Fiction: The Man Who Ate Guacamole With His Wife

By Eli S. Evans

 

A man was eating guacamole with his wife.

“You can have the rest,” she said, pointing to it. “Just let me – ” And breaking off there, reached into the bowl with her spoon, scooped out no less than half of its creamy contents, and plopped them right on top of her quesadilla.

Evidently, the man couldn’t have the rest of the guacamole – and it wasn’t so much the guacamole that bothered him as it was the dishonesty and the doublespeak. Thus, he decided to have his revenge on the woman by telling her that she could have the rest of the considerable amount of angel dust they kept in the nightstand drawer beside a canister of male genital desensitizing spray, and then, before she’d even had a chance to begin to respond (if she’d been able, she would have told him that insofar as doing angel dust alone wasn’t any fun, she didn’t want it all to herself), racing off to the bedroom and gobbling it all up, or smoking it or injecting it or whatever it is you actually do with angel dust.

Well, I may not know what you do with angel dust (a credit to my lifestyle), but what I do know is that it was because he in one fashion or another managed to ingest it all at once, in a quantity that was intended to be used over the course of no fewer than several weeks, that before long the man found himself under a bridge downtown trying to eat off another man’s face in an angel dust-induced frenzy. “Get off me, you pig!’ the man whose face he was trying to eat was shouting at him, but the man who’d ingested the angel dust was, by that point, fully committed to the task at hand; furthermore, he was completely overpowering the man whose face he was trying to eat thanks to a superhuman strength that undoubtedly was also an effect of the angel dust.

At this point, I realize things must be looking pretty bad for the face of the man whose face he was trying to eat, but believe it or not, there’s a twist: it turns out that man was wearing a mask and therefore, what the man who’d ingested the angel dust ended up eating, when all was said and done, was not his actual face but only the mask. This probably seems like a lucky break for the man whose face the man who’d ingested the angel dust was trying to eat, but unfortunately there’s yet another twist, which is that the whole reason the man whose face he was trying to eat was wearing a mask in the first place was to avoid being recognized by the police, by whom he was wanted for himself having recently tried to eat another man’s face while in an angel-dust induced frenzy. Thus, with his mask having been eaten was quickly apprehended, along with the man who had tried to eat his face but ended up eating his mask, as soon as those very same police arrived on the scene.

As for the man whose face that second man had tried to eat, you probably won’t believe this but he, too, had been wearing a mask at the time he was attacked – not because he was also wanted by the police for angel dust-induced face eating, which would surely be one coincidence too many for even the most credulous reader to believe, but because he was on his way to rob a bank and was relying on said mask to keep his true identity hidden from the police in the aftermath. In this regard, the mask may have saved his face inasmuch as the man who tried to eat his face similarly ended up eating his mask, but in so doing it cost him his freedom, since, without a mask, he was easily identified by the police who combed through the bank’s surveillance video after he committed the robbery, and equally easily tracked down to his corner office in the very bank he’d robbed (needless to say, he was the president of the bank).

To sum it all up, the three men I’ve written about in this story all ended up in prison: the bank robber because of the original angel dust-induced face eater, the original face eater because of the second angel dust-induced face eater, and the second angel dust-induced face eater because of that goddamned guacamole. If he ever gets out, you’d better believe he’ll be converting to hummus!

Eli S. Evans has recent work in Sublunary Review, Maudlin House, Cowboy Jamboree, (mic)ro(mac) (RIP), Queen Mob's Teahouse (RIP), MacQueen's Quinterly, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Bear Creek Gazette, Expat, and Berfrois (RIP), among others. A small book of small stories, Obscure & Irregular, was published in 2021, and a larger book of smaller stories is forthcoming in 2023.