No One Ever Gives Me What I Want
My husband asked what I wanted for Christmas.
A nemesis, please, I said.
Come again?
A nemesis. You know. A formidable opponent against whom I can sharpen my dueling skills. My antithesis. Yin to my yang.
I thought I was your yang, my husband said.
I don't know about that, I said. You're certainly my animus. But not my nemesis. I don't have one. I've never had one, and I always wanted one. Please, Sweetie, get me a nemesis.
But why? asked my husband.
Just think how much easier it would make everything! No more moral ambiguity, no more having to sniff out the little bits of evil that reside everywhere. It's like what Stalin said, about wishing the people had just one neck so he could cut off its head. At least, I think Stalin said that.
You want to cut off someone's head?
No! I just mean it would be easier if everything one perceives as wrong with the world were all bundled up in one body.
Would you kill that person, then? And get rid of the body?
Certainly not. Or only in self-defense. And even then I'd try very hard to disable her first.
Your nemesis is a she?
I don't really know. I just needed a singular pronoun.
What about that girl you told me about from junior high? The female bully?
Vicki Gleason? Yeah, she's probably as close as I ever got. She sure knew how to push people's buttons. There was this red headed boy, Jay something, in our class. She could wind him up like a top. I don't even remember what she'd say, but he'd go berserk. She was always trying to make people feel bad.
Well, maybe you could look her up. 'Cause I have to admit, I was thinking something more along the lines of a Wii Fit. Or maybe an iPod.
No one ever gets me what I really want, I sighed. When I was growing up I asked my parents for literary genius and world peace every Christmas. All I ever got was a pink Huffy and a stack of Nancy Drews.
Dawn Corrigan has recent work at Dogzplot and Wigleaf. She's revising a novel. She alvays vants Peeg Vater now--alvays, alvays.