Dear Global Warming,

I am so pissed. I was, like, waiting for you last night at the Greenhouse Café, and you stood me up! I should have listened to my mom. She always says not to go on blind dates, but you’re so popular that I just couldn’t help myself. When I came home, the windchill factor was minus twenty-eight and there were six inches of snow on the ground—and it wasn’t like I was in freaking Canada or something. Some neoconservative-ass scientists say you don’t even exist, but I know better. Every time a cow farts, or our neighbor Dr. Purdue idles his Ford Expedition, your hot bod is growing stronger. A cow fart for you is like spinach for Popeye, or so I’ve heard.

How nice it would be if you and me could cuddle up together with full cups of hot chocolate in my room and watch those rich SOBs on TV building mansions on the seashore. Are they, like, stupid or what? We both know that in 2010 the seashore will come to my village in the Poconos, when the polar caps melt! Meanwhile, it would be nice if you could melt the snow in my driveway before my mom asks me to shovel it. You’re cool, you can do it, GW! Don’t wait for another cow fart, or I will be really pissed.

Tomorrow I’ll try the Greenhouse again. Be there! I hope we’ll be chillin’ together one day, you sexy creature.

Ashley

 

Mark Budman was born and raised in the former Soviet Union but now resides in New York State. His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared or are about to appear in Mississippi Review, Virginia Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, The Iowa Review, McSweeney’s, Turnrow, Connecticut Review, The Bloomsbury Review, the W. W. Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward, and elsewhere. His first novel, My Life at First Try, is scheduled for publication in May of 2008 by Counterpoint. He is the publisher of a flash fiction magazine, Vestal Review, and the recipient of a Broome Country Art Council grant. He is also the interview editor for Web Del Sol and a book reviewer for The Bloomsbury Review and the American Book Review.