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art by Kate

Brian was Catholic in the way that a lot of Catholics are. He didn’t get to mass every Sunday, he hadn’t made an act of contrition in a decade at least, and he ate meat on Fridays during Lent. But there was one thing he was certain of, and that was that he intended to marry a fellow Catholic. After all, he believed in Jesus Christ and the sacraments, even if he didn’t partake of the latter as often as he should. At a party in Brooklyn one night, he met a Jewish girl named Lydia. He was a little drunk, so he flirted with her and sang the Groucho Marx song to her that bore her name. They kissed a little, and she asked him if he wanted to go upstairs to her apartment, which was in the same building, with her. Brian was interested, but he had scruples: It could only be about sex, he said. It couldn’t be about anything more than that, because he was Catholic and she was not. She agreed to his terms (she had had a bit to drink herself) and so they went upstairs. Eventually Brian fell out of touch with the mutual friend whose party he had been at that night. When the Catholic clergy abuse scandal broke, he took what he believed to be a moral stance and left the church. He thought of Lydia then and how he had probably come off when he gave his conditions to their sleeping together. He wanted to apologize, but he hadn’t asked for her phone number, or even her last name.

About the Author
Marco Kaufman has published in several different fields, including literary criticism, medical writing, and Holocaust historicism and currently writes on The Big Book of Grievances, his weblog of short fiction, flash fiction, and works in progress.

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