The Most Boring Man in the World – “Dragons and Turkey Legs”

The Most Boring Man in the World lived with the fear that in the middle of saying something, he would vomit. He knew he wouldn’t vomit in a comical, cartoony spray, which, if done in public, would cause enough collateral damage to allow him to escape the situation by running very fast, much like Batman throwing a smoke bomb and shooting up into the ceiling. Instead, it would be a convulsive burp-like vomit that came without warning and would leave him covered in something that looked like creamed corn and/or beets. This had never actually happened, but this fear alone was the reason that The Most Boring Man in the World rarely said anything at all.

Seated in his regular seat on the bus, he looked out the window. They pulled up to a stop, where he could see a man with no legs sitting against a parking meter. The bottoms of his jeans, which were cut off below the fly, were covered shut with duct tape. The Most Boring Man in the World was suddenly possessed with the urge to run off and grab the man, throwing him over his shoulder like a backpack, like Chewbacca and the broken C-3PO in The Empire Strikes Back. Then he realized that the man with no legs might not have seen that movie, and might not understand the gesture.

The bus doors opened and people trudged on. A woman with a high-cut lacy shirt and a long flowing skirt sat down next to him. “May I sit here?” It seemed a strange thing to ask after she had already sat down, but he just nodded, and turned back to the window. The bus lurched forward.

“Would you like a banana?”

He turned back to the woman, who was holding out a slightly underripe banana that she’d pulled from a pocket on her skirt. Panic rose in his gut.

“I have tons of these, like I’m a monkey or a chimp who’s escaped from a zoo that’s right next to a supermarket and has been looking through his cage at all the people who are leaving with bananas and thinking, ‘oh, man, when I get out of his zoo, I’m gonna get a nice apartment and fill it with bananas.’ Of course, my reason for having them is pretty simple. I’ve got braces, and when I get them tightened, they’re all I can eat. See?”

Smiling, she showed him her braces. “The thing that really bugs me is that they’re not authentic. I work at a Renaissance Fair on the weekends, and instead of walking around singing like I used to, I get worried that I’m going to affect people’s experience by taking them out of the moment, when they see me in my bodice and chain mail gloves, but then they see my braceface, they’ll be all like, ‘hey, what kind of Renaissance Fair is this? Queen Elizabeth never had braces!'” She made a mock-indignant face like the angry tourists might make. “It also makes eating turkey legs super hard.”