Writing For G.O.T

New Story--Undying addition

1144 words

Shayna had always felt that in a small town like Davies nothing serious would ever happen, except for Father Flannigan’s scary sermons. Most of other things she had heard were just talk, amounting to almost nothing much.

Now, here she was, the cause of the biggest event of the year, if not the decade, her divorce from Ben. It wasn’t just any old divorce, too. It was the kind of divorce that shook the earth from its axis and divided the town into two.

In the courtroom, people had gazed at both of them. They asked her again, and she agreed again. “Yes, it is so. It happened just like that. The whole thing was my fault, too.” It was because the man who was supposedly her lawyer had told her to say that, and she did. In front of the entire town, too, for the courtroom was too small to hold everyone, so the court personnel had installed loud speakers in the yard, where the sounds of the proceedings were piped, including Shayna’s sobs and the fart that was emitted from the court stenographer, which she later swore came from her machine.

Afterward, Shayna’s mother thought Ben had bribed the lawyer to get away with paying nothing to Shayna. Shayna’s mother was certain that Ben was sleeping with Alice, on the side, too.

“I am sorry I caused so much trouble,” Shayna said to her mother in the kitchen at breakfast, after the divorce, after not going out at all for a week for she had decided to let everything quiet down. Staying inside for a week was a fair price to pay for getting a divorce in Davies.

“Lord knows, Shayna, it wasn’t your fault at all,” said her mother, as she poured hot milk on to her bran cereal and stirred the mixture with her spoon for she didn’t like them crispy. Of course, she’d stand up for her daughter; it was her God-given duty.

After breakfast, Shayna went up to her room to in a hurry to change her fluffy bunny rabbit slippers, which Ben had given her on her last birthday. She thought as she took them off, she should give them to Goodwill, but that, too, would be fodder for the town gossip. So what? she thought. This town is crazy, I’ll just go to the movies for the day where no one will see me in the dark.

She entered the movie house after the movie, Wonder Woman, had started. She sneaked inside and sat at the back. What she hadn’t counted on was that the girl at the box office could call a few people and those people would call other people, and eventually, her watching the Wonder Woman movie would be the business of Davies. When she came out of the movie house, she saw the crowd hanging out by the door.

“Oh, no, that’s crazy,” said her mother when she came home and told her about all the hoopla. “This town is going nuts. Movies, divorces, funerals, weddings, they love them all.”

But one day, a month later, Ben showed up at her door. Shayna’s father let him in. If her mother wasn’t suffering from diarrhea that day and wasn’t in the bathroom when the doorbell rang, she would have shooed Ben away, but that wasn’t meant to be. Shayna’s father still liked Ben and saw him as the son he wanted to have.

While Ben came and sat down at the usual armchair that he used to sit when he and Shayna were going together, Shayna stood at the door of the living room and stared at Ben. Ben didn’t look at her first. And when he did she could see him as he was, the man a stranger to her, whose face she forgot she ever noticed. With her looks, she could have had anyone, she thought, and she somehow knew he’d visit, for old habits are hard to break.

He said to her father, and not to Shayna, “Let’s try again. We were both at fault. We acted too quickly and childishly. After Shayna, I met another woman but she had a dog who didn’t like me, and I don’t want to be mauled by a dog.”

“If you don’t leave now, you’ll be mauled by me!” said Shayna’s mother, rubbing her belly. She had to show up to defend Shayna, no matter what her emergency could be. “My daughter is not your plaything.”

Shayna didn’t know who the other woman was and she didn’t care. She didn’t care about Ben anymore, either, and she didn’t even want to live in Davies.

In her dreams, big cities called her, San Francisco leading the list.

“Sorry, Ben,” she said. ”There will be no seconds. You'll have to learn to live with dogs for a change. And I’m leaving Davies, soon, anyway.’”

“Where are you going?” asked Ben.

Shayna shrugged and said, “None of your business.”

And that was that.

Before she took the plane to San Francisco, Shayna went to church, but not Father Flannigan’s church. She had enough of his sermons. So she had picked a Baptist place, although any other church would do that didn’t force her into a confessional. She wanted the town of Davies to realize how awful it had been for her, so awful that she could change her church.

She wanted to go to San Francisco because she wanted a job, and she needed social situations where she could start anew by introducing herself to the right sort of men. Men who wouldn’t know or care about her divorce history and her reputation in Davies.


It didn’t feel easy at first, wrenching herself from Davies for she hadn’t known any other town, but her mother encouraged her and lent her the money she needed for the plane and a bit more until she found a job.

On the day of her departure, goodbyes were exchanged while her father stood silently to one side, but he drove her to the bus that would take Shayna to the airport.

In the airport, as she waited to board, Shayna watched from the tall glass windows the airplanes pass before the sun after they took off, and she hoped she had reached the apex of some great arc in her life.

When she took her seat inside the plane, the passenger next to her struck up a conversation and she responded. He was a tall vigorous man with curly brown hair, a rugged Roman nose and the physique of a football player. He was a man’s man, and Shayna couldn’t help herself to compare him to Ben.

Later, when the plane landed, she lost sight of him in the hubbub of the airport, but she had made it. She had left Davies, and she was now here in San Francisco…