Buddy

I am going to begin posting my short stories that I write...it should be fun and it will make this blog more of a place to try out creative ideas, which I want it to become. So that should be fun...I start out with a much lighter-hearted one, most of my stories have dealt with harder subject matter. I was getting tired of writing hard stories, so I tried my hand at a comedy...so please allow me to introduce my very first attempt at writing comdey...don't laugh (will, I mean laugh, but not like that ;) )

~The Author
Tawney had only met Buddy for 45 seconds and he ruined her life forever. She had been perched in her favorite eucalyptus tree for the last two hours trying to compose a poem. It had not been going well. This was evident because all the leaves from where she sat had been torn from the branches leaving a bald spot in the tree and leaf litter on the ground. It was also evidenced by the fact that in her notebook there were only three words and of those three, two had been crossed out.

Now Buddy was the sort of person who enjoyed seeing odd people doing odd things, thus when he saw the teenage girl with purple sunglasses sitting up in a bald spot of a tree, he enjoyed it. So, unknown to the girl-poet, he sat and watched her rip leaves and deliberately scratch out words while he ate an entire bag of potato chips. After a while, Buddy thought he would very much like to meet this girl. However, the potato chips he had just eaten happened to have been Lay’s Sour Cream and Onion potato chips and he knew that the only thing worse than onion breath, was onion powder breath. The skinny boy sat down rather dejected and pulled his plaid overshirt a bit closer to his chest. Then it occurred to him that she, given the height of the tree, would necessarily be rather far away from his mouth and so the chance of her smelling his breath was greatly reduced. This gave him much encouragement. He was going to meet the girl in the eucalyptus tree.

Meanwhile, Tawney had not an inkling of her impending doom. She had thought, being in a eucalyptus tree, to write a poem about koalas and she had finally started to get some momentum on it. Only, not very many words rhyme with koala, or Australia or even emu. This last one was only related by merit of it being an animal from Australia, a line of thinking she had taken up when a poem strictly about koalas had failed her. For lack of proper words to rhyme with Australian fauna, she decided to give up entirely.

She lept out of the tree and landed on directly in front of Buddy.

She was startled.

He also, felt surprised.

He scratched his head, but then extended his hand and almost said, “Hello, my name is Buddy” when he remembered his onion breath. He quickly resolved never to open his mouth, so he simply stood with his hand sticking out in the air. Tawney stared at the outstretched hand, she was not quite sure what to do with it. At first she thought about shaking it. This seemed the best option, but what if he was one of those sleezy boys her brother had told her about and as soon as she touched him, he would run away with her and she would never see her family again. She considered this for a while but then realized that this particular boy was likely to be beaten in a fistfight by a nine-year-old and she was much larger than a nine-year-old by at least three years, so her fear of that was offset. In fact, he was much more likely to be one of those street magicians who might electrocute her when she shook his hand, but since she was not on a street and much more thinking on the matter would lead to a truly awkward social situation, she decided to risk it.

She shook his hand.

It took Buddy a moment to shake her hand back, he was rather shocked she had actually done it after waiting so long to get around to it. He knew if he had might have spoken it could have made all of that go faster, but that was simply not an option. Not with a bag of onion powder flavored chips sitting on his breath.
Tawney let go and stood there, looking at the boy. She expected him to introduce himself now. She imagined that perhaps he had been a part of a community where words came after handshakes, or what sort of odd or strange things must have happened to him to keep him from being able to talk, never in her life imagining it to be something half so boring as a bag of Lay’s potato chips. Still no words were forthcoming.

“I’m Tawney,” she finally said.

He said nothing, but smiled. It was a cute smile. Maybe he was hiding some terrible secret, behind that smile and he was afraid to speak for fear it would all come tumbling out.

“Can you speak?” she asked.

He nodded, but never opened his mouth. Maybe he was a very young monk and had taken a vow of silence, and now his heart was breaking with love of her but he could never speak to her or marry her for monks also must be chaste. Chaste seemed like a strange word, she wrote it in her book.

Buddy saw her writing and wondered what she could be doing. He saw her write the word “chaste” and wondered if she was reminding herself of her virtues. Then he realized this was a very ridiculous and self-conceited thought and resolved to think it no more. He stood there a bit longer, hoping to hear her say one thing more before he left. She fulfilled this desire.

“What is your name?”

Here Buddy was in quite a bind. This comment required an answer and it required an answer that went beyond a simple head nod or shake. He knew what he was about to do next was mad, but he had no other option. He covered his mouth with his hand and said it much louder than he had intended to.

“Buddy!”

And then Buddy ran away, to quickly escape the shame of the breath that must surely have slipped between his fingers, clenched as tightly together as they were.
Tawney watched him run away. A thousand questions about Buddy raced through her mind. She was utterly intrigued by the boy she had met for only 45 seconds. Suddenly all sorts of words began to fly into her mind. Glasses. Scratching. Monk. Circus Performer. Lion Tamer. Lost Love. Secret Love. Forbidden Love. Runaway. Siberia. Spy. Lonely. Orphan. Hermit. Egypt. Ancient Pharoah. Second Life. Time Traveller. And many other words of even more extravagant meanings and lofty expectations entered and stuck in her mind. She wrote furiously all night and well into the next day and even then she felt she had only barely scratched the surface of this boy and all he was.

She had fallen in love with him, that much was certain. Not the romatic sort of love, but the obsessive sort of love where one cannot help but think about the person they love because they are intrigued and fascinated and thinking about them and their many possible lives has become a sort of fantasy, like a video game, but in the mind. And it completely takes over your life so that you never can have it back the way it was before this falling in love happened, and in some ways your life is forever ruined by a chance meeting. This was exactly what had happened to Tawney, and she knew she could never for the rest of her life stop being in love with Buddy.