Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (11 page)

D
ISH
N
IGHT

E
very Wednesday night was Dish Night at the Wells Theatre. And it worked because she was there, week in and week out. She sat through the movie to get her white bone china. A saucer. A cup. The ushers stood on chairs by the doors and reached into the big wooden crates. There was straw all over the floor of the lobby and balls of newspaper from strange cities. I knew she was the girl for me. I’d walk her home. She’d hug the dish to her chest. The street lights would be on and the moon behind the trees. She’d talk about collecting enough pieces for our family of eight. “Oh, it’s everyday and I know it,” she’d say, holding it at arm’s length. “They’re so modern and simple and something we’ll have a long time after we forget the movies.”

I forget just what happened then. We heard about Pearl Harbor at a Sunday matinée. They stopped the movie, and a man came out on stage. The blue stage lights flooded the gold curtain. It was dark in there, but outside it was bright and cold. They didn’t finish the show. Business would pick up then, and the Wells Theatre wouldn’t need a Dish Night to bring the people in. The one we had gone to the week before was the last one ever, and we hadn’t known it. The gravy boat looked like a slipper. I went to the war, to Europe where she’d write to me on lined school paper and never failed to mention we were a few pieces shy of the full set.

This would be the movie of my life, this walking home under the moon from a movie with a girl holding a dinner plate under her arm like a book. I believed this is what I was fighting for. Everywhere in Europe I saw broken pieces of crockery. In the farmhouses, the cafés. Along the roads were drifts of smashed china. On a beach, in the sand where I was crawling, I found a bit of it the sea washed in, all smooth with blue veins of a pattern.

I came home and washed the dishes every night, and she stacked them away, bowls nesting in bowls as if we were moving the next day.

The green field is covered with these tables. The sky is huge and spread with clouds. The pickup trucks and wagons are backed in close to each table so that people can sit on the lowered tailgates. On the tables are thousands of dishes. She walks ahead of me. Picks up a cup then sets it down again. A plate. She runs her finger along a rim. The green field rises slightly as we walk, all the places set at the tables. She hopes she will find someone else who saw the movies she saw on Dish Night. The theater was filled with people. I was there. We do this every Sunday after church.

G
RACE
P
ERIOD

Y
ou notice first a difference in the quality of space. The sunlight is still golden through the dust hanging in the driveway, where your wife pulled out a few minutes ago in the Célica on a run to the mailbox, and the sky is still a regular blue, but it feels as if for an instant everything stretched just slightly, a few millimeters, then contracted again.

You shut off the electric hedge trimmers, thinking maybe vibration is affecting your inner ear. Then you are aware that the dog is whining from under the porch. On the other hand you don’t hear a single bird song. A semi shifts down with a long backrap of exhaust on the state highway a quarter mile away. A few inches above one horizon an invisible jet is drawing a thin white line across the sky.

You are about to turn the trimmers on again when you have the startling sense that the earth under your feet has taken on a charge. It is not quite a trembling, but something like the deep throb of a very large dynamo at a great distance. Simultaneously there is a fluctuation of light, a tiny pulse, coming from behind the hills. In a moment another, and then another. Again and more strongly you have the absurd sense that everything inflates for a moment, then shrinks.

Your heart strikes you in the chest then, and you think instantly
aneurysm!
You are 135 over 80, and should have had a checkup two months ago. But no, the dog is howling now, and he’s not alone. The neighbors’ black lab is also in full cry, and in the distance a dozen others have begun yammering.

You stride into the house, not hurrying but not dawdling either, and punch in the number of a friend who lives in the city on the other side of the hills, the county seat. After the tone dance a long pause, then a busy signal. You consider for a moment, then dial the local volunteer fire chief, whom you know. Also busy.

Stretching the twenty-foot cord, you peer out the window. This time the pulse is unmistakable, a definite brightening of the sky to the west, and along with it a timber somewhere in the house creaks. You punch the Sheriff. Busy. Highway Patrol. Busy. 911. Busy. A recorded voice erupts, strident and edged with static, telling you all circuits are busy.

You look outside again and now there is a faint shimmering in the air. On the windowsill outside, against the glass, a few flakes of ash have settled. KVTX. Busy. The
Courier
. Busy. On some inexplicable frantic whim you dial out of state, to your father-in-law (Where is your wife, she should have the mail by now?), who happens to be a professor of geology on a distinguished faculty. The ringing signal this time. Once. Twice. Three times. A click.

“Physical plant.”

Doctor Abendsachs, you babble, you wanted Doctor Abendsachs.

“This is physical plant, buddy. We can’t connect you here.”

What’s going on, you shout, what is happening with the atmosphere—

He doesn’t know. They are in a windowless basement. Everything fine there. It’s lunchtime and they are making up the weekly football pool.

It is snowing lightly now outside, on the driveway and lawn and garage. You can see your clippers propped pathetically against the hedge. Once more, at top speed, you punch your father-in-law’s number. Again a ringing. A click.

