Rhyming

A liability.

I haven’t been writing as much fiction over the last few days because everything started rhyming. This is a big problem. I hear a thing in my head, and the next thing rhymes. It’s like an earworm but more like a clew of them. It usually takes me a little while of writing down rhyming lines to get past it. I have friends who are songwriters, one in particular, and I bombard him with the results. To his eternal credit he is polite. Here and there he’ll pick out something he finds tolerable, like a person who has been dragged to the store that has recently been opened by the couple you know in town or maybe one town over but don’t know that well but have always been nice so why be mean and sure I’ll take those driving gloves with the hand-painted Daffy Duck design. Long metaphor but accurate. Finally around midday today the fever broke and I started to hear normal prose in my head instead of rhyming.

*

OVER EASY

There was a perfectly balanced door in the house and Jack told Alice about it and she said that she had noticed it, too. The bond between them strengthened. He had been in the house for years and she was new to it. He had resisted moving her in for a few months but when her podcast was picked up it only made sense—he was the one with the home studio. They sat in the kitchen with notes for next week’s episode spread out on the table between them. “How do I suppress the true crime element until it’s time to reveal it?” she said. “I’m a radiologist,” he said. Her coffee mug was leaving a ring on the wood and he said so. His phone was not on silent mode and she did not say so. A gramophone in the corner, acquired a yard sale they attended as part of the first season of her podcast — the killer was a collector — played a song by someone’s great-grandfather: “Her voice in the morning / Her face in the glass / It comes without warning / It comes to pass.” He reached across the table for her hand. She gave it to him but when he moved his hand — their hands — over the edge of the table, toward her and down, she objected. “Why not?” he said. “Well,” she said. This was a sure sign that a speech was to follow. A speech followed: she was available to him, “was motivated by desire too of course,” but was unwilling to be taken for granted on his schedule, “not simply an instrument,” papers squared up in annoyance, “not a tenant,” arms folded. “Have I done anything to make you think otherwise?” she said. He pinched his chin. “Well,” he said. “You’re naked.” She stood, proving his point, and went upstairs. She might have even had a smile on her face. He heard a door close: not a slam, not a creak. It was the perfectly balanced door, the one on the studio, and it swung silently and clicked shut like a finely engineered briefcase, or an argument. The bond between them weakened. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]