Slowly and deliberately, like an ancient collector strumming an abacus, my eyes tabulated all sorts of visions as they moved from eyes to lips to hands, carefully making no short shrift of the view. Manners disintegrated; I could do nothing but stare and sweat as he sat there across the room. His features an incantation, their emergence leaving me drunk and undone. I could no longer control myself. I needed him, even if it meant the end of me.

For the first time I knew real desire. Walking now, trying to walk now, I crossed the room. And then, just feet away, moments away from passions ignited, he picked a booger and flung it into the hair of an elderly woman sitting off to his side.

I froze. He looked up from his magazine and met my gaze. I could see nothing now but a crisp, translucent flake just above his lip. It must have fallen out during the excavation and deployment procedure. Ensnared on a bristle of facial hair, it jittered with each exhale. Like a mast, that devastating little hair held the offending flake aloft until it broke free and sailed onto his shoulder.

“Well, hello,” he said, greeting the frozen figure standing in front of him “Do I know you?” he continued.
I couldn’t stop staring at the flake as it resided now on the shoulder pad of his navy blue suit jacket. I moved in close, leaned into him, and flicked the flake onto the floor.

“You had something on your shoulder,” I responded. And then I left the building. Minutes later I returned to get my jacket, my book, my coffee, my phone, my car keys, and my purse. As I was collecting my things, he stared at me. I could barely see him through my fogged up glasses as he got up and made an approach. I faked a phone call and retreated to my car, peeling out of the parking lot as if I’d just robbed the place.

Minutes later I was on the phone with my best friend. “Is a picked booger really that devastating? I mean, is it a deal breaker? Is it?” I asked.

“In this situation, yes,” she replied. “You’re not a bad person, CJ. It just wasn’t meant to be.”

“Was it the hair trajectory? Because what if it just looked like he aimed for the hair and actually was aiming for nothing except away from himself?” I questioned, my efforts resembling the work of a defense attorney.

“Hair or no hair,” the judge concluded, “a picked booger is a picked booger. Case closed.”

With Law and Order chimes ringing in my ears, I was distressed and crestfallen. Could it be that I was a picked-and-flung booger away from life-long happiness and most assured sexy-time? And was it fair to dismiss someone for committing a booger-like offense? The questions were futile. I knew it. So did Robert Boyle.

Robert Boyle never married, lived with his sister, and coined the word “analysis.” He also created my booger problem, although he referred to it as the litmus test. Using plant extracts, he found a way that chemistry could distinguish acids from bases. Fairness had nothing to do with his categorical dismissal of whatever he was testing; it was science.

Before Boyle, chemistry was not the chemistry that we know today. Instead, it was more akin to alchemy with its practitioners diluting and titrating their way to wealth. Any metal could be turned to gold, or so they hoped. Boyle saw something different. Boyle saw chemistry as not some dodge or hustle but a way of legitimizing the world, a way of creating objective from subjective, all the way down to the basic chemical units of boogers.

An hour later I was back in the parking lot. I’ve flung boogers. Everyone has. And who knows, maybe a few have even landed in hair – innocent, gray hair. All my equivocating was for naught as I entered the coffee house minus a booger-flinging Adonis. I ordered another coffee and began to read once again. I was about to turn to the next page when I looked up to find a strange man standing over me, speechless, but smiling.

As always, please send comments to stiletto.on.the.prairie@gmail.com