Bull in the Sun

The swarm of Minotaurs engulfed them, red eyes ablaze, snorting guttural grunts and viciously swinging sharp axes.

“Press E space R arrow key down,” instructed the measured voice of Jake, Samantha’s fiancé. They played the action fantasy game together online. They were close yet they were far away. Samantha obeyed the orders and her character, elf princess Sparzy, threw her head back, raised her arms and leaped into the air while radiating a golden glow. Sparzy hammered back to the ground and a ring of pulsating light flung from her white skirt, knocking the Minotaurs to their hairy bony knees.

“Now run, quickly,” said Jake over speaker.

“But I want to kill them,” said Samantha.

“You can’t kill them, you’re not powerful enough yet; you have to avoid them or they’ll kill you,” said Jake with measured intensity.

Samantha sighed. She pressed the keys and Sparzy sprinted past the downed Minotaurs.

“Good girl,” said Jake. He then told a joke to try and smother his previous patronizing tone. She didn’t fully hear the joke (something snarky about the best way to avoid problems is to run away from them). She didn’t put effort into making her giggle sound very convincing. Her mind wandered to a recent discussion she had with her friend Rebecca.

Rebecca had ranted about relationships. She mused about all relationships being a gamble because not only can you never really know a person you can’t know who it is they will become either. You’re just left guessing over their potential and direction. “Educated guesses,” but still just guesses. And it sucks, Rebecca had said, because you’re supposed to make these life consequential decisions in your 20s. When your brain isn’t even fully developed yet, or not until twenty six or seven. Like, Rebecca had said, the 20s is the decade when you’re your most attractive and vibrant and daring and so on and then it all goes downhill. Your youth, your vitality, your prime, the tight elasticity of your skin, all these things that make you attractive to potential partners. And then it all just, fades.

“You’re talking about superficiality,” Samantha had countered.

“Yes, but you’re not naïve, you know what I mean,” Rebecca had said back. “Your options shrink with each passing year. The pool of what’s available shrinks. Yet you’re on the clock at all times, with time running out.” Rebecca had droned on this theme for awhile, mostly with self pity lament, mostly doing all the talking. Rebecca had ended the conversation with something like “Maybe none of that made sense but I think you know what I mean. Just, it’s weird but not weird how everything is a game of chance really. How we think we are in control but not really. Especially when it comes to others. We can only make predictions.”

In the game Sparzy walked over a cliff and fell into lava while Samantha’s mind wandered. Jake burst out laughing at the death. “Oops,” Samantha said. Jake made jokes about clumsiness and driving, kidding Samantha. She only half heard him and unconvincingly laughed, which he took as her sharp sarcasm. “I wanted to quit anyways,” said Samantha.

“You really are getting better at it,” Jake said. “Good even. You want to Face Time?”

Samantha pressed her lips together. “I’m not looking my best.”

Jake laughed and said she always looked stunning; she couldn’t be ugly if she tried.

“Do you want to go to Paris?” Samantha asked.

“I’ve been before as a child,” Jake answered. “Yes, it’d be fun to go with you.”

“The sun sets,” Samantha said. “But the sun also rises.”

Jake laughed. “Okay Mrs. Random, suddenly profound. What’s that about?”

Samantha sighed. “Just thinking about the Hemmingway novel. The Minotaurs in the game made me think of bulls, which randomly made me think of that book, The Sun Also Rises. There was a display at the book store because of some PBS show or something maybe is why I thought of it.”

Jake made some “bull shit” pun joke that didn’t make sense. Samantha didn’t bother to fake a laugh. “I had known the meaning of the title but forgot but now remembered. Or, I don’t remember where it comes from, but its’ a second part of a phrase. The sun sets. But the sun also rises. Like, when my mom was sick, that was an obvious dark time. Felt like the sun setting. Possible end of life, the closing of a chapter or book or whatever. But if she hadn’t gotten sick I wouldn’t have met you. That’s the rise part. The sun also rises. New days continue on, after the darkness has left. Life goes on.”

“Yes,” Jake said. “And gets better.”

Samantha was glad she hadn’t turned her computer cam on so Jake couldn’t see her skew her lips crooked in an expression of doubt. An awkward pause commenced.

Jake broke it by saying “Yeah, it’s good to have a positive attitude. What’s that book about anyways? I’ve never read it.”

Samantha answered: “There’s this lady, Brett Ashley, who everyone loves, especially the narrator, I can’t remember his name, maybe Nick. But he can’t be with her because he’s impotent.”

“Cruel,” interjected Jake.

“An injury from World War I. It’s partly autobiographical about Hemmingway’s romps in Paris and Spain and going to Bull Fights and stuff. He was married at the time and so couldn’t be with this girl he liked. She was a modern girl, in the 1920s which meant that she was liberated, which meant she had short hair and casual sex with this bull fighter guy who the narrator was also in love with. She ridiculed the narrator’s Catholic religion. He had become disenchanted with it too though. That’s a small but important part of the novel. ‘You don’t’ really believe that stuff’ she tells him while in a Cathedral and so on.”

“We’re Catholic,” Jake said with seriousness. Again, a pause commenced between them. She heard his game playing through her speakers.

“You started the game and are playing solo aren’t you?” Samantha said.

Jake responded by making a joke about having sex with himself while she’s away but really it’s with her in his mind and compared it to playing video games without her. The joke was convoluted and neither laughed. “You know I don’t like to end the night on a loss,” he then said.

“Okay, have a good night then,” Samantha said.

“Another fun night,” Jake said. “It was fun. You had fun, right?”

“Always,” Samantha said.

She had a dream that night that the earth had burned the surface and what remained of humanity had to live in underground caves where it was cooler. She gave birth to a Minotaur. She joked in the dream that she didn’t have to build a maze to put the Minotaur in because they already existed in a maze. She laughed in her dream so loudly that she woke herself up. She woke up to silence except for the sound of her heavy heartbeat, a chirping cricket and dry wind blowing through a slightly cracked window.