2nd Place in the Cambridge Short Story Prize 2025
*
Standing before the minister, TJ knew he was making a horrible mistake. He glanced at Gyn, and wondered where she was in her head, because she certainly wasn’t here, with him, getting married.
I knew none of this, watching my best friend take the leap. Huge. Maybe the hugest leap of any guy’s life. When we became friends, working at The Schuss, he didn’t know Gyn. We were just guys, with a shared love of adrenalin. They hired me to rent the e-bikes. He handled kayaks in the summer, skis in the winter. In our spare time, we liked to test our product outside. Not bad, getting paid to play with the latest toys.
TJ met Gyn at my wedding. Elise and I had hired Gyn to tend bar. The deejays were amping up the tempo for the guests already drunk enough to hit the dance floor when TJ approached the bar.
Gyn was standing behind the bar, tucked into the hillside beneath a canopy of Doug fir branches.
“Bushmills,” TJ said.
The bartender looked like a character in one of those Japanese hentai comics, the T&A wing of manga. Long, straight black hair. Wide eyes. Creamy skin. A stiff smile. Ample spillage from the lip of her bodice. She looked like someone surprised to find herself in the camera’s flash.
“Neat?” Gyn asked.
“Rocks, please.”
“Neat,” Gyn said, when she handed him his glass.
“You’re not very good at this, are you?” TJ said. “First time?”
“Friend of Elise,” she said. “What do you mean, not very good?”
“You asked if I wanted it neat. I said rocks. You gave me neat. You weren’t paying attention.”
She looked like she was going to cry.
“Look,” he said, “maybe you should be a … model. Or something. Not everybody’s cut out to pour booze.”
“Model for what?”
“I don’t know. Van Gogh?”
She looked confused. TJ laughed. He took his drink and turned away from the bar and walked two paces and turned around and stared back. She wasn’t very bright, but she was staring at him. He went back and gave her his card. She looked at it, then at him, unsure. “I don’t ski,” she said.
“We could go out?” he said, by way of explanation. “If you call me? We could talk … about skis?”
After that exchange, TJ didn’t think about her. He didn’t recognize the number when she called. Their courtship had some holes in it.
On their first date, they got sushi. She had never had it before. When he told her it was raw fish wrapped in seaweed, her pale skin took on a green hue. She ate the rice. Slowly.
She mentioned that her mother worked for many years as a palm tree at a Galveston tiki bar, walking around with fronds on her head, smiling at people and their umbrella drinks.
“Really?” TJ said. “That’s … fun.”
She looked at him, smiled, then looked away as if at only something she could see.
He mentioned that his own mother died in childbirth, and his dad ran an auto repair shop in Scotts Bluff. She looked confused.
“Nebraska?”
“Oh,” she said. “Sure.”
He wasn’t sure she knew what Nebraska was, so didn’t pursue it. Instead he told her his dad liked to think he liked to fly fish, although he rarely went. He just went to Cabella’s and bought the gear. TJ liked mountains, and moved to Summit County after high school.
“Easier to catch,” he said.
She didn’t get it.
“Mountains? Easier to catch,” he said, dissecting his wit like he was gutting a trout. “Easier than fish? With a dry fly?”
For Gyn, it would’ve been a good opportunity to mention that her father wanted to be a stand-up comedian. He was wanting it in a tiki bar when he met her mother and ordered more mai tais than any comedian should consume while attempting to be humorous. Her mother married him anyway, perhaps attributing his excess to nerves.
Besides, she needed laughs more than money. Her father had left her a cold cereal fortune. The palm frond gig was just something to do.
Gyn never told TJ about her father’s “lessons” a dozen years into her childhood. Divorced from the need to earn a living, he had chosen instead to study perversity. In the morning, when his palm tree was sleeping, he would borrow the frond bonnet and let himself into Gyn’s room. He would sit beside her on the bed and talk of how people who loved each other, like a 40-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl, should touch each other. “Like this,” he showed her. “See?” he said. “You’re doing great.”
Praise warmed her, softened her reluctance. She didn’t know what to do. He was her father, after all. In short order, he would finish his lesson and take his sticky thing back into the hall. Lessons ended after he later got himself arrested and sentenced for marketing himself as a pregnancy massage therapist and massaging more than the pregnancy.
“He got arrested for paraphilia,” Gyn’s mother told her. “He’s going to be away for awhile.”
“Para?” Gyn said.
“He was … messing with kids.”
Gyn listened, but her eyes wandered from one furnishing to another. She wasn’t sure what to say. She was twelve. On the wall, she focused on a painting of a boat at sea. Dead crew. Adrift.
Her parents divorced. Years passed before Gyn, nearing graduation from high school, told her mother how her father had worn the palm fronds, too, and taught her about his sticky thing. Her mother slapped her, and went into a rage, and kicked her out.
Gyn got a job at a daycare center. Elise owned it, and let Gyn sleep there after the kids went home. Gyn saved enough money to afford an apartment, then furniture, then some fake boobs. She had always wanted boobs, but her parents hadn’t chosen to give her anything more than the bare minimum.
As he sipped his Bushmills, TJ told her that he had always liked sliding, down a hill, down a wave, across a frozen lake. Years in pursuit of that flow-mo had led only twice to broken bones. The one in his lower back had almost paralyzed him.
That was why, after their own wedding, six months later, he had to have her sit on top.
They kept the wedding small. She wore the same wide-eyed look. It was the look she saw when she sat at her vanity dresser, staring back. Like her eyes would jump from her skull, if she didn’t hold them back. One time, in the middle of sex, TJ thought that she looked like a mannequin.
