A Man Named Stella
Once upon a time there lived a man. The man was named Stella. “That's not a very masculine name,” people would say to him. “Yes, you are right,” he would reply, because they were right.
Once upon a time there also lived a woman. The woman was named Richard. “That's a remarkably feminine name,” people would say to her. “No, you are wrong,” she would reply, because they were wrong.
One particularly sunny Tuesday afternoon, Stella was out taking his cat for a walk around the neighbourhood. The cat did not enjoy the daily walks that Stella would take him out on, because he was a cat and did not enjoy anything. If the cat could have spoken, he would have reluctantly admitted that the outings were decidedly preferable to the bi-nightly vegetable stir-fries that he received for dinner, both because Stella was a notoriously terrible cook and because most of the vegetables smelled annoying. Stella was well-known around town because, for the majority of townspeople, he was the only man named Stella that they knew. “Hello, Stella,” a boy greeted Stella as he passed by the child's driveway with his irritated cat. “Hello, Johnny,” Stella replied. “My name's not Johnny,” said the boy whose name was not Johnny, but Stella didn't particularly care. The cat disinterestedly scratched the boy's legs a little and no one cared about that, either. Stella did not particularly care about a lot of things. He cared deeply about his cat and about the bi-nightly vegetable stir-fries he cooked especially for the cat, and he possessed an explicit fondness for calculators shaped like octopuses (he owned 724, by his last count), but many things outside of this short list did not garner the attention of the man named Stella. “Why get a hobby when you can eat vegetable stir-fry with your cat every other night?” he would have liked to say, but he never stumbled across the opportunity to do so. One thing, however, that Stella felt he lacked in life was a human companion. His cat was a wonderful companion and only scratched him on vegetable stir-fry nights, but Stella often found himself wondering what it would be like to serve his vegetable stir-fry to another human. However, for a number of reasons, most notably his atrocious cooking and general apathy towards everything, finding a friend was not something that came easy to Stella. Furthermore, although his unusually feminine name had rendered him locally famous, he was far more of a novelty than a respected figure and nobody really wanted to go out with the man named Stella. “Oh, if only there were someone with a more feminine name than mine whom I could befriend,” Stella lamented to his cat, who did not reply, as he was a cat and therefore unable to speak. “Like Richard,” Stella suggested, “What a feminine name that is!” He paused for a brief moment to process the sheer femininity of the name. If the cat could have spoken, he would have agreed. Little did Stella know, a woman named Richard resided on the other side of town. She too longed for a friend, as feeding her dog bi-nightly potato salad and collecting octopuses shaped like calculators was beginning to get old. “Oh, if only there were someone with a less feminine name than mine whom I could befriend,” Richard lamented to her dog, who could talk but just didn't care. That night, Stella was struck by a bus and died.
