It Snows Metal On Venus

Five Minutes of Doubt

We all have those jokes, games, names and pieces of wordplay that are a kind of secret dialect between us and that other intimate person: a lover, a best friend. And to those around us, we might as well be speaking another language altogether. How many times have we said ‘you had to be there, really’ with a laugh of ever-decreasing conviction: ‘Oh, that’s one for me and Chris.’ These things form the backbone of intimacy. In this piece, our narrator and his lover share the hobby of eavesdropping on people’s conversations, and report them back diligently during pillow talk. At first, it’s a game that thrills…