She was afraid he would find out about her boobs and lose interest. When he found out, he was okay with it. They were nice, but not like most. Her eyes had the same quality, like they were crippled, unable to close, impelled to open wider and wider.
She came home one day with a camera. She had decided to become a wedding photographer. She didn’t want children.
“But you worked at a daycare center?” TJ said.
“Now I know.”
He didn’t care. She took her photos and people paid her but TJ thought she wasn’t a very good photographer. She would show him her web page where she posted photos for her clients. The photos looked like the work of a voyeur. He never said anything.
“You’re not looking,” she said once.
“They don’t look very happy,” he said.
TJ told me all this over pizza and beers at Booga Lou’s.
He said the people in her photos never looked like they knew they were being photographed. Like surveillance footage. They were often out of focus. She couldn’t make them smile. She was the photographer, but she didn’t know how to josh with people, how to put them at ease, how to make them laugh. TJ said he had suggested she learn a few jokes, but she froze up when she remembered her father.
“I’m a photographer, not a comedian,” she said. “Who tells a joke when they’re taking photos of two people who have been married for an hour and want to go to bed?”
She had a point. She never laughed. Tell a joke? What a joke.
I ate some pizza and sipped my beer.
“Don’t be offended,” I said, “but does she remind you at all of … Morticia?”
“Morticia?”
“Addams. From ‘The Addams Family.’ Played by Carolyn Jones. Kinda hot.”
TJ thought about the question. “Guess I better dial up that show to see what you mean.”
One day two years into TJ’s marriage, we went mountain biking and again for beer. We sat at the rough wood tables, cradling our glasses in our hands, waiting for somebody to start.
“It’s not working,” he said.
“Get a new job,” I said.
“Me. Gyn.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“She’s stunning,” he said. “Just stunning.”
He paused for a second, then continued. “Just … stunning.”
“And … that’s a problem? Because …?”
He said he had never slept with anyone so inert. “Every time I’m with her, it’s like she’s somewhere else. Staring at something inside her head.”
He said he lost it with her the night before. She had gone into facebook and posted a snarky rant about a new winter warming shelter that was being set up in the parking lot of a local church. Small popup shelters would safely house two people during the cold of winter. Gyn complained about the proximity of the shelter to a local school and the risk from “pedophiles and alcoholics and other vagrants.” He said she raised the spectre of rapists roaming outward from their cabins to prey on innocents walking to and from their school.
“A little harsh, huh?” I said.
“You’re shitting me, right? You should have seen the pushback.”
Nothing like dangling out a good opportunity for people to get a good huff on. Sanctimony feels so good, especially when offered on behalf of people we usually ignore with their cardboard signs at the interchange.
TJ’s face was flushed. He shook his head. I realized I didn’t really know TJ. I had never seen this side of him, the side that cared.
“They’re on the street, for chrissakes,” he said. “Living under bridges. It wasn’t as if someone was asking us to put them up in our backyard. It’s a church. Nice people.”
I offered to get him another beer, then left him with his thoughts and a few minutes to catch his breath. When I returned, I jumped to the larger predicament. His realization that his beauty queen was a blank slate.
“You could tell her you’ve got a job offer. At Jackson Hole.”
“What if she starts packing?”
“You can’t dodge this.”
His eyes were all watery. “You’re not a failure,” I said. “You tried. No guarantees, right?”
He moved out, but he didn’t move far. Our place had an extra bedroom, and he ended up there for a couple of weeks until he found a studio to rent. I assumed that they had parted ways.
After TJ married, he had less time to hang with me. Understood. Once they split, we gradually fell back into our after-hours friendship. We talked about all the usual stuff, great trail rides, recent river runs. We never talked about Gyn again. Then he moved, to Jackson Hole. I felt responsible, but wasn’t sure for what.
I was driving past the strip mall with the bowling alley one day when my eye caught the lettering on a sign. It was one of those signs you see jammed in with six or eight others, nothing anyone can read at forty miles an hour. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw it, and turned around and came back to see if I had read it right.
“Shoot Me Now.”
What in the hell kinda business was that? When I got home, I did a computer search. All was revealed. Gyn had a web site, for a business where she would model for people. They would pay to take pictures of her, using her camera. “Clothed or Figure,” she had described the service.
The next day, I drove back to the bowling alley. I got out and walked around. I found nothing with that name on it. I let it go, but a week or so later, I was driving down the same street and up ahead, I saw a woman crossing the street with a bag of groceries. As I got closer, I realized it was Gyn, coming from the food pantry across from a complex of storage lockers.
I pulled over and watched her approach the keypad at the fence around the storage units. A gate activated at her touch, and rolled back. She stepped through.
I pulled my car around and into the road that served the mini-storage place. I pulled off to the side opposite the entrance. I popped a beer from the mini-cooler on my passenger side.
Before long, a car pulled up to the gate. The driver hit the keypad, got back in and drove slowly to one of the units. It was Gyn’s. She stepped out from inside, greeted the man, then led him back inside. Maybe twenty minutes later, he emerged, got in his car and left.
She came back out with a cooler like mine and a folding chair. She set it up, went back inside and came out with a small gas barbecue. She pulled a couple items from the cooler and put them on the grill, opened a beer and sat in her chair.
Not much later, the sun went down, but by then, I was home.
***
Stuart Watson worked at newspapers in Anchorage, Seattle and Portland, and has literary work in Bull, Barzakh, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bending Genres (Best Microfictions nominee), The Writing Disorder, Rattle, The Muleskinner Journal, Reckon Review, Sensitive Skin, The Broadkill Review, Stanchion, Does It Have Pockets? and others, all linked from chiselchips.com. He lives in Oregon.