The past returns in waves, each shallower and more bitter than the one before it

  Catholic Lady sent me an email this weekend. She claims that she tore apart her room recently looking for a few very short "stories" (her word) that I wrote. They always brighten her day.

  You'd think she'd keep better track of them. In the four years since our gruesome romance lit up and fizzled out like a firecracker shot into a swimming pool, she has claimed to have lost those "stories" no fewer than five times. More than once a year. Every time she asks for them, I oblige, sending a digital copies to her gmail account. Perhaps they're being deleted by some powerful and nefarious third party? Perhaps somebody at Google has it out for me?

  I wish she'd come up with a better pretext for contacting me. Honesty is out, of course -- that seems pathologically to never be an option for her. But the lie is so blatantly bad that it just about flirts with honesty. It wants to be disbelieved.

  I have no satisfying way of processing this for myself. There's something about dealing with somebody who is so pathetically transparent that is at once irritating and disarming.

  When I met her older brother for the first time, he drunkenly told me (and there are quotes here, but you get it -- I don't remember his exact wording): "she's talked about you. Actually, she doesn't shut up about you. She had these weird little story things she was posting on her Facebook? I thought she wrote them. But I guess you did, and she was just posting them."

  Before I broke up with her, I took the trouble to sweep backward through her Facebook post history, right to the point where she had first met me. She'd cribbed tons of things I'd said and things I'd posted on my Facebook (which at the time had somewhat lax security settings), presenting them simply as her own. I didn't really even know who she was at that point. But she knew me.

  I understand that I'm in a uniquely non-threatened position, generally, being a white man whose looks are basically "unremarkable," but that was maybe the first time I remember feeling viscerally unpleasantly creeped out by an admirer.

  But this isn't any kind of good processing either. I'm making it easier for myself to think of her as a bad person when, realistically, she was a very young woman negotiating her affections for somebody in a way that I can certainly find fault with now, but probably pointlessly so.

  After I broke up with her, she changed her Facebook profile to include that god-awful cliche shit, "when you love something, let it go, if it comes back to you, it's yours, if it doesn't, it never was, blah blah blah." It's such a miserably droll, teenage thing, and I was so angry with her at the time already that I just sneered at it, thinking, "you're fucking kidding me, right?" But that's the thing about dealing with somebody so transparent: you really do know when they're lying, and you really do know when they're hurt.

  She'll be in town soon, to visit. She's blonde, now. She wants to meet and catch up. Again. She asks me, when I move, have I thought of moving closer to where she lives now? It's a wonderful place. I'd love it. We should talk more.

  There's no point. There's no point in it at all. You don't want to hurt people, but you end up doing it anyway, as though it were natural and inexorable, like breathing, and then they invite you to do it again and again. I have nothing for her -- I can't undo our shitty cataclysmic relationship; I can't un-be the person who walked away from her (The One person, apparently, which is mind-blowing, because what men do you meet, exactly?). I can't un-be who I was: a wrecked, half-insane zombie of a person, grasping hungrily at the nothing left by my ex-fiance. I can't help her or make her more whole or anything; to the contrary, I am certain, I can only hurt.

  I'm obsessing over this lately, but there's a bit of insanity to the idea of fixing your mistakes. They can't always be fixed. You've got to be able to let them go too.

  Well, OK. Maybe I can take my own advice.

And the Clever

a 30 minute prompt piece. We all did this (we all -- the writer's group -- the 'official' one) as a formal exercise this time. the prompt was "soda pop." I think the ending is a little too confusing, but oh well -- didn't have the time to fix it.

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Bison stood next to the box, delicately disrobing a Payday candy bar.  Tyson and Chucks angled him from down the block.

Chucks appraised the circumstances. “Absolutely fucked up.”

“Man wait, man,” Tyson said. “Hold up. Bison’s big, but he ain’t that big.”

“Are you blind? Motherfucker’s five of you.”

Tyson cocked his head to the side, then ran his hand up and down the length of his own torso. “OK he’s big, but he ain’t hard.”

“You ain’t hard.”

“I’m hard.” Tyson bent forward and started rubbing his palms together.

“Yeah, you hard,” Chucks said. “You hard and Bison’s tiny. Got a real cutaneous pair of eyeballs on you.”

“Man, I don’t even know what containious means.” Tyson started to pace back and forth, never drawing his eyes away from Bison down the block. “Fuck it. I’m going in.”

Chucks stood fixed in place and watched Tyson strut the block. “I’ll call a ambulance,” he shouted. “And a fuckin coroner.” He gripped the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb. From behind, he heard somebody hum a few famous bars of the theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Chucks pivoted on his heel.

“If it ain’t Bridgeclub,” he said.

Bridgeclub sauntered up in a neat vest and dress-shirt combo, touching his finger to his nose and smiling. “Recognize the song?” he asked.

“Nice shoes,” Chucks observed.

“I ask again. Recognize the song?”

“Yeah, I know it. Wester music. Like Semitey Sam in the desert.”

“Like Yosemite Sam in the desert,” Bridgeclub confirmed, tipping his glasses. “Ennio Morricone. The American icon of Italian birth.”

“What the fuck? They teach you this shit in Eggland?”

Bridgeclub declined to respond. “How’s Tyson?”

“He’s about to die.”

“Ah. L'Estasi dell’Oro,” Bridgeclub lamented.

“Man, fuck your language. You were supposed to be here ten minutes ago.”

“True.” He tugged his shirt sleeves. “I have a plan now, though.”

Bridgeclub sauntered down the block, stopping by a cooler. He eyed Tyson, who was dancing idiotically around Bison, looking for an angle or a moment that would not come. The box glittered like the setting sun. Bridgeclub opened the cooler, removed two sodas, and began shaking both violently as he continued sauntering toward Tyson.

Chucks, after some cool hesitation, ran after him. They both reached Tyson at about the same time.

Bridgeclub held out the two sodas. “Pop, gentlemen?”

Neither Bison nor Tyson immediately accepted. Instead, they glared at him in confusion. “Pop?” Bison croaked. “What the fuck is pop?”

Chucks caught his breath and explained, “man, he means soda. Shit’s soda. That’s Bridgeclub. He from Eggland. Everything he say sound like fuckin Romeo and Juliard.”

Tyson and Bison emitted understanding “aahhs,” then accepted their sodas. And, opening both tabs in unison, they quickly found themselves drenched in a heedless spray of phosphoric acid, sugar, caramel color, and ‘natural flavoring.’

“Shit!” shouted Bison.

“God, fuck!” shouted Tyson.

Chucks stumbled backward, patting himself desperately. “That shit’s just soda!” he yelled, as though to convince himself.

Bridgeclub cleared his throat and produced a handkerchief. “I’m sorry, ugly,” he said to Bison. Bison grabbed the handkerchief and said “what the fuck you call me?”

“Bison,” he said. “I called you Bison.”

Bison wiped his eyes and then gave Bridgeclub a cold stare. “Weren’t you standing over there before?” He said.

“Would you like a towel?” Bridgeclub said. “I’ll get you a towel.”

And without further objection, Bridgeclub sauntered off down the block, whistling a familiar theme to himself. After he turned the corner, he came upon a local grocery, whereupon he stepped inside, picked out a cheap red towel, and purchased it with some of the money he’d just earned.