absalom and balthazar

by nick nelson

absalom and balthazar were walking along the beach. a breeze was blowing in off the water. why don’t you like me? balthazar asked absalom. you are too fat, absalom replied. balthazar wanted absalom to like him and he determined to lose weight. he quit his job as a consultant and spent the next two years dieting and working out under the supervision of weight loss professionals who took most of his money from him, and he lost two hundred pounds. do you like me now? balthazar asked absalom. no, absalom told him, you are too ugly for my taste. balthazar then wrote a couple of best selling novels and used the royalties to purchase the best plastic surgery money could buy, which made him look like a model on the cover of a magazine. how do i look? balthazar asked absalom. not bad, but you are still the same boring and tiresome person you always have been. balthazar wrote three more best selling novels and a couple of screenplays and enrolled for three years at a charm school in the swiss alps. the charm school had summer vacations and balthazar spent them visiting a holy man in the mountains of a remote asian kingdom, absorbing ancient wisdom. when the three years were up, balthazar presented himself once again to absalom. what do you think? balthazar asked. i have to admit your manners have improved, at least on the surface, but i don’t like you any more than before. but why not? balthazar tearfully pleaded. i don’t need a reason. i just don’t like you. why didn’t you tell me that to begin with? balthazar wailed. you didn’t ask. i was trying to let you down easy. but balthazar was not ready to give up. the holy man had told him of an even holier man who lived in a remote wilderness and who might be able to help him out. when balthazar found this second holy man in a cave beside an icy river, the sage told him that he might - not absolutely would, but might - solve his problem by using mind power to draw the universe into his own brain where he could then transform it into a different universe, one in which absalom liked him. balthazar used every fiber of his being in this feckless pursuit, and did succeed in transforming the universe. into a vast shopping mall, in which absalom was a teenaged girl, working in a gourmet cake and cookie shop, and he, balthazar, was a pigeon. whenever the pigeon attempted to approach the girl on one of her breaks, she would kick at it, exclaiming, ooh, yuck!