A Bit of Dignity
His guest from Scotland dawdled getting to the shower and by the time she arrived, it wasn’t there. Instead, there was a hologram of a shower, one that didn’t leak. The water came down in soft, warm drops, perfect for taking a shower, so she stepped into the hologram. She seemed so happy to be away from Scotland that she flapped her wings like a bird. She poured some of the cerave body wash into the palms of her hands and began to massage it into her body, except now her body was no longer a body but a hologram of a body. This must be some glitch, she said, trying to regain a bit of dignity. She had flown all the way from Scotland to take a hologram of a shower. She heard someone knocking at the bathroom door. She imagined it was her bagpipe-playing, sausage-fatted father, Ian McDougal. Instead, it was her host from America who had to pee again. She was dripping wet and suddenly, homesick for a country in which people had such stiff upper lips they never had to pee or shower. In America, we pee in the shower, he said, that is, if we can find the shower. He also was a hologram.
Jeff Friedman has published ten collections of poetry and prose, including Ashes in Paradise (Madhat Press), The Marksman (Carnegie Mellon University Press), and Floating Tales (Plume Editions/Madhat Press). He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and numerous other awards
Meg Pokrass has published nine collections including the forthcoming The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books) and a collaboration with Robert Scotellaro, Breath and Shadow: Six Sentence Stories (MadHat Press). She is the Founding Editor of Best Microfiction.