“Fun Fact” by Patty Tomsky

Most people couldn’t care less about other people. Most people are like apes or Neanderthals, roaming to find more food, drugs, fire to be warm, and cold alcohol to help them forget how empty most of what they do, think, and want truly is in the face of death, I tell my sister. Jesus, you’re strange, she says.

So here’s another fun fact, I tell my sister, and she scowls the way she does when I get going. I don’t blame her. Not many people can handle the truth as I tell it. Not many people want to learn this much about themselves. Too many people are lying to others and themselves; too many people weave dreams that can’t come true. 

So I tell my sister about the online date last week where I’m standing there in my brand new dress in one of those insufferable hipster bars that think brewery and band stickers count as décor and the dress is nice but I bought it on credit. And I leave before the dude can even show up to avoid complications, distortions, and disappointment. And because I’m a coward. I don’t tell my sister this; what I say is, So I’m ordering a frothy IPA and pretending I want to meet this guy I’ve been texting for a week. His voice on his cell’s voicemail sounded pretty happy, I say. So that’s why you stood him up, huh? Too happy?

To change the subject I tell her in his pictures online he looks like he has a big head like movie stars reportedly do or John Mayer. I can’t help but add that the human head weighs eight pounds. Yeah, Sissy, the adult human head which is full of childish needs and odd longings like the ones children gather and garden for themselves right before Christmas. Plastic longings for solid things that turn to forever things that will lie in the sun in the landfill before other stupid, cheap plastic things cover them up and they lie there in the dark for thousands of years. Like this guy’s film, he wants to make.

So this man that I was direct messaging with for weeks, I kinda liked him. She says I can tell and I’m like I left him in the lurch ‘cause about ten minutes before he was ‘sposed to come into the bar I remembered that he was directing and filming a feature on his iPhone at the Great Sand Dunes. He had asked if I wanted to be an extra. I picture him and his thirty-something college friends scouting locations. In the blaze of a southern Colorado sun, they come upon a landfill full of worn satin sleep masks and pregnancy tests from former lady loves. I left the bar nearly running. 

What’s wrong with that? You’re artsy. You really need to get into film school yourself, she says. You’re a regular Bergman, you know that? 

Sometimes her humor is a touch too dry. I start to say something about that but wait too long. Time gets away from me sometimes. I look over and she’s asleep. I turn the music up but not loud enough to wake her and whisper sing to stay awake for the construction zone I know is coming up.

I don’t know the lyrics to any of the songs after the first few. I keep pressing the button to scan then turn the damn thing off. I’m used to entertaining my Sissy; I’ve been a class clown since birth. She doesn’t have to be conscious for it, so I tell her another fun fact: Trains should be extinct. Especially the ones like the one lumbering slowly, loaded with coal on the rise above the highway. A greenish moon rises over its beetling trundle. I try to pay attention. If you were there, you’d almost drive off the road, the whole thing is too scary. You might ask your sister something real after the rest of the fun facts, like 

“Do you remember Mommy at all?”

 And she’s awake, maybe has been the whole while, and she says, no, you? And you shake your head. You say: Mothers are ridiculous they should be extinct. They’re buried under eons of expectations that no one could possibly live up to: Fuck you, June Cleaver. Fuck you, Mrs. Cosby. 

In the dark after my not-date and after I blocked his calls, I wondered if I wrote people off too quickly. I can’t be with someone who makes movies on a phone. I want to call my sister and laugh about it, make her agree. I live near the railroad tracks in that town where the kid died last year and they blamed his mother but of course, it was the wicked stepmother with the Manson eyes all over the news. Sometimes in my sleep, I accidentally commit murder. At least I think I do when I wake up covered in heat and hurt and there’s nowhere to put my anger.

The air is that special soft summer violet and your sister says better luck next time if you’d called that night but you didn’t.

We get in an accident near the train tracks driving on I-25 in an icy rain. Your sister blames you for it, though neither of you was hurt, she’s furious, hissing in your face, saying fun fact: we’re both mothers now. What does that make us when we’re not careful when we’re foolish and you tell her we’re fucked in any event. You tell her as you both sit on the lip of the ambulance between the back doors with a kind young man wrapping your forearm and a kind young woman placing an ice pack on your sister’s head: Our poor kids in this poor world. 

