had logo

September 28, 2026

Courthouse Wedding Proposal

Maya Afilalo

What a day! What a day I wasn’t expecting! It began same old same old, coffee—NOT TEA!—coffee! Then the phone rings and it's too early for the phone to ring, but I pick up, and who is it but my ex-wife Sandra! What a day! What a day to hear from Sandra! First thing I ask is, is little Oscar okay?, and thank God he is! Then I ask Sandra, what are you calling me for at this hour, and you wouldn't believe what she says! She says Sammy, I'm outside your house! What a day I've been having, Sammy! What a day! I walk to my front door—mind you I'm still in my pajamas and my robe, the robe Sandra bought me as a birthday gift not two years earlier—and lo and behold there is Sandra in her '97 Corolla! I yell, Sandra what are you doing here! And the neighbor yells, pipe down Sammy! And I yell, I'll pipe down when you stop blasting Sad Man in His Pick Up Truck Country Music at three a.m.! Sandra yells, Sammy, I dreamt last night that we married again! Oh Sammy, tell me you’ll drive to the courthouse again! Please, tell me, Sammy! And I said yes! Yes! And I ran inside and called in sick to work and put on my best suit, knotted the yellow tie I wore to our wedding, and Sandra and I drove like two loons to the courthouse and said I do! I do! What a day!

Maya Afilalo is a queer writer living in Philadelphia. The recipient of the 2022 James Hurst Prize for Fiction, her stories and essays appear in New Ohio Review, The Rumpus (Funny Women), Porter House Review, Bayou Magazine, The /tƐmz/ Review, and elsewhere. Maya has an MFA in fiction from North Carolina State University and is working on a short story collection and a novel.

 

 

 

My constraint: use only one type of punctuation to end a sentence, an exclamation point. The story also starts and ends with the same sentence, which had to appear at least once somewhere else in the piece. With the second constraint, I wanted to play with the concept of circularity, both in the structure of the story and in Sammy’s repeating the same mistake (or is it a mistake?) by marrying Sandra again. The repetition of the punctuation…the craft choice is harder for me to articulate. There’s the repetition of marrying Sandra, but I think ultimately it brings us closer to Sammy, to his excitement for life that borders on a little unhinged—but lovably unhinged.