Keith J. Powell
Bog Baby Pant Rip
Alan and I meet for coffee and both recognize the woman with the expensive stroller and cruel French braid as someone we went to high school with, even though we can’t pluck her name from the tips of our tongues (she ran in a different circle than us but all the attractive girls had a certain baseline fame in those younger days) and so I suggest saying hello but Alan shakes his head and when I rise anyway he snatches his coffee and zips out the door and I don’t know why he rushes off but before the door to Deja Brew even swings closed I’m texting our group chat, telling everyone how Alan and I bumped into a girl he’d had a crush on in high school and when she waved at us he ran away spilling his vanilla iced latte with extra whip on his pants and everyone is LOLing at the thought of Alan soggy and dripping with cream and asking what happened next so I say Alan got flustered, tripped and fell in the doorway splitting the seat of his Brooks Brothers, and that he tried to act like he wasn’t embarrassed but I could tell he wanted to cry and by this time Alan is in his car reading this unspooling thread, trying to set the record straight, but it’s too late, too too late, the yarn is already braided into my cannon of Alan lore — like the summer he and his college roommate spent grooving to Santana, shaving each other’s chest (the Summer of Smooth) or the day he went to the office wearing a fringed woolen poncho and ten-gallon hat (he’d heard Wild West was the new business cas) — and understand, I do wonder why I can’t stop spinning these fantastical Alan tales especially considering he’s kept so many shameful truths from my drinking years but I’m nowhere near prepared to pull at that loose string and instead continue onward, explaining how this isn’t even the first time Alan’s fallen and ripped his pants running from a girl — that in high school it happened so much his nickname was Bog Baby Pant Rip (autocorrect swaps “big” for “bog”), and they all say “yeah I can see that” while Alan swears that I’m a liar, a maniac, and everyone replies “sure, Bog Baby, sure, why would he make that up?”
Keith J. Powell is co-founder of Your Impossible Voice and has recent or forthcoming work in SoFloPoJo, Heavy Feather Review, BULL, 100 Word Story, and The Disappointed Housewife. Find more at www.keithjpowell.com.
