by Linden Kocan
Sarah Jessica Parker watches the tiny descending sparkles of the custom Chrome plug-in she has used for the past five years. She is talking to her gay friend. She says, "I am pining again."
Her gay friend Kim Cattrall says to her, "He is balding, lol. That's a Norwood 4. Think about your future."
Sarah Jessica Parker sighs palely. "I will marry him," she decides. "His hair will stay as it is. We will produce children with strong stomachs. Our building will have restoration capsules and its own telephone."
"You do you girl," says Kim Cattrall, without menace. He drinks the energy drinks he can't stop drinking ever. Rip-Its. They are a dollar twenty-five. That's all the B-12 you need.
"I am aware that I have an attraction to a certain kind of effete intellectualism," Sarah Jessica Parker tells Kim Cattrall. "He needs to be in possession of some height, some pallor. Some poetry. I like when I can tell a man has thought, all the while he's taking a photograph of himself, what it might look like on the back of his book. I find this quality especially charming when the man is over forty and estranged from his children. That way we have more time to cam. I offered to give Berger the money to pay for a sub collar, but then he dumped me."
Kim Cattrall stops rolling his cigarette for a second. "I hate poetry, bro. Remember when you asked my husband Steve Brady to photoshop a man on whom you'd soured all bald like an egg?"
"Yes," Sarah Jessica Parker says. "I did not like the result. It wasn't very realistic."
On the other side of the computer, Sarah Jessica Parker is turning on the new tool she has bought to improve her health. The box says the machine is ionic and that its electromagnetic field is bigger than a horse's heart. It's supposed to ease a bowel condition and make her hair shiny at the same time. The machine whirrs and suffuses a devilishly indulgent red light. A twenty-eight-year-old girl—not a woman, she is certainly not so old as to be a woman, not yet, or at least this she hopes to the point of fever—has got to pamper herself, especially one who has suffered as much as she has. There are only fifty people in the world, Sarah Jessica Parker thinks, and has said out loud to other people, who have suffered more than she has. During this brief lull, Kim Cattrall thinks he hears Sarah Jessica Parker ask him how he is. Then he realizes he is mistaken, because this is an impossibility. Sometimes when he talks to Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall’s playful brain will show him a pleasing mirage of the friend he wishes to have and not the friend who he actually does have. Kim Cattrall’s large, needy boy cat jumps up onto his lap. His husband Steve Brady has been admitted again to a psychiatric hospital, but Sarah Jessica Parker said not to worry because schizophrenia isn't real. Demonic possession, however, is, and that's what Kim Cattrall’s husband Steve Brady has. Recently, Sarah Jessica Parker, whose ambition often prompts her to change career goals, has expressed that she would like to be a children's therapist. In response to this expressed desire, Kim Cattrall, who is a very polite man, chooses to remain polite.
"I ghosted your Cro-Magnon friend because I'm a boss lady," Sarah Jessica Parker says, unprompted.
"Oh," says Kim Cattrall. He lights the cigarette. "Get it girl."
"But I do need someone. Desperately. I'm fading."
"Yeah. I feel you. It's hard to be alone," Kim Cattrall says. "Me and Steve Brady aren't ever apart. The last time was nine years ago, when he went to Detroit alone to work on the house. The house is a fucking mess, by the way. I've only been eating frozen hashbrowns and chips from the gas station."
"Sorry, I'm not very interested in your life," Sarah Jessica Parker tells Kim Cattrall. "Those problems don't sound like real problems. Did you take a look at my story yet?"
Kim Cattrall gives the large boy cat an eye kiss, which is a kiss cats understand and nearly always return if they love you. You close your eyes slowly at them and they close their eyes slowly at you. They do this back and forth a while, and then he says, "Yeah. Let's go over it, I guess."
"Oh, good,'" says Sarah Jessica Parker, smiling through the phone so Kim Cattrall can hear it. Kim Cattrall assumes she spends a lot of time on the phone at her fake e-mail job and so she's good at that sort of thing. "Hey, Kim Cattrall? Did you know you're a really good friend? You know that, right?"
Kim Cattrall smiles. "Well. What a wonderful thing to say. Thank you, Sarah Jessica Parker. You're a really good friend, too."
"I love you," Sarah Jessica Parker says, "because you're like a pincushion. Anything bad I feel, I can just come to you and put a pin in it. I can do it whenever I need to. And you're like an eight ball too. Any way I shake you, it comes up me, me, me."
"Do you have the story up on your computer right now?" Kim Cattrall asks his friend.
Sarah Jessica Parker sounds plaintive. "I'm in my car. Can't you just read it to me?"
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Linden Kocan (@7mansions7) is a 6'2" doctor who practices in Detroit. He has been lauded for his bedside manner.
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