Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
The after-school program operates out of a recently defunct Pier-1 Imports. While most of the merchandise has been removed to regional warehouses, a smattering of dead stock remains. For instance: a circle of twelve, mustard-yellow papasan chairs. Here we read in silence for the first twenty minutes while Miss Viki finishes stocking our snack bags with celery sticks and plastic cups of apple juice.
Looking up from my copy of Charlotte’s Web, I steal glances at her while she works. What a darling––the way she prepares fresh, healthy snacks for us, instead of stale, unsalted pretzels, a lá her predecessor, Miss Nancy. I want to tell her that her frizzy curls are the color of strawberry lemonade. She will ask me if I want to touch them, and when I do, my tiny fingers will get stuck, and I guess we’ll just live like that from then on.
Three papasans to my left, my rival, Warren, is squirming behind an oversized picture book about dinosaurs. Warren plays on the travel soccer team and acts as if this makes him part of the Holy Family. Yesterday, he told Miss Viki she had beautiful eyes. She blushed and thanked him, but inside was probably thinking: what a nothing boy.
I’m one page away from Charlotte’s dying speech––which, when I read it, I will cry. Not the blubbery sobbing of a child, but a measured, silent stream of tears. She will come rushing from the snack station to comfort me. She will see what I’m reading and guess that I am crying because Charlotte croaked. Already this will endear me to her. Sweet, sweet Anders, she’ll think. She will begin a pep-talk counseling me about death being a natural part of the life cycle, ergo nothing to fear and so forth. Won’t she be dazzled when I explain that, actually, I haven’t been afraid of death since I was five! That it’s rather the wisdom of Charlotte’s dying words that have moved me to tears. How sad that no one truly sees how precious life is until they’re at death’s door.
“All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy,” Charlotte tells Wilbur. “This lovely world, these precious days…”
I will read this passage out loud to Miss Viki. And she will think: Sweet Anders. Probably you will grow up to be a poet, and though twenty years my junior, I will fall madly in love with you. Only not yet because you are, like, seven. She’ll cry too, and it will be a moment we both cherish for the rest of our lives.
I look over at squirmy Warren and feel something like pity for him. He’s watching Miss Viki chop celery on a bamboo cutting board. I can recognize that in his limited, primitive way, he is yearning for her. Probably, he’s planning his next flirtation––something saccharine, reeking of desperation. “You smell nice, Ms. Viki.” Or: “You have a sweet laugh.” He catches me scrutinizing him and sticks out his tongue. Poor kid, he’s playing checkers.
I’m playing the long con.
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The worst part of the long con is that it requires Miss Viki to marry Buff Tony, the other counselor at the after-school program. I see the way her chest swells when he plays basketball with us on the rinky-dink hoop he hauled in last week in his shiny black truck. Perhaps they have already kissed, perhaps not.
It would be nice to imagine her chastely waiting for me to come of age, but I’m too much the realist for that. My long con is not a fantasy. It is a carefully choreographed dance that will sweep us through life, with all its joys and sorrows, finally into each other’s arms.
In two or three years, Miss Viki will marry Buff Tony. They will honeymoon in San Juan, and, cradling her in his arms, he will sprint into the green, glassy waters of the Atlantic. It will feel to her like magic. The thing about Buff Tony though is that, while yoked and handsome, he’s an absolute ogre in terms of emotional intelligence. He wouldn’t be caught dead crying at lovely worlds or precious days.
And so, love fades. She turns forty and wonders, what’s it all about? Meanwhile, Buff Tony is watching a football game in the living room, beating his chest and roaring “LET’S FUCKING GO” when the Patriots score a touchdown. She will look out the kitchen window and see a spider crawling across the cracked pane.
Colton Huelle is a fiction guy from Manchester, NH. He is currently a student in the MFA program at The University of New Hampshire, where he also teaches composition and creative writing. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Chicago Quarterly Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Unstamatic.