prompt: forever, title: her best to understand in misc. flash fiction

The sailor indeed said “Brandy, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be… but my life, my love and my lady is the sea”. That much is entirely accurate, but you gotta understand, that’s about all of it that’s true. The song’s veracity collapses quickly beyond that. It’s all a problem of perspectives, as is nearly everything in our lives. Those are things he said and believed, yes, but his tale is only a sliver of that truth. Some monk might say “the lunch is not the meal”. We want to believe story songs are sung by reliable narrators. Honest and clear-eyed. Without subtexts or artifice. As if it’s what really happened. Our assumption for Pop Music is un-ironic simplicities.

The song is what our sailor believes, that this pretty bartender, this Brandy is madly in love with him. That she must walk home through a silent town to lie in bed and dream of spending forever with him. Why? He brings her gifts! She listens to his exaggerated seafaring meanderings while she pours glasses of port, whenever he’s in port. She must be infatuated with him. A sailor’s ego didn’t allow him to even consider that she’s a bartender, Brandy’s just doing her goddamned job. Humoring him. Selling him drinks so the bar stays afloat. Collecting tips, so she can as well. He believes all stories are really him as that’s what we have all always been told. We’re expected to believe everything is actually about us. But how can he even be certain Brandy’s her real name? She may be using that nom-de-guerre to separate private life from public. Maybe she just thinks it’s funny to be a bartender named after an alcohol. It could all be a private joke between herself and God to get her through the night. The sailor cannot imagine a universe he isn’t the center of, which is his fault and not hers. Blame it all on this culture of glorified self-centeredness, I guess.

At night when the bars close down, she walks home through a silent town, that’s true enough as well. But she goes home to her lover Mabel, the tiny harbor’s schoolmarm, from whom she was originally just renting a spare room, but it blossomed into so much more. They keep it all on the downlow, as it is a closed-minded place, they maintain appearances. She pretends to sleep alone as opposed to in Mabel’s bed but everyone who matters knows their truth. He simply happens to not be one of them. She pities him for his delusion, but when he gives those fancy gifts, she can sell them and buy rare books to fill her Mabel with delight, so she plays along with his fantasies.

He was right what a good wife she would be but, clouded in ego, he never considered she might prefer to be someone else’s wife, instead. A story is never a full truth. The lunch, never the meal.

Doo-dootin’ doo-dootin’ doo-dootin’-doo.