The Font Man: Part 3

...Continued from Part 2.

This installment is brought to you by the
7th Most Attractive, yet very humble-
Sophie Kipner.




Relieved he was now not to have to use Comic Sans, as indicated by the door post, Bryan swept a sigh of relief across his face with the back of his hand.  But Arial, he thought.  Why she would use the font he had been in LOVE with for years before Helvetica was an astounding mess of delusion so complex and interweaved with hatred he could barely swallow at the thought of it.  He had taken refuge in Vicodin after his split from Arial.  He consumed her to the point of identifying himself with her slants and narrow style, but that point was also to sickness.  Every woman he met would fit into her style or else he couldn't really see them clearly.  Font glasses.  His parents staged an intervention but he ended up just transferring his propensity towards OCD onto other fonts.  That's when he started calling his girlfriends Helvetica.  Same pleasure from the affiliation with a font, but never a mention of Arial.  It was too painful. 

Caught now between a backstory and a future of calligraphic possibilities, Bryan was frozen stiff.  His legs parted hip-distance apart, angled awkwardly outward, in the middle of the doorway after he saw the sign.  He looked down at his feet so long he started to lose his balance and fell backwards.  Wobbling first, then falling quickly with a loud bang, disturbing his co-workers.  Nothing unusual, they thought.  "Bryan with a Y in Helvetica- weirdo!", they'd say to each other after a snide laugh.

His vision faded but his spell was broken when he awoke to a nurse calling out his name.  Tapping the right side of his head as if to ascertain the whereabouts of its contents.  As she spoke, something enormously unusual happened.  Bryan blinked his eyes, wondering if it was a dream.  As she opened her mouth, instead of hearing the sounds, he could see the letters spill out of her mouth and bounce through the air... all in the neat and round and equal font he recognized.  "What's your name?", he asked the nurse. 

"Verdana."