AcmeShorts

“Coup D’Tocqueville knew all the angles, so when he plopped into Twiggy’s chop shop and hipped us to a line on a hot truckload of merkins1, there wasn’t a dry crotch in the house. Of course Coup’s also a double-crosser so I wasn’t gonna toss dice on a job like that. I packed plenty of heat, enough lead to poison a high-rise project full of babies. And it was a good thing too cuz the fuckin’ merkins turned out to be douche wigs2, so I had to aerate the guy’s innards for him. But enough about me. Tell me about yourself, Celeste. For instance, Do you put out on the first date?” I could tell the broad was impressed, real impressed.

1. Merkin - 'm&r-k&n (noun) counterfeit hair for women's privy parts, 1680 OED
2. douche wig - meaning unkown

Date Written: December 3, 2003
Author: Ewan Snow
Average Vote: 4
Comments:
12/4/2003 Will Disney: you know what? i *wish* the meaning were unknown to me.
12/4/2003 qualcomm (4): i know ewan has been dying to use merkin in a short since its introduction into his vocabulary sometime in the last year or so. i can picture the eureka moment that must have led to his writing this short: he calls someone a douchewig, and a lightbulb comes on. also, it the short exemplifies two interesting snow characteristics:
1) the hastily wrapped up, ill-conceived denouement, without which the short may have made 5 stars in my book (example); and
2) the use of this particular type of tough-guy voice (example).
12/4/2003 Ewan Snow: Well, you’re wrong about the vocab point; I was introduced to the term about seven years ago by a woman at school in Boston, but I'd forgot it until recently when I remembered an (also forgotton) line from a B.K. poem that included the term "douche wig," and thought it was the word (merkin) I couldn’t remember. Anyway, what's wrong with writing a short based on a word?

As for the other two points:

1) Yes, I tend to ruin shorts with poorly conceived conclusions. I even sort of know it while I'm doing it, but somehow can't stop myself. This is a fundamental character flaw that my therapist and I are working on.
2) The tough guy voice is just one of many well trod short-short sub-genres, related to noir I guess. The earliest known example, though it’s not fully formed in this one, is probably here.

12/4/2003 Benny Maniacs (4): Four and a half - fucking good footnote mechanism.