JOKES I HAD WITH MY EX

ALIDA DEAN

When we drove past a scenic graveyard he'd ask me if I wanted him to bury me there. I can pull over right now he'd say, like he was being generous, offering to do the dirty labor of digging my grave. But really the joke was that if I wanted to be buried, he would have to kill me first. Or I could kill myself. By the end of our relationship, most of our jokes had to do with helping each other die.

But not all of them. We also had a joke about Captain, the cat I'd given away when I moved to Texas to be with him. We pretended Captain rode freight trains in search of us, back and forth across the country. Back and forth. If we saw a train, in whatever state, we'd say, incredulously, Cap-py? as if we saw him there, exhausted from his journey and purring with relief at the sight of us, the wind ruffling his soft orange fur.

We stayed together for six years, I was single for two years, and now I have a new boyfriend whose sense of humor I'm trying to adapt to. New-boyfriend thinks it's funny to wear cotton when we go cross-country skiing. Neither of us has children and when the school bus drives by his house in the morning, he says oops, kids missed the bus!

I'm not saying my ex was funnier; our jokes were like jokes in a Cormac McCarthy novel, mainly effective because the surrounding material is so bleak. I'm not even trying to compare them. What I'm saying is, I've finally gotten over Captain and it's my ex I look for on freight trains, and in freight yards, and graveyards, now.

Alida Dean is a fiction writer and educator living in Upstate New York, where she is currently at work on a novel and linked-story collection. Her stories can be found in Big Fiction, Nashville Review, Ninth Letter, and Soft Punk, among other venues. She is a graduate of the University of Montana’s MFA program and the University of Cincinnati’s PhD program in Creative Writing.