They were two men discussing, one tall one short.
The tall man paused as they walked; "You understand what I mean don't you?" He was saying down to the short man, jerking the trailing dendrites of his large, coarsehaired, black and gray mustache and gesticulating fiercely—in violent jerks; and then during these abrupt pauses, looking down intently at his shorter companion for agreement, then stalking off again, plowing forward deeper into the core of his subject, suddenly waving his thin long arms to encompass and then disseminate more enormous concepts, his big hands seizing fleeting forth, these evanescent points out of the air. The flying white cuffs of his shirt sleeves inflated with the passing air, loosely encompassing his bony, multi-articulate flopping wrists with their big protruding bones.
The shorter man was not always in passionate approval, "Oh, I surely do, if, if... ." as though searching for some particular stipulation to put on his comprehension or concordance, stopping raising his hands palms upward, appealing to unseen observers, then also making an unfolding expression with his hands: thumbs, fingers, little fingers all were slowly unfolding in flower petal time-lapse fashion, miming the evolution of a borning thought, passing down his psychic fallopian tube during their discussion, and now being fertilized, by the tall man's words and finally conceived, ab ovum, a growing, thought-infant--hard for the short, pudgyfingered man to birth impeded by his digital body fat.
"Oh," bellowed the taller stringyer man, protesting his dilatory circumspectness "don't you dare play the fool with me," impatient of these abundantly cautious caviling stipulations and stuttering hesitations, now stopping abruptly again and putting his large bony knuckles on his hips in rhetorical exasperation and expectation; and then suddenly holding out his bony big hands, spread in an imploring supplication, "don't you dare, when I know you are as sharp as the mythic carpet tack. It is a simple matter of who is talking about what."
"Oh, to be sure," replied the other more quickly, "and that was always my thesis to begin with," again shaking a quod-erat-demonstrandum pudgy index finger, as if he had indeed truly long known and been trying to prove, since the beginning of the conversation these very syllogisms, what the taller man was talking about and was merely now, motivated by excessive caution urgently trying to confirm these and mortally essential discursive points that might seem quite obvious to him but nevertheless required verbal reiteration.
"Granted," said the tall man, "and so under these circumstances that I have been developing," the taller man restated with renewed vigor, "given exactly the situation that I have been describing to you in nauseatingly copious detail, I might add, what would be the only course of action that anyone could possibly take. Given all of the various ramifications that I've enumerated, that, of course, I realize must be more precisely laid out and circumnavigated each in its appropriate and apportioned turn, as one would align a row of avian ducks to be assassinated, ducks in a row; you catch the analogy? It's a hunting analogy derived from antiquity to indicate that there must be an alignment of points in order to facilitate an elegant and immediate form of discursive dispatch... ."
"Ducks, to be shot... ."
"Well, now there, exactly! that is magnificently well put, and, do you see? How it was instantly apprehended by yourself, as I knew it would inevitably and incontrovertibly be; which is a mere reaffirmation: when you want to you can be consummately percipient than anyone. And succinctly and beautifully put--"Ducks, to be shot... ." there is eloquence and brevity. For brevity as you know is the soul of wit and tediousness its limbs and outward flourishes My faith is never misplaced in an individual. I pride myself, and not without justification on being able to immediately assess someone's intellectual capacity, sapience and perspicacity: "Ducks, to be shot... ." you have precisely apprehended exactly what I was speaking of and with a magnificent rhetorical sweep reiterated the core of the argument. But returning more meticulously and acutely to the exact subject under discussion and now allowing your predominantly evident quality of being a precisian... ."
"Ducks?"
"Yes. So?" the tall man stopped again, waiting, then slowly opened his preternaturally long arms in an expandingly, a telescopically broad gesture that started at his bony chest--it's protuberant manubrium near thrusting through his shirt's cloth, and ending only at the length of his reach--in fact he was now backing and backing to give himself more compass for this final gesture, like the deity indicating his subject universe, giving himself more and more expansion, calling upon the heavens, deo caelestis, the far galaxies as universal witness to his inescapable logic and, inevitability of his interrogatory.
Suddenly, even this was not enough, he knelt, reverting from the macro to the micro, from the universal to the finite, kneeling in self-abasement and obeisance upon the humble unassuming ground, appealing to the earth itself, and began stabbing a spadenailed finger into the terra tabula rasa, now explicitly and finitely laying his premise out, in front of the shorter man: "Look there's the first point that we have spoken of exhaustively already and I assume you have assigned some credence to. Then here's point two which perhaps which you have already conceded is clear; so given each one of these as accomplished steps in our reasoning process, in our syllogistic development, that can at last be taken as a conglomerate rhetorical whole; and now merely for the sake of conversational logistics what would you say was the most advisable course of action... ."
A long expectant silence ensued, the tall supplicant remained kneeling and devout. The short man was in deep cogitation, wrapping a pudgy arm around his own stomach and resting a supporting elbow upon it, grasped his own chin to support his brain, ponderous with furious mental activity, "Course of action?" He repeated, "yes. Well, under the circumstances that you have laid out and described, so well I might add, that anyone, at least I myself, feel that under these given conditions, under these considerations that you have stipulated or shall I say again laid out or enumerated do for the purposes of consideration that... . under the best kind of percipience or discernment that I can bring to a profound consideration of your points that you have ... ."
"Come, come, man, you are dithering" interrupted this still kneeling taller man, "dithering, what is your advice about this matter?"
"Gentlemen," came a call from a key-jingling attendant, "Time for meds."
BIO: Lives in Los Angeles, has appeared on Nat. T.V. over 6000X, title role in Uncle Nino, (check imdb.com) lecturer on family values, (check google) on art, liturature, collected painter: museums, priv. collections. Publisher of Invertebrata, quarterly journal of bug husbandry, herptoculturist, microscopist. Has run Writers Helping Writers, fiction writers critique group for 11 years (if you would like to join, contact at 323-276-8984). Writing Creds. numerous commericials, his own lines in the movie Uncle Nino. Dry Bones Anthology. Past pres. of Montecito Hts. Improvement Assoc. Wrote a scene in Tears of the Sun also played the prient Father Gianni. Grower of rare fruit. Optibike rider.