I was browsing randomly and ended up on an article about difficult interview questions.  One of the questions caught my attention: “Tell us a story which has a title of Green Hat.”  Oooo.  I like making up stories on the fly.  I spent less than a minute thinking and came up with this idea.  The luxury of time with writing means it’s a little more fleshed out, but I think I would have been able to get my point across verbally.

A man was out walking one day and came upon two old men seated opposing each other at a table.  In front of the the men were some seemingly random items on what looked like a complex map.

One man wore a white hat and the other, a black hat.  They stared intently together at the pieces in front of them.  When the man with the white hat would make a move toward a piece, the black-hatted man would reach towards a different piece.  Then each would pause and withdraw their hands from the map, leaving everything as it remained.

The newcomer approached the old men and asked, “Who are you and what are you doing?”  White hat replied, “I am the spirit of positive progress, the one across from me is the spirit of negative consequence.”  Black hat smirked in acknowledgement.

“What I am trying to do,” White hat explained, “is move the pieces on this map to the best position possible, but whenever I ready myself to move a piece, my counterpart prepares to move a piece in a negative way.”

The newcomer considered this and asked, “So when is the last time you moved a piece?”

“I have not for a very, very long time.  If I do, something bad will happen.”

“But, do you know what will happen?” asked newcomer.

“No. But it will be negative.”

The newcomer reached for a piece and Black hat reached for another piece.  To the positive spirit’s shock, newcomer slid his piece all the way across the map.  In return, the negative spirit moved his piece, although only a fraction of the distance.

The positive spirit was beside himself.  “Look at what you’ve done!”

“Did I not move a piece father forward than your opponent moved his back?”  Queried the newcomer?

“Yes, you did,” said the positive spirit thoughtfully.

“Then that is net progress.  You have not have that in a long time.”

The newcomer then pulled a hat from his pocket and put it on his head.  Both old spirits looked at him, surprised.

The newcomer said simply, “Green means go.” and walked onward.

In my Internet travels, I’ve seen the good and the bad and the tasteless and the strange.  One thing that I saw that struck my fancy was a writing genre I think are called “BAWW Stories.”  These are short stories – either true or not – that exist for the purpose of being heart-wrenching and emotionally hyper-charged.  Usually, the story involves a close friend, family member, or pet in a terrible series of events.  The end result is that you just break down and bawl – “bawwwwww!”  I’ve wanted to try my hand at writing one, so let’s see how well it turns out.  Gratefully, this is total fiction.

…and that’s that.  I’m single now, I guess.  Who am I kidding, I know I’m single.  When you call your girlfriend up and you hear from the background noise that she’s at some party that you had no idea was planned, when you hear a guy asking “Is that him?”, when she stutters and hesitates when you say you’ll see her tomorrow, these are some pretty obvious signs.

It’s not like I didn’t see it coming.  She’s always been more social than me and I could tell I was holding her back.  I’m not going to bother deleting all the emails and texts just yet.  I just want to sit for a bit and think about the good times.  We had, what, maybe a month?  That’s pretty good for me, considering all the first/last dates I’ve been through.

Bub is here beside me.  Bub is my closest friend, even though he’s a cat.  He always knows when something’s up.  I take good care of him and he never fails to show his appreciation for it.  Bub chose me, which is something I could never expect from any human companion.

Bub was a stray that showed up at the house one afternoon.  Who knows why he chose my house.  He was thin but clean and he seemed so happy to see me.  As time went on, Bub became closer and closer to me, like a child.  And he’d seen many of my ups and downs as I stumbled through my failed relationships, so he understood how I was tonight.

I figured I should go for a drive to clear my head.  That’s usually what I did in times like these.  Bub seemed to know what I was up to (as usual) and headed to the door.  That was one of the coolest things about Bub, that he was so dog-like.  He actually enjoyed car rides.  So, I hauled him up and we got in the car together, Bub settling down in my lap after I buckled my seat belt.

As I drove through the back roads, I ran through the last few days in my mind and analyzed how my latest relationship fell apart.  Yeah, she had become distant.  Yeah, I didn’t seem to care about it.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  It was me.  Bub was in my lap, purring.  Bub didn’t care about all that stuff.  If I ignored him, he just hung out with me.  That’s how a relationship should be.  No, no.  I’m being selfish again.

I turned on to the interstate for the drive home.  The back roads are nice, but sometimes you actually want to get somewhere in decent time.  Although Bub liked car rides, the Interstate made him a bit nervous.  I reassured him frequently as we drove on.

Suddenly, Bub tensed up and I looked down at him.  While I looked down, a truck horn blared right beside me.  Bub scrambled off my lap and down onto the floor.  Freaking out myself, I look up and see a wall of stopped cars straight ahead.  I look down again quickly for Bub.  He’s pressed himself down at the front of the floor, under the brake pedal.  All the blood drains from my face when I realize what was going to happen.  I only have seconds to react.

The tears burst from my eyes as the screeching of tires is drowned out by the screaming from the front of the floor of my car.  I’m so sorry.