face by a prawn, which knocked his arm, which was back around her back, away as he staggered backward, soon joined by herself, as she leapt backward, away from the hooded figure that stood up suddenly from a crouch in the shadows to the side of the shelf, holding one more prawn from the bowl menacingly and in what she assumed was the throwing position from which he'd dispatched the previous one.
He fell, also wetly, to the ground, landing on top of the prawn, which, by some trick of physics, made it to the ground before he did, and looked on helplessly as she backed up over him, stepping on his left leg, and almost fell herself, and the hooded figure advanced slowly towards the two of them, still cloaked in shadow, wielding the prawn...
To be continued...
disclaimer:
This one goes out to two mere girls who've encountered a malicious use of prawns.
Paint stains and all, looking lovely (ehm, not the prawns).
And especially the one.
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Yer Weekly Horoscopes. Shrimpy.