Flash fiction from Michelle Vider

Me and Bradley Cooper and the True Dimensions of a Love Triangle

Image by Zing Wong via Flickr, CC.

A) ME AND BRADLEY COOPER (PRE-HANGOVER)

There’s a quality like sweetness. It’s made of soft lighting, smiles, laughing with you but not at you. It grows in small spaces. Alias set scenes with Will Tippin in a too-small-for-tv apartment, a space where Jennifer Garner could hide from her premise and fate.

Bradley Cooper waits with a slice of much-needed normalcy, charm that she brushes away with her hand to reveal a hunger for truth, a hunger that gets him killed. (Christ, OF COURSE that’s what hides beneath, as if normal-sized flaws could make a dent in her world of espionage.)

B) ME AND BRADLEY COOPER (POST-HANGOVER)

He’s hot but aggressive. You fear for your safety. That’s enough for you.

Silver Linings Playbook frightens you. You can yell, but can you yell like Jennifer Lawrence? Will yelling keep you safe?

C) BRADLEY COOPER AND OUR FUTURE

Listen to me—this is the greatest missed opportunity of our lifetimes:

BRADLEY COOPER AS LUCIFER IN

JOHN MILTON’S PARADISE LOST

Imagine Bradley Cooper as the universe’s ultimate charmer. His every coyote scheme fails to ruin God’s plans, yet he seduces humanity out of Eden and into the world.  These big budget movies fall apart all the time, but a year later Bradley Cooper was still on it with GQ:

“Milton, bro? Milton… That poem fucking killed me. Satan? That character was un-fucking-believable. I could taste him in my mouth, dude, reading that.”

You love this douche. You love people who love things. You love people who moan how a poem put the taste of wounded, anarchic Satan in their handsome mouth and he couldn’t get enough. You love people whose ridiculous love leaves them helpless in the face of it.

Love on, Bradley Cooper. Love Milton and Satan and Jennifer Garner and anything that hints at a normal heart.

Michelle Vider is a writer based in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in The Toast, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Baldhip Magazine, and Pop Mythology. Find her at michellevider.com.