TWO
     
     But is that true? You tell me. 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     It’s never been certain.
     It’s anything. 
     Anything’s never been certain.
     Among the anys is one thing that I’m talking about.
     God is that one thing.
     Because, at least as I’ve been told, God is Love. And if there’s 
ever been a definition that confuses a person more than that one, I’ve 
never heard it. “What’s God?” “Well, that’s easy. God is Love.” “Oh 
yeah, smart ass? Then what’s Love?” “… Well, that’s a more difficult 
question.” 
     You might as well say that God is kooboobid. And kooboobid? 
Well, that’s squamp. 
     Isn’t it obvious? God is squamp.
     For a long time, people have been saying that God’s an entirely 
unimaginable one thing that’s composed entirely of three other things 
that are just as big as the one thing that they make when they’re all 
put together. For a much shorter time, I’ve been saying that that 
doesn’t shed any light on Love, which was what made me go looking for 
God in the first place. 
     At nineteen years old, you don’t go playing hide-n-seek with God 
when you have Love to keep your bed warm and your clothes smelling nice. 
And at nineteen years old, I had no Love, and no God, and no faith that 
either would come along. At nineteen years old, what did I have? Just 
squamp and kooboobid.  Just stupid sounding meaninglessness.
     Alas, when you ain’t got God and you ain’t got Love, at least 
you’ve got Prozac and suicide to get you through the night.
     
     But don’t let me start off on the lame foot, though. This isn’t 
a depressing tale of teen angst. Eventually, I’d get — “get” as in 
“have,” and “get” as in “understand” — both Love and God, just as 
soon as I got — again, “got” as in “had,” and “got” as in 
“understood” — my Amelia Waverly. It took a book’s worth of bullshit, 
but I can’t complain. My clothes smell nice, my bed’s warm, and I’ve got 
lots of meaningful things to think and say. 
     Thus, you can safely say that this story is about how Amelia 
Waverly made the life of Simon Socorro a very happy and meaningful one, 
simply by being a living woman, though, she’s a girl who doesn’t exactly 
exist. To the best of my knowledge, she hasn’t ever, and never will 
exist. She’s something worth looking up to and loving. She couldn’t 
possibly exist in a world like this, characterized by a distinct lack of 
things to look up to and love, by a distinct lack of meaning.
     So, feel comforted and discomforted at once: Amelia Waverly 
doesn’t really exist. She won’t be making real people look dull or 
stupid. She doesn’t do anything at all. Not beyond the confines of this 
story and your mind, at least. But those aren’t very confined confines, 
are they? 
     Amelia exists just enough to concern yourself with her. 
     In fact, my wife’s name is Amelia Socorro. She doesn’t like 
being called Mrs. Socorro, or Mrs. Waverly either, for that matter. And 
she’s never liked being called “Amy,” or “Aim,” because she likes 
the sound of her name uncut. When compared with most American girls, she 
has a finely structured self-esteem: she thinks that she’s worth all 
three syllables.
     Because we love each other, and I say her name an awful lot, she 
lets me have a one-syllable discount. She lets me call her Sugar. I 
won’t call her that in this story. It makes her sound stupid.
     Seems odd that making one’s lover sound stupid is an accepted 
expression of affection. Seems to me that it’s more like she’s showing 
passive affection for me, by letting me make her into something like a 
retarded pet. 
     Then again, she calls me Honey-Pie, when my name is Simon. 
Calling me Honey-Pie is like paying me an extra syllable every time she 
refers to me. In other words, she’s working extra hard to make me sound 
like a serious shit-for-brains. 
     I suppose I’ve played my part as a shit-for-brains for love more 
often than I’ve played the part of the heroic prince. I've had my share 
of ex-girlfriends. I’ve had my share of unrequited loves. And I went 
around believing that unrequited love was the only true love for long 
enough to classify me as an authentic sap. That’s all true.
     One Easter, I drove out in the middle of the night to save the 
life and win the love of a girl who, soon enough, on one Christmas Eve, 
would drive out in the middle of the night to intentionally break my 
heart. The crime that deserved me this treatment? I still loved her. 
When she’d gotten tired of love as a whole, I refused to hate her. I 
went down thinking that love was a thing that couldn’t be a crime. But, 
everything’s a crime: everything that a person can do.
     After graduating from the hell of high school, I loved a girl so 
much that I wanted to be her friend, even when she was engaged to some 
hometown creep. We’d been friends. We’d been more than friends. You 
should see the touching crap she wrote in my yearbook. It would make 
your bottom lip tremble. It’d make you scream, “Why didn’t you marry 
that girl – she loved you!” We had a connection, and I didn’t want that 
to go away because of marriage, especially with everyone reading the 
yearbook and screaming that I’d let the love of my life slip away. 
     In college, in the pursuit of friendship, I wrote her a jovial 
letter, to rekindle an adolescent kind of communication. In response, 
her fiancé wrote me an adolescent kind of threat. He didn’t capitalize 
or punctuate. His online address was Skulsmasher. The subject said: 
“back off homo,” which was interesting, since he wouldn’t have been 
telling me to back off, if he really thought I was a homo. Seems that he 
didn’t want anyone being friends with his lovely wife. And I’d better 
not go shopping at the local mall anytime soon. She worked there, and 
stalking is a crime. So if he heard from his lovely wife that I was 
stalking her, he’d track me down at my artsy college, and kick my lily 
ass. 
     I went down thinking that friendship was one thing that couldn’t 
be wrong. 
     The secret of this world is that everything’s wrong more often 
than anything’s right.
     
     I’ve been a shit-for-brains for love before. But, what kind of 
shit-for-brains am I now? I’m writing a story that will immortalize a 
girl that never lived. How’s that for a shit-for-brains? 
     In fact, this shit-for-brains has all kinds of power. Take 
Skulsmasher as an example. Right now, he’s blue and dead. Not so long 
ago, he was drunk, and put himself into a car crash with a tractor-
trailer that said GOD on the side. Skulsmasher’s leg bones ended up 
inside his chest cavity. And who’s to say whether that’s true or not? 
     What happened to his lovely wife? After the accident, she found 
out Skulsmasher had been cheating on her, with a waitress for a seafood 
restaurant. The waitress? She went out through the windshield and in 
through the O in GOD. Her skull was smashed on the side. 
     But is that true? You tell me. I don’t know anymore.
     What I do know is, Fate has three ways of imposing its will on 
our insides, of making its presence known. That’s coincidence, irony, 
and poetic justice: the sugar, alcohol, and cocaine of life. We’re all 
addicted to the thrills and the slumps of each one. And after the 
tragedy, the lovely wife, his angry widow, called my dorm room, looking 
for a real friend, looking for me, Simon. But it wasn’t just Cheryl that 
I heard calling. It was Fate. It was God. 
     It was saying: “Here I am! See what I did? That shit don’t 
happen by itself!”
     Look, kids, no hands!
     ***
     
J. WILDER KONSCHAK
     
BURYING AMELIA WAVERLY
     
3