Salmon Pants
- Aug 18, 2021
- 3 min read
by Josh Sippie
There is a certain decorum expected of a history professor in middle-of-nowhere Missouri. Plaid is encouraged, solid is smiled upon, abnormal patterns are generally treated like blotches of leprosy and held against you at your quarterly evaluations. Dr. Jasper, who specialized in French History and the Barbary Wars, was denied tenure when the school board pulled out an itemized list of unofficial infractions, among which were shirts with taco patterns, shirts with lightning bolts, shirts with lines that zigged when they should have zagged and—the first actual infraction—shirts with what was apparently a pornographic hand signal.
That was Dr. Jasper though. Would be in Kansas in a couple years. The JV league of the Midwestern history professing circuit.
Dr. Dillman was the straight shooter. No tacos, no ice cream cones, no pornographic sign language, and no Revolutions (at least not recently). He was a British history man looking for tenure. He had a family, not to mention a particularly needy Australian shepherd named Disraeli.
All it boiled down to for Dr. Dillman was a very simple principle: don’t be weird. History is a serious matter, and you’re the custodian of that seriousness. But with too much seriousness comes impulse, and Dr. Dillman, usually possessing the still disposition of a block of hewn wood, did enjoy the occasional joke. At the last history department gathering Dr. Jasper hit a sweet spot with a joke that caught Dr. Dillman so unawares that he came away from the experience with a sore gut from giggling with such gusto.
“If April showers bring May flowers,” Dr. Jasper said in between gulps of a drink roughly the same color as petrol.
“What?” Dr. Dillman asked.
“Pilgrims.”
Dillman excused himself to the restroom. He looked at himself in the mirror, considering the brief overthrow of King John I, which always sobered him up when he’d had a few too many.
When Dr. Dillman woke up the next morning, a Saturday, he accompanied his wife to Gordman’s with the intention of perusing their serious section. But across the aisle, his eyes happened upon a pair of pants that, if he were to try his untrained eyes at identification, he would have dubbed mauve. Perhaps lavender. But then again, he hadn’t opened a Crayola crayon box in decades.
“It’s salmon,” his wife said. “May look good on you.”
Dillman attributed it to blacking out when he found himself at the dinner table that night, wearing salmon pants and cursing that dilatant Dr. Jasper.
“They complement your eyes,” his wife said.
Without the university board observing, Dillman took a deep breath and allowed his legs to enjoy the slimming features of the salmon color. He wasn’t in danger of losing his tenure and Dr. Jasper would be gone soon. That would be the end of the salmon pants, unless his wife took it to the press.
“Goodness, David, you’d think you were wearing assless chaps the way you’re glaring.”
“Apologies, Minerva,” he said. “New frontiers.”
Josh Sippie is the Director of Publishing Guidance at Gotham Writers, Editor of The Razor, and an Associate Editor at Uncharted Mag. His writing can be found at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hobart, Truffle, Bear Creek Gazette, Stone of Madness, and more. When not writing, he can be found wondering why he isn’t writing. More at joshsippie.com or @sippenator101.
