Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (12 page)

It actually comes down to the fact that I can talk to my wife best of all. Not that I don’t make her sick a lot. But we’ve been together twenty-five years. That kind of thing is stronger than just about anything. Who else, for example, knows how many inconsequential and humiliating things my body has been through? “Look,” she said, “the fact is that you’re going to die sooner or later. Some bodies are in better shape for it than others.” It was a devastating statement in its ambiguity. “You know,” I said, “Norman isn’t really so dumb. What kind of shape is Marie in?” Marie is Norman’s wife. “Do you really want to know?” she said. “Well, yes. Why not?” “She thinks she might have cancer. She’s having a biopsy Tuesday.” “My God,” I said.

My wife has a way of shortening my conversations. It’s not just that she’s a busy and successful woman. Through inadvertence or intent she frequently misconstrues my words just to that extent that I cannot respond to what she says. I am very subtly confused. I used to consider it girlish charm, but I don’t anymore. It rather upsets me. I met Norman later in the week of his wife’s biopsy. He practically hugged me. “Listen,” he said, “why don’t you start working out?” He looked at me with a lot of pain in his eyes, as if it was really important. “Norman, I’m really in a hurry,” I said, moving off. “We’ll talk about it.” From half a block he shouted. “She’s all right! She’s all right!” It was all I could do not to run.

Two days later, for reasons totally beyond me, I felt like a heart-to-heart talk with my wife.
Her
name is Edna. “Listen,” I began auspiciously, “I realize we’re
both
going to die.” She stared at me. “And I want you to know it’s all right.” Her mouth opened, but she didn’t speak. “I mean, the children, the twenty-five, or thirty, or . . . years, I mean, let me say something ridiculous . . . I just want you to know that I love you.” Having spoken with my usual clarity, I was about to speak again. But she forestalled me. “Will you please
shut up
,” she hissed. Her eyes filled with tears. She gripped my hand, tightly, lovingly.
Lovingly
. That’s rather important in retrospect. “
Will you please shut up!
” I did.

H
OW
T
O
T
OUCH
A
B
LEEDING
D
OG

I
t begins as nothing, as a blank. A rose light is filtering through the curtains. Rosy and cozy. My blanket is green. My blanket is warm. I am inside. Inside is warm. Outside is the dawn. Outside is cold. Cold day. My arm reaches for a wife who is no longer there.

The stillness is broken by the voice of a neighbor, yelling from the road outside. “The dog! Your dog’s been hit!” It’s the farmer down the road, keeping farmer’s hours. “The dog!”

It’s not my dog, but it is my responsibility. It is Beth’s dog. I don’t even like him, with his nervous habit of soiling the kitchen floor at night. I used to clean up after the dog before Beth came yawning out of our bed, and that was an act of love, but not of the dog. Now it doesn’t matter why I clean up. Or whether.

Beth’s dog is old and worn. He smells like a man given to thin cigars. Beth found him at the animal shelter, the oldest dog there.

I find the dog quivering on his side where he limped from the road. He has come to the garden gate, where the rose bushes bloom. A wound on his leg goes cleanly to the bone, and red stains appear here and there on the dull rug of his coat. He will not stand or budge when I coax him. A thick brown soup flows out of his mouth onto the dirt.

On the telephone, the veterinarian asks me what he looks like, and I say, stupidly, like an old Airedale. He means his wounds. After I describe them, he instructs me to wrap the dog in something warm and rush him over.

I make a mitten of the green blanket and scoop up the dog. The thought of touching his gore puts me off, and I am clumsy. I scoop weeds and clods as well as the dog. The dew on the grass looks cool, but the blood that blossoms on the blanket is warm and sick. He is heavy in my arms and settles without resistance in my car. He is now gravity’s dog.

Driving past the unplowed fields toward town, I wonder if my clumsiness hurt the dog. Would Beth have touched him? The oldest dog in the shelter! It’s a wonder that she thought having a dog would help.

The veterinarian helps me bring the dog from the car to the office. We make a sling of the blanket, I at the head. We lay him out on a steel-topped table. I pick weeds and grass from the blanket and don’t know what to say.

