Short short story by Susan Walsh
In the end, they didn’t split up over a red Ferrari. They split up over the idea of a red Ferrari.
“Well, you’ve lived this long,’ she said. “Without it.”
“Now,” he said, arching his eyebrows, the way he did when he made a pronouncement. “Deprivation is no longer a necessity.”
“Living without something like that is hardly deprivation,” she said, rolling her eyes in the way she had whenever he made a pronouncement that she found ridiculous. “There are better things to do with the money.”
“But it’s a work of art,” he said, knowing he was sending words into the wind. “It’s a lifelong dream.”
“No,” she said. “A dream is something that changes you. Your life. The world. A dream is big.”
She was so sanctimonious. Her dour, unattractive face remained unchanged, shaped by austere views, the polar opposite of his own.
“A dream is anything you want it to be,” he said. “That’s why it’s called a dream.”
It wasn’t a dream that would change the world. He was OK with that. He wasn’t a good enough man to change the world. But it might change his world—and that wasn’t a sin. He was tired of her gray world. He wanted to live life to the way it was meant to be lived. Where passion wasn’t a crime, but a gift. Beauty, freedom, unbridled power, he wanted to experience the feeling of them all before he died.
And, the money had just fallen into their laps. It wasn’t taking from something else.
“It was like it was meant to be,” he said.
“No,” she said. “It was definitely not meant to be.”
© 2017 Susan Walsh
