EDIT: Not Worth It. -> Ice Cream Dates

An ice cream cone sat on a fish’s head as it stood on one of its fins, the other waving from a sea of scoops of ice cream. Its full lips were puckered, the way a teenager would look being caught mid-first kiss. It reminded her of her first kiss, and her brows furrowed at the memory. Some memories, as sweet as they seemed at the time, were always tainted by history and better left drowned in the past.

It was an ugly mascot—even uglier in the setting sun where the fading sunlight highlighted the manic puckered grin of the fish in the sea of fire balls. But she waited patiently for him as he finished the last few minutes of his shift wiping down tables that hadn’t been used all day.

She brushed off the hem of her sundress and swatted away the mosquitoes that were attracted to her choice of perfume.

It’s been a year. Their first year. Her first one. He promised it’d just be the two of them. After her birthday fiasco, he promised he’d be better.

The review of his family’s ice cream shop when it first opened was framed in a faded gold frame, where the gold flaked off in places, revealing the black plastic underneath. It was located next to the door. Every time the door slammed closed, a golden flake falls, and she is reminded of a child’s dream dying.

From what she could remember the review was a positive one, praising his great-great grandfather’s creativity or, what was the wording?, “creative geniusness.” It might have had something to do with interesting ice cream flavors. One example was rotten fish. It wasn’t very popular from what was gathered, but it was twisted to be positive somehow.

They stopped doing that a while ago.

He just waved good-bye to his cousin—although she’s sure she’s seen them kissing in a darkened alleyway a couple of times her trip home from the library late at night, despite his insistence—and stepped into the street, just as the sunlight receded past his feet.

“Hey.” He grimaced as he saw her.

“Ready to go?”

“I can’t today. Busy. Hangin’ out with the boys. Next time, ey?”

He turned and walked away.

She heard the clanging of the shop door, and the entire frame fell and shattered.

“Oops,” his cousin giggled. “My bad.”

She disappeared around the corner into the dark alley after him, and the shadows swallowed the world and the last fractures of light bounced off the broken glass before they, too, were swallowed.