Free The Hypothetical Girl by Elizabeth Cohen

pressed together hard, actually adhering a little through some combination of sweat and the elastic properties of skin and sadness. They were bent into a sort of triangle of grief. Between them there was a feeling she could not name. But it seemed to her then that, if such a thing could be, it was the very most opposite thing in the world from irony. The opposite of love. The opposite of happiness. The opposite of opposite. The opposite of all known and yet-to-be-known things.

Boat Man
    A llison had a special sponge for cleaning the inside of glasses, thin with a scrubby green tip, perfect for removing the goo from the O.J. glass, sludge from old coffee mugs, whatever that stuff was in the bottom of her father’s Ensure.
    She gave him a cup full of that crap twice a day. It came in cans and was touted as the ultimate nutrition. But when she read the ingredients it sounded more like a chemistry experiment.
This is what they feed us
, she thought,
at the end, when we have no choice
. Whenever she gave it to him he winced. Her father, Joe, had been a sous-chef at a five-star French restaurant. She had been serving him the stuff for four years.
That is 365 times four
, she thought, doing the math,
minus one day for leap year
. That made 1,459 days of a drink that was an insult to his every taste bud. She felt a surge of guilt flood her veins like some distant cousin of adrenaline, pumped out ofa special guilt gland, secreted away in the corner of her heart. Her guilt gland was very active.
    Allison also had sponges for the kitchen counter. Smooth but tough, to get off the schmutz without scratching the Formica. She had a really intense sponge for stuff burned onto the bottoms of casseroles. And, of course, she had steel wool. Steel wool, wool of steel, harvested from the flock of steel sheep that grazed on Iron Mountain, she thought. It worked for the worst-case scenarios. Crusted meat loaf that will not release from the pan; that grainy brown material that comes about if you leave the cereal bowl sitting for an afternoon.
    Yes, Allison had a plethora of cleaning tools, and it actually made her feel happy to have options when she was doing dishes. She would look into her cabinet and there they were, organized in neat bins, according to the difficulty of the task. Laugh if you want, but it worked for her. And, by the way, if you ever find yourself in a life that revolves completely around taking care of someone else, wiping the drool off his chin, the poop off his butt, because his brain decided to take a long hike and his body said “I think I’ll just stay here behind …,” well, we will remember not to laugh at you for your organizational schemes.
    Just as Allison had her sponge-filing system, she had developed a love strategy. She had Doctorlove.com for highbrow online dating; Letsgethooked.com for seriousdating; Flirtypants.com for flirting, and Yummybaby.com for when she felt like slumming it. She had paid a small fee to belong to each of these communities, and within each of them she felt comfortable. She had a system. “A girl needs a system,” she liked to quip, if anyone asked why so many, or why at all, about anything.
    “Like, do you ever, like, meet anyone in there you, like, think is for real?” asked Babette, her best friend forever, or her BFF, as she liked to say. The two had known each other since kindergarten.
    Even though she was pushing fifty, Allison liked to use the online vernacular of those thirty-five years younger than she. It made her feel relevant. “IDK,” she wrote back, “jury is still out.”
    And the jury was definitely out, she thought. For who in his right mind would want a woman saddled with an eighty-eight-year-old father who could not feed himself? A man so divorced from his former self that he no longer even remembered his own name? “That would be one hell of an online man,” said Babette.
    “Yeah, thanks for that insight there,” Allison said.
    Then, two weeks before her