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"No happy endings" she said and looked up at me.
Is that a question or a statement? She was holding a copy of my last book, a collection of posts from the website Acerbia.com that had been reedited or retuned completely to fit the offline format. Some had been padded out to fill up more than a few pages. She had the show copy I kept around when I was looking to impress, it had been well thumbed and read from in parks. Whenever I did a signing I always used that copy for the reading beforehand.
"They're all really bleak and bitter;" she added "don't you believe in happy endings?"
In my experience there's only one real ending and that's death. Everything else is peaks and troughs of happiness and misery. After you ride off into the sunset you're left with nothing but a horse and some saddlebags, maybe the woman, maybe the money, but you're got a cold night ahead of you. If you want romance then Mark's books are on the next shelf down.
"Yes but there are phases in life and there can be happy endings to those phases."
Name one.
"Well maybe you... maybe you split up a bad relationship. Or maybe you get a new job?"
That’s a bad ending to a bad situation and a new beginning you've just mentioned. Give me an example of a happy conclusion.
She stood there, thumbing through the pages without looking down at them. Her hands subconsciously tugged at the stitching of the binding and her lip curling up deep in thought. I expected her tongue to poke out of the side of her mouth like a Peanuts character concentrating while using scissors or crayons. Finally she closed the book and approached me.
Kissing me firmly on the lips she drew back slightly and said "this conversation is over."
We're still living happily ever after.
Oct.21.2005