Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

A couple of weeks ago, a person on my blogroll had a story published in the online literary magazine Brevity.  After clicking over there to read her piece, I poked around the magazine and found several delightful stories, and I’ll be making Brevity a regular stop.

One story in particular impressed and amused me.  It’s called Future Ex Buys Pajamas, by John Bresland.  In it, he’s touring Paris for the first time with his girlfriend/wife/whatever, and he’s a little non-plussed by both Paris and the French:

The more we walk, the more difficult it becomes to avoid mention of the city’s high concentration of lingerie boutiques. During one fifteen minute stretch we pass more lingerie shops than pharmacies. For every chicken roasting on a spit, there’s sexy lingerie smoldering in the boutique window next door. I try to be a man about it. Try not to stare. But every time a woman emerges from a lingerie shop, I can’t resist studying her face for signs of lifelong erotic contentment.

Inevitably, they enter one of the boutiques:

Every item has the delicate vascularity of a burning leaf. Her eyes settle on a pair of black stockings.

And for a moment, his girlfriend becomes the object of his fantasy.  But then:

Suspended behind the stockings, hanging from a pink padded hanger like a wet blanket, one pair of women’s pajamas. The anti-lingerie. And I worry about this.

I guess the title of the story tells us where they are headed.

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For a while in the 80s, the Victoria’s Secret catalog would grace our mailbox from time to time.  Unlike the author of the story, I wasn’t inconvenienced by having to imagine very much about the women in the catalogs.

Mrs. Perils did actually purchase something from VS once, but don’t leap to any conclusion - it was something like a sweatshirt.  Unlike the couple in the story, we’re still together (hey, Mrs. Perils is hot in a sweatshirt! - Ed.)  But the catalogs long ago stopped arriving.

Coincidentally, we passed this store today walking around Fremont (click photos to engorge):

We didn’t go in, though. We had a date with a troll: