“A Love Story Told in Nine Lives” by Anna Vangala Jones
“This is the one in which they meet, fall in love, and get married. They will grow old together.”
So excited to get to feature and share this one today! It has so much of what I love about Anna’s writing, while also feeling a little excitingly new, all while also feeling a bit in conversation with another recent fave, Amber Sparks’ “Your Life in Parties.”
Anna’s story, “The Legend of the Convenience Store Cashier”, appeared here on Short Story, Long two years ago (crazy how time passes! it still seems like SSL is super brand new!), and since then I’ve been lucky enough to get to publish four other, shorter pieces over on HAD. I’ve said this before, but Anna has my number. She’s locked into my tastes, or I hers, or our tastes just align and overlap in ways that I am always excited and surprised and delighted by every new story I get to read.
Her collection, Turmeric & Sugar, is so good and I can’t recommend it enough (have you seen this Bookshop page of books by SSL contributors??), but it also feels like she’s leveled up in the last couple years. I couldn’t be anticipating a new collection more.
Read and enjoy and share and compliment Anna in the comments and on social media and in casual conversations and text chats with friends!
—Aaron Burch
“A Love Story Told in Nine Lives”
1.
This is the one in which they meet, fall in love, and get married. They will grow old together.
He takes her to a trendy new museum exhibit on their first date. He doesn’t do it to impress her but hopes that will be the result anyway. Tickets are impossible to get so he borrows his friend’s annual passes, like he has done so many times before. He arrives early so that he will be waiting for her and not the other way around. When the door opens, he sees her before she sees him. She is taller than he was expecting and he was already prepared for her to be taller than all of his previous girlfriends. She had been sitting down when they met at a cafe and he asked for her number. Later, after they leave the museum, they will walk down the street side by side, and he’ll catch her sneaking peeks at their reflection in store windows. He will wonder if she is checking out her hair or their height difference.
“Objects in mirror are taller than they appear,” he’ll say and she will be startled for a second before they both start laughing.
“I saw you looking, too,” she’ll insist and he won’t deny it. He is probably about two inches taller than her. They will soon find that their closeness in height makes cuddling on the couch and kissing while standing much easier and more comfortable.
When the woman collecting tickets at the museum refuses to let them use his friend’s annual passes for the exhibit—something that has never been a problem before and that he is certain the universe has conjured up today to ruin this important date with the girl he has not been able to stop thinking about since they first exchanged hellos—he is embarrassed and frustrated. But he doesn’t want that to be her first impression of him. There is plenty of time for her to see that version of him in the future, like when they will watch his beloved college basketball team lose in the tournament. He will watch the final minutes of the game standing with his arms crossed and his mouth closed after having begged the players and the ref to get it together for the entire last quarter. She’ll pretend she needs to grab something from the kitchen so he can have some privacy. She will just be glad he is no longer screaming “foul!” in helpless agony every other minute.
He pivots and recovers fast, suggesting they walk to a pub a few blocks away from the museum. She doesn’t seem too bothered by the whole thing and he is relieved.
After they are seated in the small dark Irish pub and have barely had time to look at the menu, a man comes over and stands beside their table. They falter in their getting to know you conversation, waiting for this unknown person to interrupt them with words. It doesn’t seem to be the waiter. The man is just patiently eavesdropping.
“Can we help you?” she asks, confused but polite enough.
“Oh!” The man looks mortified. “You mean you’re not—you aren’t with us. Oh my god, never mind, I’m so sorry.” He vanishes as suddenly and quickly as he had appeared.
They look around at the other tables and booths surrounding them. It’s all couples. They pay attention and realize that every few minutes, after some awkward stilted back and forths, the pairings of people are rotating. They are now absolutely sure that the other strangers in this pub are all speed dating each other.
They confirm this with their waiter when he comes over to take their drink order. “Yeah, we said they couldn’t book the room or clear out the place—because we don’t really do that—but that it’s fine for them to do it informally.” He looks back at them over his shoulder as they all stand in unison to switch seats again. “It’s hard to meet people here in the city, you know? Gotta try anything and hope for the best.”
After the waiter leaves, they both search for a way to get their own date going again.
“Should we treat ours like a speed date?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Puts a lot more pressure on it.”
“Well, our intended museum date was kind of like a speed date,” she says, but her smile is genuine so he knows she thinks it’s funny that they got kicked out only seconds after meeting there.
He laughs but with a nervous energy. “Okay, so this is a speed date. How many minutes do we have?” He checks the time. “Two? Three?”
“Five,” she says. “Two is too fast. No time to get into a good rhythm.” She pauses when she notices the look on his face. “I didn’t mean it like that!” Now she is the nervous one, laughing at his raised eyebrow and grin.
Their wedding will be outside underneath the shade of a massive oak tree that is hundreds of years old and they will have two children and five grandchildren. They will go through rough patches and find their way back to the original bond that intertwined their hearts as many times as needed. They hope that their last date as a married couple will be to the museum and pub from that first day and then that night the two of them can die by taking their last breaths together at the very same moment, passing away in bed of natural causes due to their old age. Of course, it will not work out that way because these things rarely go according to plan, but they will be grateful for the long lifetime full of laughter they spent together.
“I would do it all over again,” they will tell each other.
2.
This is the one in which they both study abroad at the same university in Ireland at the same time. They meet at the international students mixer at a bar and become fast friends when they find out that they both love bowling alleys and grocery stores. They agree to make time for bowling or food shopping whenever one of them is feeling homesick.
“I feel like I’ve known you before somehow,” he says one day in the bakery aisle.
She is focused on bread selection. “What?”
“Or at least like I’ve seen you somewhere and maybe we’ve even talked,” he says. “But I also know we haven’t. Does that make any sense?”
“No, weirdo.” She smiles. “It doesn’t.”
3.
This is the one in which their paths never cross. It is unclear what their opinions of each other would have been had they ever met.
4.
This is the one in which she is a bestselling Canadian author and he is a bookseller in a tiny Italian village. He has read and adored her short story collection in the original English as well as the Italian translation. He sends letters to her team, hoping one will reach her directly, asking to host a reading as part of her upcoming international book tour, but her agent and publisher select a more heavily populated town in Italy for them to visit.
When she discovers they bypassed a smaller venue for one with more people who maybe intellectually connected with her book or pretended to in order to be able to converse with others about it, she feels guilty. She remembers how when she first started sending her writing out into the world, her only dream was for it to find one reader who would need her stories at that exact time. She is sad to think that she unknowingly skipped the independent family owned store of someone who had loved her words and her characters so deeply and with whom the collection had resonated on an emotional level. It is something that continues to bother her long after they leave Europe. She mails him a signed copy of the book with a personal note of apology and thanks. He writes back and they continue a sporadic correspondence for a few years until life gets in the way and she forgets to respond to his most recent letter. In it, among other things, he asks how the writing is going and if he will get to read another book by her soon.
It is a few more decades before she finishes writing and publishing a second book. This one is a novel. She’d already been labeled and dismissed as a one hit wonder, but she is just happy these two books exist at all. She doesn’t care about the sales numbers or critical acclaim. She finds herself wondering what the Italian bookseller will think of this one. Something makes her remember him though she wouldn’t be able to tell you what it is. She sends him another signed copy along with a short note, hoping to hear what he thinks and if he likes it. The book is forwarded along to his youngest daughter to whom he had bequeathed the entirety of his personal library in his will. It joins the first book on his daughter’s shelf. She keeps meaning to read them but there are so many books and so little time.
5.
This is the one in which he is lonely and has been—unbearably so—for what has felt like an eternity. He sits on a rock beside an enormous calm lake, grateful for once that he’d never learned how to swim. What he intends to do in a few minutes wouldn’t be possible if he could just tread water before changing his mind and paddling back to safety. Once he walks out to where it is deepest and his head sinks below the surface, he may panic and splash but there will be nothing he can do about it at that point and there is no one here to save him.
But first he looks up at a cloud, not realizing it is blocking the sun. As it drifts slowly but surely away, he is temporarily blinded by the bright light. After blinking at the ground, waiting for the spots in his vision to fade, he looks up and the same cloud is back in front of the sun again, keeping his eyes safe from the heat. He almost swears he makes eye contact with the cloud for a brief confusing moment. He thinks he sees a face in it and wonders why he is seeing a face he does not recognize and cannot place with anyone he has ever met and yet it is a face more familiar and dear to him than his own. The moment passes and the sky is blue and he is alive. He gets back in his car and drives home.
6.
This is the one in which she is running late to work and catches the train after the one she normally boards every morning. She is anxiously looking out the window—trying to calm herself with the picturesque racing images of sprawling cornfields, faded red barns, tall silos, cows and horses grazing, vibrant spring tree leaves blurring together—when the train derails. There are many survivors, but she is not one of them. He is the only survivor from their shared train car. No one expects him to live but he recovers from his severe injuries after a long hospital stay. On the news, they often refer to him by saying he should have been one of the casualties as no one else in their train car had stood a chance, but he miraculously remained behind as the sole survivor. He is seen as occupying his own distinct group somewhere between those who died and the others who lived but whose lives were never in real danger.
He cannot stop thinking and wondering about those who died instead of him and why he got to stay and they didn’t. It graduates from philosophical pondering to obsession. They are all strangers to him and yet he can’t stop feeling cosmically connected to them or at least like he owes it to them to care about and honor the lives they led before they all chose the same ill fated train car that day. He makes it his mission to learn as much as he can about each of them. He even visits their graves. When he arrives at hers—a small plain grey headstone below a majestic oak tree—and reads the inscription chosen by her family, he feels even more devastated than he had at the others, though he does not know why.
7.
This is the one in which he is in prison, wrongfully accused of arson, and she is the lawyer of his cellmate. He wishes she could be his lawyer.
8.
