This began with the premise: what if we began where something was ending, and worked backward? I could think of nothing more unequivocal in that regard than Stop!
So, it became the opening line.
Lunate Literary Magazine published this story on April 9, 2020. You can read it below, or by going to the publication HERE.
Stop
by
J. Edward Kruft
Our last words:
“My God, can you please just stop already!”
“Oh fuck…”
Never the sort to obligingly say things like “I love you” or “I’ll miss you” or, heaven forbid, “God bless” when we parted ways. We were more the “See ya,” “Ciao” (ironically), or the wordless wave.
He wanted me to stop! What? Being an asshole? Probably. That’s what it usually was. I didn’t mean to be. An asshole. Well. I didn’t mean to be in the sense that in moments of calm self-reflection, that’s not the person I sided with. But when I had actual skin in the game, the person I would otherwise choose to be and the person I became in that moment – as though suddenly bellowing SHAZAM! – was unequivocal, undeniable and unabashedly Asshole.
(Equation: Anxiety – reflection + vulnerability = cunt²).
I’m rambling, another habit Scott liked to point out.
Okay, not so much liked and not so much point out as delicately raise an eyebrow to, nearly imperceptibly thin his lips to. He never spoke of it, never even so much as rolled his eyes. He was much too subtle a human specimen for that. But its existence was indubitable.
So the stop in his final words had weight.
He had told me, more than once, that he liked to watch me sleep. I found it creepy.
“When you’re asleep, you’re so, I don’t know…”
“Quiet?”
“Of course, yes. But it’s something else. Something less tangible than the clichés: innocent,childlike. You’re not any of those things.”
“Voluminous. You’ve said that. You’ve called me voluminous.”
“You’re not voluminous when you’re asleep.”
“Don’t be so certain. You should witness sometime the brilliant Technicolor and sweeping CinemaScope dreams I conjure.”
“It’s just, when you’re asleep, you’re just…just so…completely…you.”
What the fuck. Completely me? When I’m asleep?
At our wedding reception, Scott got a little drunker than he’d wanted, a little drunker than he would ordinarily allow himself. He crashed the stage and stole the mic from the Wedding Singer and attempted the last two-thirds of Stuck in the Middle with You to which he clearly did not know all the words and so inserted a lot of “baby” and “mm-hmm.” I had never loved him more.
Stop!
What had I said just before?
Oh, yes.
I loved him before he loved me. Much before. This is not what preceded his Stop! but rather what preceded our 14-year romance. Me. In love with Scott. Scott. Not in love with me. Until.
Until that day behind Our Lady of the Cenacle. Me. Smoking a cigarette as an excuse to hide. Scott. Having seen me escape through the side door. Coming to check. The sight of him burst me into tears and I grabbed him and held him.
“That fucker,” I sobbed into his ear. “That fucking son-of-a-bitch!”
We skipped the repast and went to a bar and then another. And when the bars closed, we went to my apartment above the beauty school and talked until the sun winked under the bridge trestles in the distance. We had listened to August and Everything After on repeat and he said to me, before kissing me and making me, for the first time, complete: “She has trouble acting normal when she’s nervous….”
Stop. You can go on and on like this. If anyone knows that to be true, you do. It doesn’t change the facts, doesn’t alter the truth a measly iota.
One more thing first. One more annoyance that limply attempts to hold reality and the pain of reality and the sadness of reality and the inevitability of it all, if not today then tomorrow or tomorrow’s tomorrow, at bay. One more thing:
His mother was a bitch. I say that objectively, with plenty of supporters through the years willing to back my claim, including Scott. Why do I mention this? As I’ve already laid claim, I’m an asshole. But that’s not the whole of it. She sued him. Twice. Once for a two-hundred-dollar loan. Once for a set of silver-plated-ware that she gave to him, took back, gave to him again. Then sued to get it back again. He didn’t deserve that. He didn’t deserve any of the shit that that cranky old bitty lay at his feet (Fuck you, Jane!) and for that reason, I include it here. So she can be forever immortalized and have to answer Yea or Nay to her nefariousnessness.
Now I’m just making up words.
So.
“He didn’t say that,” said Scott.
“Yes. He did.” Always insistent, I. Asshole.
“Whatever. I don’t care one way or another.”
“That’s just it. Whenever it’s something I care about, you don’t care one way or another.”
“Not true and you know it.”
“Do you remember” – and here is where, for reasons unfathomable, I feel like I have skin in the game and become the person who is not reflective but reflexive – “when I asked you, over two months ago, if Ivan could stay with us for all of October, you hemmed and hawed and said: ‘Well, hmmm. Well, hmmm.’ Like a fricking kindergartener. Why can’t you ever say what’s on your Goddamned mind?”
“My God, can you please just stop already!” I looked to him. His patrician nose. His lips, now nearly imperceptibly thinned. His lashes. Long and curled up, curled down, all in the very right places.
“Oh fuck….”
The car that t-boned us was green. The car that ran the red light, that didn’t stop, was green. I’d like to say, because it would be poetic, that the car that t-boned us was green, like the color of his eyes. But his eyes were brown. There was no more hint of green in his eyes as there was a chance he would survive a green car. Not stopping. Hitting his side. I saw the flash, the green, a nano-second before. “Oh fuck….”
Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Oh. Fuck. Oh fuck. Oh fuck.
Stop.