The veterinarian clears his throat but then says nothing.

“He’s my wife’s dog,” I say. “Actually, he came from the shelter over on High Street. He wasn’t working out, really. I was thinking of returning him.”

The veterinarian touches a spot below the dog’s eye.

“Maybe,” I continue, “maybe if it’s going to cost a lot . . .”

“I don’t think you have to make that decision,” says the veterinarian, who points out that some pupillary response is missing. “He’s dying,” he says. “It’s good you weren’t attached to him.”

Beth, I remembered, enjoyed taking the dog for rides in the car.

“These breaths,” the veterinarian is saying, “are probably his last.”

He seems relieved that he needn’t bother to act appropriately for the sake of any grief on my part. He asks, “Did he run in the road a lot?”

“Never,” I say. “He never ran at all.”

“What do you make of that?”

“Beats me,” I say, lying. I watch the dog’s chest rise and fall. He’s already far away and alone. I picture myself running out into the road.

I watch my hand volunteer itself and run its fingers through the nap of his head, which is surprisingly soft. And, with my touch on him, he is suddenly dead.

I walk back to the car and am surprised by how early in the day it still is. Blood is drying on the green blanket in my hand, but it will come off in the wash. The blood on the carpet of the car is out of sight, and I will pretend it isn’t there. And then there’s the touch. But soon the touch, too, will be gone.

G
IRL

W
ash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn’t have gum on it, because that way it won’t hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school?; always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming; don’t sing benna in Sunday school; you mustn’t speak to wharf-rat boys, not even to give directions; don’t eat fruits on the street—flies will follow you;
but I dont sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school
; this is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a buttonhole for the button you have just sewed on; this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming; this is how you iron your father’s khaki shirt so that it doesn’t have a crease; this is how you iron your father’s khaki pants so that they don’t have a crease; this is how you grow okra—far from the house, because okra tree harbors red ants; when you are growing dasheen, make sure it gets plenty of water or else it makes your throat itch when you are eating it; this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like very much; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely; this is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well, and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming; be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit; don’t squat down to play marbles—you are not a boy, you know; don’t pick people’s flowers—you might catch something; don’t throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all; this is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot; this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child; this is how to catch a fish; this is how to throw back a fish you don’t like, and that way something bad won’t fall on you; this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man, and if this doesn’t work there are other ways, and if they don’t work don’t feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn’t fall on you; this is how to make ends meet; always squeeze bread to make sure it’s fresh;
but what if the baker wont let me feel the bread?;
you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?

T
HE
B
URLINGTON
N
ORTHERN,
S
OUTHBOUND

H
er name was Christine. He didn’t know how to talk to her, so he wrote her a poem in which he compared her to the Burlington Northern southbound out of Fort Collins. He told her about the way he used to stand on the tracks in the dazzle of the headlight. He liked to step aside and stand on the tie edge to feel the thunder in his bones. Between the quaking of the cinders and his joy, the engine would almost bring him to his knees. The diesel throb in his guts would ebb until it was only sound, and then the cars—some shrieking on their springs—would
clataclat clataclat
on by. He’d choose one car, and at a trot he would swing aboard the ladder. He’d feel the night air in his hair, and the cars nearest him would have a music all their own, a rhythm he could never hear if he only stood near the track as each one passed. The horn would sound for the last intersection, a song sweet as jazz. Then, from even fifty cars away, he would feel the vibration of the engine digging in. He would dream for a moment of hanging on, of riding the coupling platform through the night, riding for weary hours in a white-knuckled crouch until the daylight would show him the red hills of New Mexico and the smell of juniper would be in the air. Then he’d leave the dream to notice how fast the ties were flying beneath him. He’d lean out into the wind at the edge of town, and he’d launch himself into the void and land running with a jar he would feel all the way up his spine, a shock he would feel as a flash of white and the taste of electricity, and he’d run and run blindly and sometimes stumble in the cinders and scrape his knuckles and bang his knee. When he could stop at last he’d hear the blood rushing in his ears for a long time while he felt the train rush on and recede, and he’d watch the stars wheel awhile and when he walked home there’d be a ringing in his ears but gently.