The funniest part of immortality, Elise often thought, was the way you
found new ways to break up with people. All the more so for someone with
Elise's mistrust of marriage. She had had dozens of last names, but none
of them were gifts.
    The second funniest part was that she never got better at guessing who
else was, as she put it, taking the long way home. The immortals she did
meet had nothing in common with each other.

    She met Holt while arranging to auction off a deeply confused piece of
art by a minor Surrealist. The dealer looked at her, then the painting,
then each one several more times. He laughed and pulled out a fading photo
showing her in a studio with the canvas and its creator. Cyclical fashion
had left her looking anew just as she had back then. "It's okay," Holt
said sagely, "I haven't adjusted to cameras either, yet."
    A road trip was quickly arranged.

    In Death Valley, dust annulling the horizon, Elise told Holt about
breaking up with a sailor by taking him there and waiting. "He was always
straddling sea and land anyway. I figured I would make him choose."
    "And you knew what he would say?"
    "Well, it's not very nice here." She coughed theatrically.

    They rigorously did not sleep together.

    Holt drove the most boring stretch while Elise put a complicated braid
into her hair. "Funny that I remember this," she said. "The rest of that
century is a little dicey." Knuckles white from dodging an unexpected
truck, Holt just hmmed.
    Stretching their legs in Kansas, Holt said, "This used to be a lot
more work."

    "How many wives?"
    "Twenty-five exactly, with good long breaks between."
    "Needed a rest?"
    "No. Needed to be fair to the next one."

    Omens struck Holt as hilarious, once you had an eye for them. "It's
like there's all this information, right in front of their faces, and they
never know! Or else I've gone mad, which would also be funny." So when
they saw one, like roman candles bursting in the air just above an exit
ramp, they heeded it. This led mostly to terrible meals and a few map fail-
ures. Holt patiently jotted each one down to search for the big picture.
    At an art gallery near Ithaca, he found something: a photograph digit-
ally altered to show the Chimera facing down some sort of wolf-deer, its
blurred expression both ravenous and terrified. "I've seen this before,"
he said. Holt pressed his business card on the gallery owner along with
his money, urging that it get to the artist when possible. Elise just
asked that it be stored where she wouldn't see it in the rearview.

    Weeks later they parted in Vancouver, Elise headed to look in on an
ex's elderly grandson and Holt headed to an estate sale farther south.
    "I had all this time to work up a goodbye line, and I didn't", Elise
said, raising the palm of one hand in a fractional shrug.
    "Then save it for someone else, once you think of it. Or email me.
Email! By god, I still don't believe it."

written for Jessica Benton in my living room 9/17/08

At some point I realized that telling people to pick "words or phrases" was misleading-- by "phrases" I meant to say that "ice cream cone" was basically one word, not that they should compose entire clauses (especially since their hard work was likely to be lost in the meat grinder). But by then, I already had the backlog of requests that I'm still going through. These, for example, were on a scrap of paper that I think I got in October of 2001 from someone passing through Harvard Square. Maybe I'll even find her!

The problem with long phrases is that with more slaloming to do, I wobble faster, and it does feel more like just an exercise. After the opening I realized that I had just written a breakup road-trip story for someone else (#87) and desperately tried to head elsewhere. Consistency of tone and character, already endangered by the whole format, became an even lower priority.

Even so I only got one of the phrases in verbatim; it's easy to see where each of the others comes in, though.

I don't know if "elderly grandson" is sensible, but it made me smile, so I wrote it. That also explains the very last line; I seem to have a taste for anti-climax lately.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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