𝚀𝚞𝚘𝚝𝚒𝚍𝚒𝚊𝚗𝚒𝚖𝚊𝚕𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚌-𝚝𝚊𝚌-𝚝𝚘𝚎

Catch a tiger by its vocabulary.

I take pride in my work. Care shares most of its letters with craft, and I’m a sucker for slurping up mac and cheese. Store-bought, box-packaged. The precision that my labors require leaves little freedom for luxuries of the gut.

If even a single painted line were positioned ever so slightly out of place, there’d be hell to pay. I’m talking a guided tour through the underworld, room-temp coffee for sale with an auto-gratuity applied for Babylon’s whore of a barista, pouring drip into plastic cups from atop a crimson creature, seven heads and ten horns.

The math there never squared for me, an engineer who puts a premium on symmetry. You could call me OCD, but I’d label these sorts of imperfections as the real blasphemy. Why bother leaving the house or lifting a finger if the job won’t be done right? Mark once, and measure a hundred times beforehand, if necessary. An abundance of caution must be the baseline. It keeps the beasts at bay, in fact sends them away.

Imagine the bedlam that would swallow the concrete with a foul burp if I were to stray from the path my profession hath blazed. The general population, laymen and lame women, take my design choices for granted. “How hard could it be to draw repeating rectangles across the pavement,” they might say with a condescending frown or a skeptical glance.

These trivializing peasants can’t fathom the years of mastery that inform the minutes spent sketching schematics for a new parking lot. There could be an excess of trees to build around! Bird and squirrel nests that need forcible relocation! Nor do these haughty members of the hoi polloi comprehend the naming convention of my trade.

Lot, of biblical fame, thought he knew better as well, saw himself and his family as above, or below, fault. What happened next? His wife, the love of his life, transformed into a pillar of salt! His daughters grew pregnant with his blind man’s seed to preserve the human race! Our whole genealogical legacy is but a footnote, the byproduct of incest. Now the people’s cars sit in orderly little rows, as if nothing went sour.

And yet, after all the underappreciation, I’m somehow to blame for this ridiculous murder case charade. The police vandalize my handiwork with their chalk outlines, then dare to humiliate me on the witness stand, in front of my peers on the jury, with granular questions about my methodology, materials and means.

I pencil in the very frame that dictates your terrestrial existence! My spaces are perfect! If one imbecile guns down another for parking over the thin white line, that’s not my problem!

If you enjoy books with a healthy mix of humor and romance, check out my debut novel, The Charlatan. Available here.