Suppose

A short story I've been working on for my creative writing class.

Suppose

It was facedown in a pile of spaghetti that he died.

The wingtip leather on Theo’s foot was rigid, new creases forming as he pressed his toe into the linoleum. His uncle sat hunched over the kitchen table. Aunt Charlie stared straight ahead, silent tears streaming down her cheeks—someone who finally knows how the trick was done and cannot go back. Maya turned her head to look at Theo and kept looking. He knew she was trying to decipher his reaction, and she was surely gaining ground from his twitching lip. Their feet were planted equal distances apart, a perfect row of six, and Theo watched, expecting somebody to laugh and grab a camera. His uncle was about to sit up and wipe the chunks of marinara from his face, he was sure. But he didn’t. Theo returned Maya’s stare and they looked at each other so that he would not have to look at the body.

********

It was sudden. He had been admiring the violent shade of green of the trimmed grass, wondering if everyone was saying “eggplant” over and over again, pretending conversation for his benefit. Prickliness was already plaguing the skin on his jaw from his early-morning shave. His bowtie was perhaps not appropriate.

“Hi.” Maya said.

“Hello.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Mmhmm.” He danced his eyes curiously across her face and black dress.

“I’m Maya.”

“Theo.”

“How did you…?”

“Uncle.”

“Ah. Nice bowtie.”

“Thank you. It’s too festive.”

“You do actually look a little bit ridiculous.”

“Thanks. Um. Who are you?” Theo asked.

“Friend of a friend.”

“Well you have gorgeous eyes.”

“You’re not hitting on me at your uncle’s funeral, are you?”

“What? No.” He wasn’t sure why he had said that. He excused himself and started to walk away.

It was when he turned back and met her eyes that he suddenly thought he had lost it. His head was abruptly filled with a lifetime of memories. He and Maya. She was beautiful and they had fallen in love sprinting through shopping malls and tripping over each other, holding hands and dancing at parties and games of ping pong that she never let him win. The two of them discovering his uncle, dead in a plate of spaghetti.

But he didn’t know her. They had never met before, he was absolutely sure. Yet here was a full and total lifetime where he knew nothing but loving her.

********

The soft clicks of keyboard keys filled the patio, where students sat at round white tables with scuffed plastic surfaces. Theo imagined licking the crusted yellow smear left from a previous lunch, flinching as his mouth curled upwards. He shook his head. He looked at Maya.

“Have you ever thought about our lives, how they could take a million different paths, each second? You see someone at a café or on the street and you have no idea who they are, but you can’t help but think to yourself—what would happen if you did? Your directions happen to intersect for a moment, but you will probably never see them again. We meet people and have no idea if they’ll mean something to us until they do. Or don’t. So there are these infinite possibilities that spring up into existence when we see someone across a room. Every decision we make is a turning point in some way that makes a portion of those possibilities impossible. Most of the realities are impossible anyway, but with every decision, even the tiniest, most insignificant ones, then your life takes a direction from which it just can’t go back.

“And just for a second, when we see that person across a room full of people, we can imagine that our lives will be completely different, we can see the uncharted course for the beautiful and unknown that our lives were about to take. It is so entirely possible that this strange person is going to have a significant impact on your life in a way you could have never expected. For just a moment, we can really and truly see those possibilities, the ones that are vast and limitless. And we believe in them like we have never believed in anything else.”

********

Theo was back on the springy grass. He was standing next to Maya. The pastor was mumbling at the front near the coffin.

He had to ask her. “Have I met you before?” 
Maya’s brow crumpled in confusion at his question. She shifted her gaze to look at Renee who had stepped in beside Theo, intertwining her fingers in his. Renee smiled and turned her head towards Theo. He leaned in to kiss his wife.

********

“I can’t believe it. It’s stupid, right? Of all the ways a person can die.” Theo said. He stared vacantly to the left, sitting on the couch in the living room.

Maya sat on the other side, an empty seat between them. “Death by tomato.” She paused and immediately cringed, wanting to take it back.

“Lasagna strikes back.” Theo said, looking at the ground, smiling.

“He would have loved that.”  

“He would have, actually. It’s true.” Maya’s arm stretched across the empty space of the sofa and her fingers tumbled between Theo’s, arranging themselves and clasping securely. Maya tied him to the ground, her wavy hair was the rope he would hang on to while falling. 
Her frizzy waves were untamable—she smoothed them down with her hands as she noticed him looking. Theo grinned, he loved the awkwardness of seeing someone notice an insecurity of yours, after which you fidget while trying not to show that you noticed them noticing, and they notice you pretending not to notice that you noticed them noticing. He looked upwards, picturing his own brown hair, mostly straight and pushed to the right.

Theo turned to see Aunt Charlie saying goodbye to her 30-year-old husband who sat slumped over the kitchen table. Not in words, because there were none. She said goodbye in uncontainable, gasping sobs, as though the air would always be this thin.

********

Maya’s eyes were absorbed in the bowl in front of her. Her spoon dipped into the Frosted Flakes, dunking methodically. Each piece had to be pushed under the milk before she could start eating.

“Cereal is a religious experience.” Theo watched her miss her mouth as she looked up to nod. She tried to cover her face as milk dribbled down her chin. Theo snorted. Maya grabbed a handful of napkins, fifteen too many, pressing all of them to her face at once.

********

Renee smiled, her blonde strands smoothed into a bun, her eyes crinkling as she looked up at Theo. She started to walk forward, pulling his hand through the crowd. Theo squeezed her fingers. They were the same fingers that he’d squeezed at his uncle’s funeral. The same hands that gave him her extra pencils in every college class they had shared.

We were wrong about the infinite possibilities, he thought. Our lives are not nearly so changeable and infinite—those ideas about what might happen become impossible almost as immediately as we can think of them. But we make those possibilities a little bit real simply by believing they could be.

 That, he supposed, was enough.