The Ice Cream Cone
- Dec 31, 2019
- 2 min read
by Jules Archer
In the horror movie, you are being chased by a man. Of course it’s a man, a man in a mask to hide his face, the cowardly devil. You see him coming over the hedge, fat and shaky like whale blubber and you wonder how he can catch you, but when he lands like a perfect-ten gymnast (because this is a horror movie) you take a last lick of your ice cream cone, say okay, fine, gutter-bomb it, run. As you run your sparkly girl-life flashes in front of your eyes, the boy in high school sticking his sneakered foot in your crotch, unasked, beneath your conjoined desks and rubbing you to frisson (ugh ugh ugh), the boy in grade school laughing and slapping your ass next to the lockers while his peon friends looked on, your mother’s boyfriend who upon smelling your Bath and Body Works cucumber-melon lotion smiled, licked his lips and said, hmm, something sure smells good, and you were skeeved out because you recently saw a documentary on scent and how cucumber-melon means arousal and now you can never look at him in the face again, your mother’s second boyfriend who knocked her into a wall and she left you to fend for herself while she shuttered herself in the bathroom, and while all these memories are terribly sad they are not necessarily terribly bad because they remind you that you have faced worse things in life that are not horror-movie related, and in each scenario you did not run, you learned, and what you are learning now is that surprise! because this is a horror movie you forgot you still have an ice cream spoon in your hand perfect for scooping the guts out of trash men. So you stop, turn, wait for him to run into you, and without hesitation, poke the man in his stomach with the pink spoon. Just a little poke, but it works, he opens up. He wails like all pathetic villains do and crumples into a pile, his steamy, snakey guts spilling out, as he tries to cuddle them back to his body like a tiny, warm baby. You smile and when you turn around the ice cream man is there, his white hat tipped, a cone triple stacked with mint chocolate chip, and you think cool, bro, and take it, because you’ve already slayed the dragons today and nothing else has tasted this nice.
Jules Archer is the author of the chapbook All the Ghosts We’ve Always Had and the forthcoming short story collection Little Feasts. Her writing has appeared in various journals, including SmokeLong Quarterly, Pank, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. She lives in Arizona and looks for monsters in strange places.
