Be My Guest (Screw You, Andrew.)

He pinched the pommel of his pen between his fingers, plucking it from his shirt pocket’s sheath in a whisper of friction. A practiced flick with his wrist had the pen upright in a fluid moment, in the first position, its conical point facing toward its adversary on the table. His expression is resolute, and yet belies the indignant fury he feels at the offense he is prepared to respond to. He massages his fingers over its rubber grip, feeling the textured pattern in the rubber worn smooth from countless other intimacies. Raising the pen toward his face, he uses his free hand to compress the trigger, releasing the point from its final protective enclosure. Taking a final moment to compose himself, he advances. En garde. His attack is immediate, a furious flurry of purposeful pronouncements. Jab, feint, swipes, slashes, and slices mar his enemy’s face as he carves his indelible markings upon it. His fury and passion is writ clearly; but his decorum as a trained professional instilled within him under the inscrutable instruction he received in Mrs. Gertrude’s fourth-grade grammar and language arts class, guides him along the narrow path of the righteous. Pearls of sweat proliferate between the frowning rows of his pinched brow, like a harvest from the vine, they are the bitter fruits of his indignation. Finally, he stops, forced to succumb to his own physical limitations as his hand has become insensate from the battering it has laid upon the fragile hull of his pitiful adversary. He uses his free hand to slowly prise his grip from the pen, allowing it to clatter to the desk, wisping smoke trails wafting off the nub. He looks down at the ruinous remains and allows himself only the slightest smile. Picking the paper up and wafting it to keep the ink from smudging, he reads the first line of his treatise: “Before I address some of the more ludicrous and erroneous complaints, let it be known that despite all of his caterwauling, Andrew chose to stay as many as six out of the seven nights that he booked at our Airbnb.”