Trivia
The public access trivia game show host tells me backstage that he'll sex me up real smart and I say okay because I want to beat Mary Lou McCartney who's dressed like a sunflower. I want my ex-husband and his new wife with the face that looks like a fingernail and all those stupid women I worked with at the party supply store and Mr. Leming who caught me cheating on a math test in seventh grade and Lenny my old boss at the restaurant who used to sneak his hand up my backside and down my backside and Sally my neighbor who's always calling the cops on my dogs Sunny and Poo Poo even though they've never done anything at all to her - I want them all to feel so bad when I don't say thank you to any of one of them when I win five hundred dollars and a year's supply of ham and lettuce and bread and ice cream and milk from the grocery store. I'm only going to say thank you to Sunny and Poo Poo when I win. So I say yes to that game show host's offer of smart sexing. Because I want to win. But then the taping starts and that game show host keeps asking questions I don't know the answers to - a question about penguins and a question about clouds and a question about the climate of someplace I've never been and won't ever go. He doesn't ask any questions about how you can tell when your husband of fifteen years is cheating on you with a woman whose face looks like a fingernail or how to empty a joint bank account and burn all of his clothes in the front yard before he gets back from a trip to Albuquerque with fingernail face. He doesn't ask how to steal sexy nurse costumes and sexy policewoman costumes and sexy devil costumes from the stock room of a party supply store to sell on the street without ever getting caught. He doesn't ask how to go on living with one kidney and pain in your knees and pain in your back and pain in your neck and pain in your little pinky toe. The game show hosts asks questions about dinosaurs and about some big superstar singer and Mary Lou McCartney answers all his questions right. There aren't any questions about how to clean up and go on living after the river floods and flows all through your house, leaving nothing unmuddied and unsoiled. The game show host doesn't ask one question I know the answer to and I lose to Mary Ann McCartney and I realize the public access trivia game show host really isn't that smart even if he thinks he is.
Madaline Foglesong is a writer from India.