Carol and I Have a Proposition for You
Flash Fiction
Yes, you. We’re no longer sure we can go through with this. My feet were getting cold this morning, so I walked into Carol’s dressing room (I know it’s bad luck to see the bride before the wedding, but we don’t believe in bad luck) and asked if she was happy. She said she was. But that’s the answer every husband wants. Once I stressed I was fine with the truth, she wasn’t sure. I told the priest I had stomach cramps and pushed the service to the afternoon.
At 3:00, Carol’s mom called and asked what was happening. What would we say? We couldn’t say we didn’t know because both sides of the family blew all their money on cross-country plane tickets. They expected a wedding, she said. We said we’d get back to her.
There wasn’t much to plan about our lives. We, devout gamblers, had only one strategy. Carol told me to write the futures we imagined on a napkin, one for every year we were together. She handed me a die. On our first vacation, we had to smuggle it out of a Vegas casino under her tongue because we’d lost too much money to buy souvenirs. Its edge is chipped where her molar scratched it.
Once I finished writing, neither of us looked at the napkin again.
Here’s where you come in. Here’s the napkin and the die Carol snatched. You can use your own if you feel more comfortable, but I assure you even though this is chipped, it’s not loaded. There’s no need to test if the die is perfectly random. No need to roll onto an even surface or a hard surface or a soft surface.
All you need to do is roll. Tell us what you get.
1: Carol and I get married. The ceremony is well-done, but the guests wonder why the bride and groom drink on opposite ends of the reception. I die first, at 79. She remarries some charming old man she meets in the nursing home. They die a decade later, within an hour of each other, in the same bed.
2: Carol and I quit our jobs and get MFA degrees. She’s a much better writer than I am and publishes first, but we both get in the New Yorker. We never move out of the studio we moved into out of college, but we save money on paint because we wallpaper with rejection letters and shitty first drafts. We die with memories of late nights reading each other’s work.
3: Carol and I get MFA degrees and become teachers because you can’t just become a writer. We spend the day teaching creative writing and composition, occasionally making nice at the faculty department parties. Our divorce becomes a motif in my fiction until I realize it’s immature to write hit pieces on your ex. I marry the woman who teaches African literature and finally read more than Things Fall Apart to impress her. Carol remarries a theater director. We meet every year at faculty department parties and amaze each other with how well our lives are going. We amaze everyone else by telling stories from our wild past.
4: Carol and I buy an RV and drop out of college. She drives, and I clear the road for her with my Harley. Carol pays for gas money by starting a YouTube channel, which gets a following. Some company wants to buy it. I try to convince her to sell, but while we’re crashing in some national park (we’ll figure out which when we get there), she points to the forest or the desert or the tundra. She points to the sky, which is speckled with stars because we’re too far out for light pollution to hurt us. We tell the company we’re happy with gas money. By the time the RV breaks and we have to settle, we’ve traveled all across the US and Canada, with a mid-life crisis across Central America. We never marry, even after we get a house.
5: Carol and I get into business to pay for her mother’s medical expenses. The poor woman has bone cancer but insists on some experimental treatment to restore her marrow. There’s a recession, so it’s tough to get anything off the ground. It takes me three tries to get something afloat, but Carol goes corporate after her first failure because she needs money more than she needs her own space in the business world. Her mother dies after three years of pain and a month of delirium. Afterwards, I tell Carol I was going to marry her, but what’s the point? After a death, you’ve really been through everything together. She agrees. We separate. We write letters but later forget. When Carol develops the cancer, and her husband leaves because he’s “too insecure about his paycheck,” I live with her for six months. It’s beautiful for both of us. I make that very clear in her eulogy.
6: Carol and I call off the wedding. We turn off our phones so we don’t have to hear our relatives gripe about wasting their time and airfare. The reception’s still on; they can dance if they want. Before we leave, we go to one last dinner and movie like it’s our first date. We eat at a shitty Italian family-style diner and pick apart the plot holes in the latest random studio flick. When we walk out, all hopped up on soda and cheap popcorn, we play the claw machines in the lobby and each get a pair of fuzzy dice to hang over our rearview mirrors. We toss our old, chipped roulette die into the trash. We take two separate flights to two random cities and rebuild from nothing. We don’t keep in contact. It’s more fun to imagine what the other person is doing than it is to actually learn about it.