Rosie is the best man at his brother’s wedding, who is getting married to a woman Rosie is unwittingly infatuated with for being so similar to their mother.

The maturity of Rosie, our male character, can’t go unnoticed, since I dearly love him for it. He finds moonstones behind the ears of living family members and drops them to create a moonstone trail of familial connections. He hasn’t dropped any topaz with the moonstones for the dead to find their way to him. 

Rosie’s brain was full enough, waiting to explode, that he never had any bowel issues or complications. He went on a strictly банан diet, bananas from Russia, where he consumed radioactive waste as an American. The Russian banana farmers loved him from his loaded order checks. He took a DNA test four months later at the request of his father to discover both sides of his family originated in the circle around Moscow. It was that close?

He eventually abandoned the banana diet right before his brother’s wedding. His brother, Jim, whose wedding it was, refused to buy him bananas from Russia. The couple was very friendly to him but it was only an old familiarity. An old familiarity because Rosie consumed a lot of radioactive waste from the ground and they didn’t approve of this strange behavior. 

At the wedding, the brother and his new wife took their family members’ words out of context. I’ll explain.

“I hate my kids, please tell me you’re not planning to have any soon,” said one half-drunk uncle to the newlyweds. The uncle had every right to hate kids; one of his sons called the other a bastardized goat. The bastardized part was more rude than untrue. The uncle can’t remember when his wife revealed she was pregnant, and math was never the strong suit in the family. The kids aspired to be mathematicians because you can get scholarships for choosing obscure majors while being left-handed. 

From that conversation, the couple heard “are you planning to have any soon,” and ran away to get the spare cake they asked the baker to keep in their room upstairs. Truthfully, they weren’t planning to have any children; the brother had a recessive gene for red hair and his new wife was from Scotland. If the couple hadn’t watched so many wedding movies to meet the standards for this day, they would’ve known that not all families want the family line to continue. Despite not wanting children, the image of a loving, attentive, and traditionalist family occupied their minds. Jim’s family wasn’t nearly as involved in their wedding or honeymoon as the family from Ready or Not, but that brother of the groom also had a thing for a bride. White wedding tropes aren’t white lies. On the other hand, Jim’s family preferred to avoid the ordeal of relocation to Mars in fifty years. They didn’t need any grandchildren and they attempted to advise the couple against them. 

While the couple ate a chocolate cake with banana custard, Rosie looked around for them. He passed the table of gifts which were stacked to form a uniform bridge for babies to cross from the dance floor to the kitchen. Rosie held two doves with clipped wings, a common process which limits the bird’s flight. Rosie bought the two trained doves as a gift to follow the newlyweds during their honeymoon. Rosie wondered where all of those birds will go when the rest fly to the Moon in five years. Rosie looked for the couple to deliver these himself though the delivery fee from the agency was a small fee to him. By the time he found them, they were dancing and throwing toiletries, singing a number of songs from the animated film Cinderella. They shrieked at the sight of Rosie holding the doves. However, Rosie shrieked even louder at the sight of them together. 

“You’ve eaten the cake!” said Rosie in response to seeing an empty cake platter. 

Rosie celebrated himself for choosing a field with an influx of success and achievements. Unlike his brother’s wife, Donna Sheridan would’ve loved him with all of his money, money, money. 

The conflict in Rosie’s life came from his infatuation with his brother’s wife. She majored in Education to have all the discussions that were censored from her. She’s always silent as a grave. The attraction of both brothers comes from her likeness to their mother, who wore all-black and grew evening primrose next to the cat bed. Upon realizing this, Rosie sought out a psychologist and a philosopher dealing with Freudian psychology. They both freaked out during the client dinner where they met Rosie and heard this very story.

Process

After writing a short story about a taxidermist who adopts a dog to replace a friend he lost, I wanted to continue writing stories that focused on characters with absurd personalities that are disconnected from reality in a way. My mentor was telling me about a British TV program called “Rosie and Jim,” which focused on telling stories through puppets. This gave me the inspiration for two of the main characters and the title, Rosie Without Jim. I wrote this short story sometime in June of 2021, a month many people seek out for weddings. Who doesn’t want a June wedding? With all of these different pieces of inspiration around me, I wrote about a character dealing with his brother’s wedding. I’ve given this story different endings based on the contests I’ve submitted them to but this was the original ending.