The Afterthought | Teen Ink

The Afterthought

March 22, 2010
By Anonymous

THE AFTERTHOUGHT (PART I)--> It occurred after the original thought.

"So, would you like to go to the dance with me tonight?" a boyish smile hints from behind a telephone. But I cannot see this. I can only insinuate from the tone.
"No; your girlfriend just moved away and now you're lonely. I know it. I'm just the runner-up." Honesty is the best policy, plays the record in my head.
"You're my closest friend who's a girl, and it'll be fun." The smile is growing weary with my inquisition. The final blow is coming...
"Honesty is the best policy, and you've proved to be a fine citizen of morals." I wipe the sarcasm off of my tile floor with a used towel. That darned fluid never ceases to exude from my lips.
I hang up.
I'm the afterthought.

THE AFTERTHOUGHT (PART II)--> It occurred as a stemming of the original thought, in a reminiscing sort of way.
The phone line was dead as a doorknob. The boyish smile robed himself with a soft robe and nestled in his bed, left to stare at the cottage cheese walls of his room.
Here in the silence, everything turned to something else. Dressers were Australian wheat fields that shifted with the patterns of the sea. The clock was suddenly made of duct tape and coconuts that fell from an island nestled deep in the East. The floor was a sky with white, white paint and blue, blue clouds made of bugs with shilling wings.
Here in the silence, he let himself muddle with insanity. Slowly, they waltzed on the broken shards of a reality... Break, break. The shards dripped through his ceiling that was a floor.
Break, break: went the plates downstairs. China's finest china was sent to its demise on a twin set of cottage cheese walls in the downstairs kitchen. Each night ended this way. His storybook of the civil war of mental capacity and the lullaby his mother supplied with her talents spurred by fury.
Furry fury. He turned the phrase over in his mind like a blueberry he had picked last spring, until a bee had stung him and he had tossed it into the bush that conceived it. The bee flew away; job well done.
And suddenly he remembered-- blueberry shampoo. Who makes that? Who would own that? Blueberry shampoo? What the...
She owned it. She smelled of it.
He turned her over in his mind, but the bees with shilling wings were frightened by the lullabies his mother kept resounding. The bees stung him at all sides and he was once again alone, with the scent of blueberry somehow on his lips.
She would always be the afterthought.


The author's comments:
"There is not one thing that can be viewed a single way."

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