This is the one in which he is the long time partner of one of her old high school friends so they only see each other at reunions and weddings. They both hate attending awkward gatherings like these but are also the nostalgic types who hate feeling left out. They find comfort in each other on these few occasions they come into contact. They remember and think of each other often in the intervening years between their conversations and meaningful glances. They yearn in silence without ever realizing their forbidden feelings are mutual.
9.
This is the one in which they live together but she doesn’t laugh at his jokes anymore. She confesses she’s never found him particularly funny or at least it’s not one of the reasons she fell in love with him. She doesn’t know that once before—or repeatedly in that one lifetime—she found him very funny and he doesn’t know that either to be able to defend himself. So he can’t insist, “but you did—you did laugh at almost all my jokes!”
In the beginning, they hadn’t minded how little they had in common. It gave them more to talk about. But that harmless distance between them ballooned over time into an impassable canyon. At first it was charming participating in the other’s interests and introducing them to the world of theirs. But once they realized they weren’t coming around to appreciate the other’s taste in music, film, books, or even what to do in their spare time, a subtle but unyielding resentment hatched and grew. Sometimes she can’t even remember what drew them together. Then he does something so simple and thoughtful, she forgets everything that irritates her. When they are arguing, all he can envision are exits and escape routes. But after she greets him at the end of a long and stressful day with more affection than he has ever received from anyone in his life, he can imagine them walking down the aisle someday.
A few months into their dating, he took her on an hours long train ride just to visit a botanical garden full of wildflowers but also elaborate ornate sculptures scattered across the grounds. It was one of the most gorgeous places she’d ever been and she would forever associate that with him now. He came prepared with a picnic basket full of cheap wine, baguettes, Cheetos, green grapes, and pound cake. As they walked deep into the heart of the gardens, admiring the beauty everywhere, it started raining so they ran inside the nearest building for shelter. It had taken them a long while to find it so they were fully soaked, their clothes dripping water all over what they quickly realized was a dance floor. They turned to leave the wedding reception in progress but they were stopped by several concerned, friendly, very drunk guests. They danced and sang obnoxiously with everyone until they began shivering. The bride made her way over and offered to take them upstairs to a room where the dry clothes she and the groom had arrived wearing that morning sat unused. The groom joined them and the newlyweds both admitted they were feeling exhausted and overwhelmed and needed a break anyway. The four of them drank some beers and did shots upstairs while they exchanged their how we met stories.
They mention the bride and groom from time to time and wonder aloud if they are still together. They hope so.
When she tells him on an otherwise mundane Sunday that she is leaving him, he isn’t surprised but he is heartbroken. The thing is even though she is the one ending it, he knows she is heartbroken, too. She can’t stop crying. He can’t listen to her tears or apologies anymore. He asks if they can go for one last drive to the lake, their favorite spot. She agrees but they wait until her eyes are dry and her hiccups stop.
When they reach the lake, an uncanny feeling overtakes him. He feels like he is looking at it with different eyes that don’t belong to him. This lake is as familiar to him as his own body and he has been swimming and kayaking in it dozens of times but now as he looks at it, he feels a flicker of fear, as though it might drown him. He feels similarly strange when he turns to look at her, like he’s known her forever, even though they’ve only been a couple for two years.
He knows she will think he has lost his mind, but he blurts the words out anyway. “Sometimes when I look at you, I have the strongest sense that some things have happened before that I know have never happened. It’s like I can see us and we’re old or much older than we are now.” He pauses and regrets sharing this with her when she’s practically already gone, but she’s listening so intently. He decides it’s too late to turn back and keeps going. “I can’t help but wonder if we’ve been together before but that time we made it. We made it a lot longer than we did this time.”
She laughs. But not a cruel laugh. A sad one. “That’s a lovely thought,” she says.
“I knew you wouldn’t believe me,” he says.
“Well, we both can agree to think that it’s true, can’t we?”
“Yes, that would be nice.”
She sits down beside him on a rock overlooking the still lake. All is quiet. They hold hands and look up to watch a passing cloud together. They avert their eyes just before it rolls on to reveal the bright sun behind it. Neither voices these next words aloud for fear that the other might disagree, but their minds and hearts arrive at the same thought in unison.
I would do it all over again, they almost tell each other.
STORY:
Anna Vangala Jones is the author of the short story collection Turmeric & Sugar (Thirty West, 2021). Her writing has appeared in Wigleaf, Craft Literary, Short Story Long, HAD, XRAY, Rejection Letters, and AAWW’s The Margins, among others. Her stories have been selected for Longform Fiction’s Best of 2018 and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Find her online at annavangalajones.com.
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ART:
Zoë Petersen is an illustrator from the Desert Southwest. She loves to knit and believes there is power in the term “grandma craft.” Until Craft Grandmother can be her official title, she’ll keep making pictures for stories.
Next Tuesday, we’ll feature a bonus interview with Anna about this story.
I read it forward, then backward. Magical both ways! Well done!
Loved this. The ending felt inevitable, like this couple. Reminded me of Past Lives and the discussion of In-Yun.