Fictionlet
“Despite what you may think, I have been in love,” Brigid said. “Brian had me from that first dinner.”
“Really!” said Greg. “That must have been some dinner.”
“It was pizza,” said Brigid.
“Pizza?”
“Yeah, pizza. Brian really understood pizza. So many people don’t, anymore.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Pizza, real pizza, proper pizza, comes from a little shop tucked away in a corner somewhere. And it doesn’t come in a freakin’ red insulated bag! If you want to eat your pizza at home, you have to go pick it up and carry it home in a thin, white cardboard box.”
“The white box is key, is it?”
“Real pizza has a thin crust that was spun and tossed up in the air by some burly, slightly-balding, dark-haired guy named Tony. It’s crisp on the outside edge and completely floppy in the middle, so you have to fold it in half if you want to pick it up.”
“Does he have to be named Tony?”
“Real pizza is at its best when it’s put on a little stand on the table — because the table is so small and the pizza is so big that there wouldn’t be room for the plates if you put it on the table. Picking it up and carrying it home in a white cardboard box is good too, but not what’s best.”
“There must be a lot of fake pizzas floating around, then.”
“There are!” she snarled. “That’s what drives me nuts about it! All these damn corporate pizzas, all these squidgy-crusted frozen things, they’re all squeezing real pizza out! Every year there are fewer and fewer places that make real pizza because of all these goddamn dopplegangers!”
“Sorry to have touched on a tender subject,” Greg said.
“But that’s why I loved Brian. He said he was taking me someplace good for dinner, and where did he take me? Tony’s Mediterranean Café over on Winchester. A real pizza place. A real pizza place. Good God, by the end of that meal, I wanted to leap across the table and tear his clothes off right then and there.”
Greg’s eyebrows headed for the ceiling. “Now that’s a mental image I never expected to have lodged in my brain. So what happened to this paragon of pizza, then?”
Brigid suddenly turned sullen and stared at some nonexistent thing in the corner. “I don’t wanna talk about it,” she said, and suddenly made for the kitchen.
Greg blinked at her retreating form. “Then why on Earth did you bring it up?” he asked.
-The Gneech
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