Radha & Faron

Faron's friend had pointed Radha out to him, saying correctly, "There's a girl you think is cute." But Radha was more than just cute. Her bright green eyes were almost always hidden by a lovely, soft mess of scarlet hair. Her smile was rare and stunning, and her skin was flawless and cream white. She was gorgeous, and even before speaking a word to her, Faron had fallen madly and superficially in love.

Radha had kept mostly to herself, purposely distancing herself from the unpleasant masses surrounding her. Still, there was something about Faron that appealed to her. She wasn't all that impressed by how he looked or dressed, and she didn't know much about his personality, but she liked him without any provocation. He seemed kind, maybe, or compassionate. She couldn't articulate why, exactly, but she liked him well enough to sometimes seek out his company. She didn't know quite how ecstatic that made him feel.

It wasn't long before study breaks and intermittent McDonald's lunches gave way to long dinners and movies and nighttime drives to nowhere in particular. Radha found she had an easy rhythm with Faron, and Faron found that he had very real reasons to be enamored of the pretty girl. They grew closer as they pushed the rest of the world aside. They began to orbit one another, to become the center of each other's universe. They began to adore each other. And their love blossomed and it grew and it became the most wonderful thing either could imagine.

And one day, Faron bought a ring and asked Radha to marry him. She said 'yes.'

They were swift in their plans and marriage followed mere weeks after proposal. The ceremony was without frills and without audience. There was no reception. Neither felt to the need to celebrate in public. It was enough to just be wed. So they were. And they were happy. For a moment.

Almost instantly, however, cracks began to surface. Things had been rushed. They didn't know each other well enough at all. Radha found she hated Faron's taste in television. Faron discovered his beloved wife was a virulent racist. Radha was an unrepentant gun nut. Faron was a pathetic momma's-boy. The two found they were incompatible. They loathed one another. Their marriage floundered. Their time together was brief and unpleasant. They decided, as quick as they had forged their bond, to get divorced.

There was a mutual dissatisfaction that made the ending easier, but it still led to hurt feelings, to sadness and to loneliness. On their first night apart, each felt the absence shaking in their stomach, rocking their nerves and leaving them frayed and irritable and angry at each other and at themselves. It was a horrible thing, like being poisoned or diagnosed with cancer. They felt like they were dying. Their union had been shattered, their lives were tossed into a tizzy of disarray. It was a good decision they'd made, they both knew it. But it was a good decision under the worst of circumstances. Radha wished she'd never met Faron and, of course, Faron felt exactly the same. It was a wretched time.

They had pressed on past the worst of it, though. Radha made an effort to send all of the wedding gifts back to their friends and families. Faron found a lawyer who would help them on the cheap. Faron made his announcement at work, issuing a sort of press release to let everybody know at once. Radha let people know in a more private manner. The sympathy was slight; everyone knew they had rushed things. There was a vehement rush of "I told you so" to the poor exiled couple. Faron and Radha had expected it, though. It still didn't make it any easier.

There were gifts left over, too, that had no card or giver's identity attached to them. The remainders were nothing spectacular... a puke green blender and a small powder blue iron. Radha gave them to Faron. He didn't want them, but neither did she. So he took them back to the store, a twenty-four hour monstrosity, in the middle of a sleepless night. He felt like a zombie, shot through with insomnia and depression, wandering about endless aisles in a stupor. He knew he looked a fright... hair in a rat's nest of discontent, stained white t-shirt, dirty jeans, flip-flops and bright red lines variegating his bleary eyes. He was hallucinating, he assumed, but he couldn't be sure. A dour man was giving him advice as he stood by a display case full of watches.

Horrible chintzified versions of good songs played overhead as janitors scrubbed the linoleum around him. This dour man, another shopper, was speaking over Faron's shoulder. He was a bit taller than Faron, but hunched and sallow. His face was sharpened like a vulture's beak and he wore tiny round glasses with milky lenses. He was missing teeth, and looked somewhat, Faron assessed, like a modern day warlock. Faron didn't like him. He didn't like the man's cackling voice or his beakish nose or his dry-rot coffee breath. But he stood still and listened to the dour man's advice. It was horrible advice. Faron's brain was too addled and sleep deprived to process it, anyway. He waited for the dour man to stop sputtering. And when the man had finished talking, Faron began to walk away.

The dour man grabbed Faron's shoulder and crazily demanded some sort of payment, some sort of tribute for the advice he'd so generously offered up. In a daze, Faron turned around and shoved the old man square in the shoulders. There was no anger to his assault, just a mechanized motion that took the dour man by surprise. The man stumbled and Faron moved in. Inexplicably, Faron snatched the little round spectacles from the dour man's face and mangled them in his hand. He didn't change his expression or his posture. He just calmly wrecked the old man's glasses. And his victim was stunned. His brown teeth and empty gum sockets were exposed in surprise. He was horrified. Faron dropped the mangled mess of the man's glasses onto the ground and stomped a few times upon the remains for good measure. The glass popped and made satisfying grinding noises as Faron dug his heel in the twisted metal. The dour man, absolutely mortified, fled the strange scene and left his assailant to himself.

Faron looked down at the old man's smashed glasses. What was there, in place of hunks of wire and shards of lens gristle, was a tiny tribe of spidery men, hairy and many-limbed and barely as big as Faron's thumb. They were obviously the product of an overtaxed mind, but they seemed real enough to the mummified divorcee. He crouched down by them, watching them leap like trained fleas and squeak out echoes of what the dour man had said. "Go back to her," they shouted, but it was the advice of the insane. Faron took a deep breath and tried to disbelieve the tiny creatures' existence. It didn't work, but it's failure didn't surprise Faron in the least. "Go back to her!" they shouted again. But Faron wasn't stupid enough to listen to them.

He decided to go home and try, in vain, to get a halfway decent night of sleep. As he made his way to the dimly lit atrium, he saw Radha walking in. And his heart began to race. He felt guilt swell up in his belly, the guilt of having surrendered so easily. He suddenly felt as if the entire conflagration was of his own design. He wondered what he could have done better, what he could have done to avert this disaster that their lives had become. And so he approached his soon-to-be-ex-wife with a heaviness in his heart and a sincere and worthless apology on his tongue.

She didn't even look in his direction as she walked on past.