This time a recording tells you that all operators are busy and your call will be answered by the first available. The voice track ends and a burst of music begins. It is a large studio orchestra, heavy on violins, playing a version of “Hard Day’s Night.” At the point where the lyrics would be “sleeping like a log” the sound skips, wobbles, and skips again as if an old-fashioned needle has been bumped from a record groove.

You look out the window once more, as the house begins to shudder, and see that it is growing brighter and brighter and brighter.

T
HE
H
AIRCUT

I
knew the moment he got on the plane that something wasn’t right, but what it was eluded me. He stood there in his khaki suit, tennis racket in hand, his teenage boys beaming on either side. I stood, our daughter in my arms, flanked by my parents. We faced one another the way I’d seen the British and French do in old Revolutionary War films.

What is wrong with this picture?
I asked myself, recalling a test I’d often failed as a child. I was gullible, good at believing. (The dog belonged eating at the table, the wife could wear her husband’s hat.) I knew everyone was expecting me to greet this man from whom I’d been estranged, for this was our time of reconciliation, the time to make up for what had been. We had reached this decision together after living apart and on opposite coasts for a year.

We had been estranged since before the child was born. He couldn’t handle the additional responsibility, I clung more than I should. I had wanted a family, he still struggled to get beyond the one he already had. We had tried to separate and failed. I took a job in California, where I moved with my small child. He stayed on the East Coast. But we spoke every day on the phone. Each of us made several trips back and forth. I agreed to leave my West Coast job. He said he would try again.

Two months had passed since we had seen each other. I still felt annoyed with him for breaking our Valentine’s plans (a ski trip he’d promised the boys came up). I had gotten miffed over his not calling when he said he would. I hurt over disappointments, large and small, but now I had come with our daughter to my parents’ house in Florida, and he had come with the boys. It was to be a family vacation, our time to reconcile.

Look again
, I told myself, still unable to decide what bothered me, what seemed wrong. His face looked handsome, almost tanned. His suit was neat and pressed. His eyes were clear and bright, his shoes polished. His beard and hair were neat and trimmed.

I paused there. For if you spend five years of your life with someone, you pay attention to certain things. This is a man of quirks, little oddities you don’t forget. He won’t eat oatmeal if it has any lumps. He won’t wear a watch. When hurt, he recoils. He must play tennis every day. He has a way he hunches when he’s telling an untruth. And he won’t walk into a barbershop. In fact he prides himself in not having been in a barbershop in twenty-five years. I had cut his hair for the past five, his ex-wife had done the same for innumerable years before that. This man was a willing Samson to his Delilahs. Two months had passed since I’d seen him, yet his hair was neat and trim.

It felt as if the meaning of a dream were suddenly revealed, as if a foreign code had been cracked. The broken Valentine’s weekend, the missed phone calls, the colleague he always needed to see. Suddenly in one lucid moment, standing there in the airport, my family by my side, his next to him, all of us happy to be in a place where it was sunny and warm, the pieces of the puzzle fit together as I had been trying to get them to for so long.

It was a crystallizing, a coming together, an epiphany, if you will, as if a fog had lifted. I had no more doubt. Nothing was unsure. As he stepped forward to embrace me, I said, “Who cut your hair?” He stepped back, but I held my ground. “Tell me,” I said, moving our child to my shoulder, “Who cut your hair?”

V
INES

L
ately I notice that I
smell
more. I used to be able to wear the same shirt three or four days without being aware of it. Now, even in the course of a day, it smells foul.
I
smell foul. It doesn’t seem to matter whether or not I take cosmetic precaution. My
deodorants
smell foul by the end of the day. Along with this my feet are getting colder and sweating differently. My blood is circulating less. I think about my teeth a lot. Not too long ago I used to begin days feeling on top of things. Lately I realize I’m full of little stratagems to hold it all together. I wiggle a toe here, take an extra breath there, tighten my buttocks inconspicuously on the subway. I asked my wife recently whether or not she ever got that rotten fruit feeling, that sense of galloping inner deterioration before falling from the vine with a sickening
plush
. She answered quickly and emphatically, as befits a Vassar girl: “No,” she said, “I don’t. I get tired. I get headaches. I get disgusted. And I get periods.” There was a pause. “
Sometimes
,” I said, repaying her for the speed and emphasis of her answer. She cackled. All things considered, she wasn’t bad.

Not so my friend Norman. “What do you mean, that rotten fruit feeling?” he said. Norman is a health culturist. He does a lot of yoga and eats well. He impresses people as having a clean system. “Look,” he said. “Maybe
you’ve
got to go, but
I
don’t.” I wondered whether he had moved on to something besides yoga. “I’ve told you for years,” he said, “that you are literally full of rotten shit.” I don’t really like talking to Norman. For one thing, he never knows what I’m talking about. But my wife and his went to elementary school together. I’m really waiting for him to get a hernia before I talk to him seriously. I have several friends like Norman.