F3: ‘Sublime’
They said it couldn’t be done.
Well, I sure showed them … Fools!
*cackles menacingly*
SUBLIME
Finishing the last of her soup, Theresa turns to me and smiles. Her eyes are unnervingly reptilian. I don’t know, perhaps her great-grandfather was a monitor lizard or something. My boyfriend, my former boyfriend, kept a monitor lizard. He was called Coleridge, after the poet. The lizard, that is. Not my boyf-
Not my ex-boyfriend.
Anyway, she’s sitting there; cold eyes, fixed smile.
“Becky” she says, hints of a smirk playing on her lips, “Really dear, that soup was sublime.”
Her voice goes up on the last word. I clench, well, pretty much everything. This is it – showtime.
“Sublime?” I ask, raising both voice and eyebrows; “Really?”
As I continue, her smirk hardens.
“So,” – (I lean in, eyes pitched skyward) – “Would that be the Burkean or Kantian conception of the sublime?”
She turns to Ivan; her man from Minsk. He shrugs, inadvertently concealing what little there is of his neck.
I wait. I’m good at waiting.
“Kantian?” she hazards eventually, staring intently at the table.
“Ah!” I say, getting to my feet, “So the soup shattered your ‘misplaced belief in authentic representation [1]?” I advance on her, menacingly. She shrinks back into her seat.
“Was it” – (anticipating victory, I pause to wet my lips) – “a phenomenon so fundamentally overpowering that it was, to quote Bleiker and Leet, ‘not just awe-invoking, but simply too vast to be comprehended in [its] totality [2]?”
“Did you just manage to incorporate footnotes into your … uh …?”
Ivan trails off as I fix him with one of my stares. Snatching the empty soup bowl from under Theresa’s chin, I’m pretty sure I see her wince. For the rest of the evening, she says nothing, and I later return from a toilet break to find both her and Ivan gone – having slipped, unnoticed, into the neon gloom of the concrete jungle.
- – - – -
[1] Bleiker, R. and M. Leet. 2006. ‘From the Sublime to the Subliminal’, in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34 (3), p. 723.
[2] Ibid. p. 717.
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
The bit with the footnote made me giggle – well written, sir. 
I feel bad for Ivan, somehow.
That’s both hilarious and sad – I love it!
“Would that be the Burkean or Kantian conception of the sublime?”
Fantastic. Glad to see you returning on form!
Very good sir. Very good indeed. Inserting footnotes was well placed and raised a smile.
That’s the last time I describe anything as “awesome” with you in earshot!
I like it, it made me smile.