The Proposed

Elijah Sparkman

At the Ghost Bar, I got on one knee and proposed to Mary Paige. “I’ve never been this happy in my life. Will you marry me?” Drapes slithered across the wallpaper beside us. The mirror behind the bar, dirty. About fifteen people were there on the third floor of that old castle. We never do this unless there’s at least that many. Everyone clapped. Mary Paige cried. A man in a suit gave me three pats on the back, said, “First round is on me.” We got about four rounds out of him. Champagne. Old Fashioneds. The man in the suit had been married before. On a lake. Summer breeze. Surprisingly brilliant weather. The cutest cheeks. Never did work out. 

     Hungover the next day, we waited until the evening, and I drove us to a brewery. On the Ohio River in Cincinnati. I said, “Mary Paige, nothing in the world makes me feel the way you do. Will ya?” A woman in a green dress told us the night was on her and invited us into her fold, an assemblage of cousins and siblings and nieces and nephews. There was this woman with pearls around her neck. I said, “I’m going to buy pearls like those for Mary Paige one day. I promise.” She said, “Well, aren’t you two just the sweetest thing? Here, take these.” I held those tiny balls in my hands, and I felt like I could sell a cloud to heaven, water to a fire hydrant, the way my voice started at my soul and burst out of my lungs and traveled through my throat into the eardrums of the people around us. 

     Cincinnati is hilly. And not populous. I reckon that’s why, when we walked the bridge from Covington, Kentucky on Day 3, we encountered some folks in Conway’s Brunch Haven from Day 1. I was about to pull out the ring, my dead mother’s, when they came up to us. “How are the honeymooners doing, hey? Heading back up to Toledo soon?” We played it off and got a beermosa out of it, but the whole thing spooked me.

     In the parking lot, my fingers flexed against our gold Chrysler 2000, the wind above us doing somersaults. I told Mary Paige, “I’m ready to move on. I’m ready to pawn this shit and try our luck in Pittsburgh. This town, its hills. It’s sparse. It’s not for me.” Mary Paige said, “You shmuck fucker, this is why I could never marry you in real life. Have some gall.” Her words hurt for reasons I couldn’t understand. In no way did I want to marry Mary Paige. She was a friend of an acquaintance who I’d gotten high with behind the Target back home. My favorite thing about her was that she was quiet, in a way akin to an opossum. She liked the night, and she did her own thing. Before this rendezvous, we were good at chewing on Vicodins and drinking El Gato Negro in silence. I felt safe with her. She was never going to say something that would get me buzzing and negatively charge my imagination. Which has always been a problem for me. Where my imagination can go and those forces that try to connect with it. They throw me off. Into dark places. If I’m not careful. My imagination can get the best of me like that. 

     The questions: What is a schmuck fucker? Did I want to marry Mary Paige, but I was too dumb to realize it? And what was I doing wrong in Cincinnati, that could be then done right? Underneath me, the yellow line of the parking space was cracked into incongruency by the blacktop. Cheap shit. The smell of fried something—something bland—a potato. Mary Paige: I looked into her eyes, irises swimming like tadpoles in a country road trench. The people we end up with during the most important moments of our lives. 

     When we got married… Or, I shouldn’t say that, because you get married at a wedding. When we got proposed, not just in Cincinnati that weekend, but in what turned out to be St. Louis, and then New Orleans, and Baton Rouge, and Lafayette after that, you should have seen the looks on people’s faces. Googly-eyed. Curvy mouth smiles. It was like they had something to believe in. Whatever pain they’d been experiencing. We became a conduit for their hope. There, in life, were two people who could actually agree on something. Their love for one another. And weren’t cowards. Me and Mary Paige acted on intuition. When people saw us do what we did, in this spontaneous-to-them manner, it made me feel like it was worth it. Like they could do it, too.

© Variant Literature Inc 2023