She discovered quite by accident that the woman was dead. She had stumbled on the article while searching on a product that carried a similar spelling to the woman’s name, enough so that when she and the woman were friends a decade earlier, the similarity had been the source of many affectionate jokes and then, as the friendship waned, a few less affectionate ones. Why had it waned? The initiating incident involved an unkind piece of gossip passed from one of the women to a third. A mixup with a man inflamed matters. The two women had last seen each other at a Christmas party for the company that employed both of them as contractors. One had been too drunk, one too defensive, and each had decided that they were better off without the other. A decade passed. Men were married. Children were delivered. Jobs were taken off and put on like coats. And then one morning, searching for something to buy, one woman had discovered that the other woman was dead. The back room of her mind flooded the front room: she remembered the woman’s shyness, the smeared look of her features, the sharp sense of humor that protruded from otherwise impeccable manners, the surprising occasional upjuts of libido and the shocking dirty talk that could accompany those moments. She zeroed in on one moment early in their friendship, a lunchtime spent sitting in the park, trading the names of favorite songs, thrilled when their lists overlapped. She knew that they had shared three songs in common, but could remember only two: “Time of the Season” and “Blue Bayou.” She tore at invisible hair trying to recall the third, to no avail. The product that carried a name similar to that of the dead woman was a kind of shortbread cookie. She bought a tin and tried to taste the cookie in the mouth of her mind, but the buttery crispness she expected was gone, and what was in its place was dry and ashy. The article did not mention how her friend had died.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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