Oh, yeah.
I didn’t know what to feel when the Kool-Aid Man got down on one knee and pulled out the ring box from the breast pocket of his yellow and black Hawaiian shirt.
“Your timing is off.” I cross my arms. The contractors are scheduled tomorrow to fix the him-sized hole in our wall after our last fight. He said he needed to get some air. When he came home, he apologized and then swore it was a reflex.
“Is the timing ever right for this,” he says
I scoop up a forkful of chorizo and gorgonzola from the bell pepper on my plate and shove into my mouth. The Kool-Aid Man opens the ring box and thrusts it at me.
“So, are we doing this,” he asks.
I remembered our second night together, how the light of the cigarette flickered across his concave body. I watched hot tar swim and dissipate in his cherry colored plasma after each inhale. I started rehearsing, revising the story of how we met until our audience could recreate the right moments of the story in slow motion: the first date, the awkward attempt to make out on my couch, the way he left through the door instead of the wall, how we survived the go-kart wreck of our second date, how he nursed me back to health with his hands and mouth, carried me across the threshold of his bedroom.
I revised our story: his constant chain smoking staining my house and then our house, how the walls always lost to his temper, how I kept us fed and clothed after he was laid off, how I wanted him to become an aquarium of cancer, how I brought him here and didn’t know how to let him go.
I cup the Kool-Aid Man’s face in my hands. “I can’t do this anymore. I’ll have someone stop by to get my things.” I get up from the table and walk away. I don’t turn as I hear the table crack beneath his fist.
J. Bradley is the author of the forthcoming story collection, The Adventures of Jesus Christ, Boy Detective (Pelekinesis, 2016). He runs the Central Florida based reading series/chapbook publisher There Will Be Words and lives at iheartfailure.net.
