By Claire Hopple
Brandy is a fine girl. She does not, however, make a good wife.
And then she dies. She suffers. She doesn’t go quickly. It cannot be helped.
She’d been married to a drug lord for a number of years, which everybody made a big deal out of. But it was same-as-usual for Brandy.
She divorced him until he agreed to host a pool party, remarried him at the pool party, and then divorced him again that afternoon when he acted like a hotshot with a pool noodle.
There were times when they only lived on the moonlight and their mutual determination to build the perfect sandwich. They were responsible for the highly regarded sandwich determination quotient, or SDQ.
The drug lord––we’ll call him Rob now––hosted a metal plate in his head. Some claimed he was torpedoed. Others insisted it was due to a hunting accident. And then there were a select handful who stated he had the plate for no reason other than he wanted one. Regardless, Brandy was once entranced by it. This was back when they were inventing aliases for themselves in the wilderness. And it was truly all it was cracked up to be. Until it wasn’t.
Rob started saying things Brandy thought he really meant, being fully honest with her, and it seemed uncalled for, unsavory even. She set his glockenspiel on fire in response. It had the desired dramatic effect.
Oh. Now everyone is staring at him. The town is holding an assembly. There’s a projector and everything, just like grade school.
Rob wedges into the crowd until it froths up, spilling over into an outcry. Then he distances himself, holds a rolled-up flyer to his ear to check whether he can hear the ocean. Echoes of the pool noodle return, so he stops.
Crying doesn’t matter at an assembly. Who’s he kidding? He’s pure embarrassment smashed into the earth by gravity.
Rob scans the room to decipher which one of these citizens he’s so cleverly avoided up until this moment deserves to be bribed. Perhaps any citizen will do.
There’s a college kid draping himself over a chair just to get noticed. Rob approaches, but the kid speaks first.
“What brings you here?”
“Business transactions,” Rob says.
“I will tell you everything I told––” the kid starts.
“Nah. Whatever you’re about to say isn’t what I’m after. I’m trying to find myself,” Rob says.
“That’s nice.”
“I mean I made a voodoo doll of myself. And I lost it. Now I’m trying to find it.”
Rob had already faked his own death before. If the worst happens he’s already warmed up.
“Why, uh, why…I’ll keep my eye out for it, chief,” the kid says, saluting him.
He tries his luck with the snack vendor. But they fall into an argument surrounding mathematics. Rob doesn’t believe her when she says she can do her times tables. Rob briefly considers assigning her a times test so he can observe her claims. She falls asleep at the snack table while he’s deciding. What can he do but dwell on all her unguessable thoughts. This is what happens when you talk to people at regular intervals, expelling the determination typically reserved for sandwiches.
He leans over and whispers to the sleeping vendor, “Brandy always listened to me.”
He washes his hands of the search. Someone will find the doll version of him under a rose bush, and she’ll have the privilege of deciding which version is the dummy.
There’s nothing wrong with vanishing from society, even if it doesn’t amount to much. Which is exactly what Rob does, never to be seen again and feeling the same way he always had, now and forever. At least his metal plate is there for him. The metal plate has been there all along.
Claire Hopple is the author of six books. Her stories have appeared in Southwest Review, Forever Mag, Wigleaf, Cleveland Review of Books, and others. More at clairehopple.com.