He Loves Me, Loves Me Not

“Ya oughtta be careful what you say around her. She’s the town spermologer”.

When I first heard these words I scoffed. So what, she can’t be all bad. I believe I can handle anything that comes my way; a gossip queen can’t do me no harm.

Or can she?

I went into work the next day, and Liz says to me, she says, “Mourning Wildflower…”. I about choked on my coffee. She looked me up and down with her one good eye – her bad eye glazed like a blueberry donut – hand on her hip – left foot tapping – arms crossed, “Well?”, she asked accusingly.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about, miss”.

Crisis adverted. How did she know?

…

Randy’s birthday is coming up on the 27th. He would have been at Wildflower last week if the transmission hadn’t given out on the last home stretch. As soon as the little red Toyota broke down he took out his yellow bic-lighter. Map in flames he let it fall to the ground. As he stepped onto the pavement the tow truck pulled up. Some kind of birthday month.

Back at headquarters, I was fixing
the little problems Yuri and I was facing. One, I couldn’t go back to work knowing Liz was on to me. Two, it’s time to move on anyways . Catch ya’ll the flip side.

…

Duct-tape in hand, Randy skates over to the next lamp post.

“Ya didn’t have to quit, Ari.”

I hand him a poster. What was I supposed to do? Let them mock me about my dead boyfriend?

“I don’t think they were mocking you, hun. They were probably trying to help guide you”. He skated over to the cork-board kiosk and did a plea-aye.

I hand him another poster. I look down at my iPod. Everything on my grooveshark account is playing by twos… Whatever You Like, Whatever You Like, Bukowski, Bukowski, Montage, Montage, Doesn’t Remind Me, Doesn’t Remind Me… God, who’d wanna be such a control freak?

“You can throw them a curve-ball, A-train”.

…

Wildflower is a big, witch-y, family reunion held in the mountains of my beautiful home state. It’s host of some of the best disc-golf tossers in the nation. Every year we have a tournament in the hills. Every year the location changes. And every year only a select number of homies get the maps to our destination. I guess it’s kind of like a sub-let party of the rainbow gathering. Most years I almost always get left behind. Guess they just don’t think I’m cool enough…

Foolish boys… I’d rock their world, too, if they just gave me the chance.

…

I’m not sure if we are really allowed to talk about it. It might be like one of thoooseclubs. The kind where the first rule is always, The first rule of __________ club is you never talk about ___________ club. He might be dead to you, but in my heart he is still alive.

Well, Wildflower, here is a big screw you with a smile and my middle finger flying high.

-by Arian