Her face is splashed in the orange of construction lights. A fat man who looked kind waved you both into a tiny lane (your sister has been dropping hints and suggestions about, hey, you’ve got room on my side all along the miles) you’re convinced the orange barrels will squeeze you off the road between the concrete divider and spaced out, dangerous, dented barrel cones that could dent you and your sister in ways that are difficult to fix. The stupid kind man who’d waved you into the wreck is next to the car, he’s scrambled down into the ditch you’ve spun into, he’d been hoping you’re alright, the green moon overhead, that train from a different century passing with nary a stutter the engineer asleep at the switch. He says oh my god oh my god and you both find yourselves comforting him, though you’re so mad you want to spit in his face.

No one brings you to the hospital you have to sign something that says you refuse and you rent yourselves a hotel room near the airport so your sister can take the shuttle and you watch TV almost all night after your sister walks across the street to the liquor store and gets you both four-packs of rosé and merlot you drink like Alice in the story, little bottles for trying to get big or small.

Fun fact: You tell your sister that TV is the bane of any studied and able female presence in the world. She says sometimes I watch myself try to do this world, play it as a finessed act of will and I’m completely, ridiculously inept. She reminds you of an actress in the flash of a paparazzi camera. Frozen in time, her profile like your mother’s, but more modern. Your mother has cinched-waist fifties dresses on in your dreams and she waves from the top of a hill; she waves like a woman on a train or on the station platform as her man goes off to war.

You tell your sister that and she says, no Mommy’s always in 70s caftans and wearing her cancer wig when I think of her and you go, oh that’s too bad. My Mom looks like she’ll break into a jitterbug at any moment and your sister looks sad and says, hey that’s nice, I like that a lot.

The bland hotel walls and smeary artwork and oatmeal carpet and gleaming bathroom help you both relax. All is innocuous here, nothing will stick or stay, words can be said that will not be taken back or remembered. Sisters can grow resentment like an infection, a malaise but on this night after the spin into the ditch banished any nasty comments (after Sissy’s fear went away she cried and stopped being angry). After years of pigeonholing each other mercilessly, over years and days, judging the people we were when we ignored or hurt each other without thinking. This night we’re wrecked from the wreck and there’s only the peace that comes from surviving, from being just about to die. 

My kids have the most power over me, she tells you, more than all men, even Daddy, even John. 

I love the kids but they’ve not made me very happy but fun fact, here, maybe the most fun one of all, happiness is an illusion anyway, it’s what we try to add to warm and dry and fed to make us feel special and more real than most. Mothers feel special and real because our children go on after we die, without us. After I said that she was quiet I could tell she disagreed. 

My sister and I share a birthday and on our sixteenth, we danced under the stars with our shared best friends, and that moving, musical second felt happy. How do you get back there? Remember? I ask. Remember that day? I change the subject. My sister’s face is mottled with TV lights like she’s underwater.

She says: Those girls wouldn’t recognize me anymore. 

I say: Those girls were the best friends I ever had. 

You’re one of my best friends, she says and you say awwwww pretty treacly sis and she kisses you near your ear and rolls over and you’re grateful to be alone. 

You have one best-friend friend left—here comes her face, floating up into your head, here comes the uncomfortable situation where you last said goodbye, here, hear the hoarse whispers between you, galloping over cliffs into the open grave of your secrets she holds to this day.

About Patty Tomsky
She/Her/Hers

Patty Tomsky is a multi-genre writer and journalist. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Mile High MFA in Denver, Colorado. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been published in many journals and magazines such as FEMZINE UK, Allegheny Poetry Village; Paterson Review; Kota Press: Lilliput Review; US 1 Worksheets; and Madness Muse. She won Third Place and Honorable Mention in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize and her poetry circus, Rock n Roll Hootchy Koo, a multimedia narrative and music event won a Pikes Peak Arts Council grant for ArtPop 2019.

Patty’s fiction has been anthologized in three books: Story Cities: A city guide to the imagination (2019) and No Spider Harmed in the Making of this Book (2020) both from Arachne Press, and We Are The West from Twenty Bellows (2022). Her chapbook with photographs, Elementals: Songs for Gaia won jury prize for inclusion in the Commonwheel Artists Co-op exhibit for Climate Change in 2020. She also read selections from Rock n Roll/Elementals during Denver’s Headroom Sessions broadcast #44. She works as a copywriter for some excellent people at AWS and lives in Colorado with some animals and people.