FOKKEN

By

Grant Flint

My entire life is about “fokken”. Which is Middle Dutch for “to copulate with”. All else is sham, hypocrisy. Everyone is the same. I don't claim to be special. Fokken. That's what it's about.

All day long we watch people deny it. The story of life is fokken. A story there, in one word. A short story. One of those ‘Palm' stories like the Japanese write. The whole story can be written on the palm. Fokken. You can write that 20 times on the palm. 20 short stories. That's a novel.

There are only two themes in stories, in Literature: fokken and death. Death is the end of fokken. From birth to grave, fokken. To copulate. The drama, the plot, the ending of this story this afternoon is death. There are no slices of life. Only fokken. Then death. I’m dying, you're dying, they're dying. Meanwhile, fokken.

"I'd rather be fokken," folks say, unsaid, all day long. I see it in their faces at work, the women, the men, the fat, the beautiful, the terrified.

"Fokken me!" their faces squeal soundlessly, a deep perpetual blush on their confused faces.

"Hi. How are you?"

"Pretty good. How you doing?"

"Okay. Except I need some fokken."

"Me, too. But I guess we won't get it."

"No. They said on TV, there wasn't likely to be any fokken today."

"Yeah, but how often are they right?"

"True. Well, good fokken to you."

"Same to you. And lots of it."

"Sure. Thanks."

But it's not there, won't be there, will be missing on break, at lunch, all the way home on the freeway. We go home as though it will be waiting there, possibly, for us. But it isn't.

And then it's Friday, maybe it will be a fokken weekend. But it isn't, and it's hard to go back to work Monday morning when all there is to look forward to is -- maybe this weekend, there will be some fokken. But there won't be.

And then one day or evening there is death. And you realize your whole life you have been looking for fokken. Only you never got it. Oh, a wisp of it here and there. Brief paradises. Only to remind one of the wasteland on either side. Bliss for a moment, an hour, a day, even a week. The meaning of life. Everything clear. And then gone.

A short story. Birth, the search, death. Everyone writes the story. All of us, writers. The search for fokken. The search, the search. Then death.