Photo by Unsplash+
by Jessica Klimesh
There were no gifts last year (or any previous year)—no tiered cake or pink champagne, no celebratory pomp at all—so this year I asked the mayor if the town might throw me a party, which he agreed to, even though, he pointed out, “It’s rather self-serving, don’t you think?” I admitted that it was, but what I couldn’t even begin to explain was that, unlike him, I had once lived in a world where people had names, where yearly milestones were met with fanfare and hubbub.
The mayor eyed me curiously and then, after an unrestrained giggle, said, “It’ll actually be delightful to have something to celebrate during the depressing month of January, with its snow-gray mist and vacant darkness, not to mention the commencement of another damn year to remind us how desperately fleeting time is,” adding that he would organize a committee to decorate the streets and buildings with streamers and balloons of tangerine, turquoise, and red to really make the town pop with color.
A nameless reporter from a nameless newspaper interviewed me, wanting to know more about the strange upcoming shindig and, specifically, what my relationship with the mayor was—a worthless insinuation since, without a name, I was unidentifiable, rendering any gossip useless—and I explained to her that it was simply a celebration of the day, twenty years back, when I’d gone missing, just up and left my previous life and drove my Ford straight off the edge of the world, ending up in this quaint and peculiar alternate universe, in a place without a name and without cell service, both of which had immediately appealed to me. “But what was the catalyst?” the stunned reporter asked because, like the mayor, she also had no understanding of the kind of realm I’d left, so I recounted to her how people there were always competing to be the crème de la crème, to see their names beaming boldly on a marquee sign, and it all just became so tiresome that I decided to disappear, and now each year I celebrate that fortuitous day.
Naturally, the reporter never asked my name (why would she?), but it later occurred to me that, even if she had, it had been so long that I wouldn’t have been able to tell her anyway.
Jessica Klimesh is a writer and editor whose flash appears in a variety of literary journals. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com.
