his concerned acquaintances

His acquaintances – not friends, couldn’t stand the cunt – were all the more concerned when his preoccupations shifted solely to what he insisted on referring to as the shape of the girl he had formed some strictly superficial relationship with at work. Indeed he referred to her as though she were nothing but this shape, a geometric abstract, and not a flesh-blood being of infinite complexity and intricate psychology and probably desires. The shape of her from stomach to ankles was exceptional and coiled like something barely molten and only just setting, he said. In fact, he had begun to consider the whole world in terms of geometry alone, as shapes colliding. She wore black desert boots. He wanted to taste her saline snatch on his tongue, their two shapes merged into something compound and entirely impossible to plot. His small talk was poor and his large talk all the poorer. It was all he could do to not reach out and touch her fine hair, and wish painful death upon those who brought creases of laughter to her long pale face. None but he and he alone knew the true interactions of her lines, vertices, curves. His shape work was robust, teacher’d said it all those years earlier, though needed some improvement in the advanced shapes. This, she was his improvement, his baptism of fire. She’d made a geometrician of him. He likely loved her, to the extent such emotion could be possible in less than three dimensions. How he longed for a life on paper.