NICHOLAS GRIDER / GIRLS’ NIGHT
CHOICES
→ Sometimes a girl → Sometimes a girl wishes she had just stayed home (in several senses of the phrase) and every dive bar is a small Wisconsin with brick walls
Girl’s name is Katie → girl’s name is not Katie → girl’s a bartender at Dirty Dozen Bar on the worn out northern edge of metro Cincinnati, girl says she’s from wherever and not here forever, girl’s good at her job → girl’s a woman aged 34 who says she doesn’t mind being called “girl” but very much minds it, Katie/Kathleen/Katherine/Kaitlyn/Kyle is willing →
to negotiate with reality if she gets to put her feet up, in an alternate timeline Katie is McKayleigh and ends up in western Tennessee as a pageant queen but western Tennessee is close to certain kinds of people in northeast Arkansas whose parents who got married at Taco Bell and who are fluent in chemical labels and bad things happen both to good people and people also known as McKayleigh, girl’s a girls’ girl → probably not a government girl’s girl deep undercover to locate and neutralize an amiable dude named Josh before he transcends into medium-sized godhood (there are levels to it) → Katie/Kathleen comes alive →
there is a “place” for somewhere (for us, for bartenders who quit)
→ Katie/Kathleen gets married
→ Katie/Kathleen gets “married”
→ Katie/Kathleen gets married to a nice man named Josh (not Joshua) Green (fka Daniel Abrams, aka Jeff whose dad has ideas about men being men) who says he converted to Christianity from Judaism and to heterosexuality from bisexuality (the through-line is renouncing things, the other through-line is desperation) based on some highly formative young man trials by fire → Katherine Parker-Green is married to a laidback guy named Josh who sometimes goes to his priest for counsel about if you change yourself how do you know if it works → Katie dies sometimes violently and sometimes peacefully depending on which podcast host tells the story → Kathleen gets comprehensively divorced
→ McKayleigh is a hallucination built by angels in the form of a giant feathered eyeball but later made redundant by eldritch AI → Kate is a real person?
→ Kate is heaven’s favorite real person
→ Kate is heaven’s favorite real person who has probably never killed anyone
→ Kathy is not here right now but you can leave a message → Kathleen is a choice made a young woman with bad tissue who no longer wants to be known as a girl
→ who no longer wants to be known as a girl, as a girl (as a question?)
→ Katie lives above a bar and changes her name to Carla in order to escape everything but fate and sleeps fitfully and her name used to be [redacted] but that was a thousand years ago and a girl’s got as many old names as she’s got destinies, Carla?
→ Carla knows how to arrive
→ Carla knows how to arrive and how to leave, how to get in
→ Carlson knows how to get in and out, how to live and die, and
→ Carla wipes the bar, and as he wipes the bar she tells the priest who’s there for a drink about how the most difficult part of your life being a custom-made Choose Your Own Adventure is:
→ it requires a world in which to have
→ adventures,
→ it requires the power to force the world to play along
→ and also
→ Carla knows the world
→ Carla knows the world knows
→ Carla knows that she knows the priest is fucking her husband Josh and she’s cool with that because he’s a lot less prone to tantrums now and anyway considering the priest is a priest she doesn't have to worry about
→ considering the priest is a priest she doesn't have to worry about frequent testing for STDs (unless she does) and she asks the priest if she does, which is a question he both does and does not know how to answer but because priests also just wanna have fun his answer is to finish off what’s left in the bottle, which is a not inconsiderable amount, before putting all the money in his wallet on the clean bar and telling Kat either God is real
→ either God is real or the world is and either way you‘ll end up face down on main street with your throat slit, so which one do you choose?
→ do you choose?
DECISIONS
Sometimes a girl’s best friend is a clean left hook so quick she doesn’t bother to put down the wet towel in her right hand in case she needs it to mop up a small miracle of blood.
Nicholas Grider is a writer and artist whose story collections include Misadventure (A Strange Object/Misadventure) and Forest of Borders (Malarkey).