Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (6 page)

I don’t know how far back I should go. There have been recent volcanic eruptions on Venus. The newspaper said “recent,” as defined by scientists, is “300,000 to several million” years ago. But I guess I’ll start with three winters ago, December 19 to be exact, when your husband and I got into our first accident. Car accident. Nobody hurt, but addresses were exchanged, license plate numbers, insurance information—and I’ll admit, I couldn’t help it, I noted your husband’s eye color. Hazel.

Nothing else would have happened between us if three weeks later I had not returned the box of farina with flour-beetles to Bonno’s Food Warehouse where I don’t usually shop because of incidents like the above and also my ex-sister-in-law works there and we have never seen eye-to-eye. How could I have intended for your husband to be right ahead of me in the checkout, buying formula and plastic diapers? The first thing I noticed was his neck brace, but then, when I saw who he was, I had to inquire. If I was going to get smacked with a lawsuit I wanted to know about it. Wouldn’t you?

But even then nothing else might have happened if, on January 16, my downstairs neighbor Matty had not smoked in bed. I remember the date clearly because I had taken off work that morning to bring my mother in for a root canal. She turned out to be allergic to the ether or whatever it is they made her suck and she practically died in the chair.

I’ve lectured Matty about smoking safely in bed but she doesn’t learn. She practically burned down the hallway, which needed it, but if it weren’t for your husband and his men it could have gone further.

I was unintentionally in my yellow robe, kind of shivering, and I said, “Hank Henkins!” because by then I knew him by name.

“Hank Henkins! That can’t be you!” Of course, I was pleased to see him under those circumstances—you would’ve been, too. And I’ll admit it even if he doesn’t—that’s when I think he first noticed
my
eye color. Just for the record, they’re blue.

This is the silly speech I am driving around with, although I have not yet made the call. I have Elly Henkins’ number and I have driven by her house frequently enough to know she is home. The garage door is open, and the twins’ stroller, in the middle of the sidewalk, is in a suggestive position. It is time to make a speech of some kind. I am over-my-head in love with Hank Henkins, and it won’t wait until Kathy and Pam are grown up. It won’t even wait until they are at least prom age, which Hank and me were both trying for. I thought we could have the longest flirt in history with no dire consequences, but now a thing has happened and I can’t wait.

T
HE
F
ATHER

T
he baby lay in a basket beside the bed, dressed in a white bonnet and sleeper. The basket had been newly painted and tied with ice-blue ribbons and padded with blue quilts. The three little sisters and the mother, who had just gotten out of bed and was still not herself, and the grandmother all stood around the baby, watching it stare and sometimes raise its fist to its mouth. He did not smile or laugh, but now and then he blinked his eyes and flicked his tongue back and forth through his lips when one of the girls rubbed his chin.

The father was in the kitchen and could hear them playing with the baby.

“Who do you love, baby?” Phyllis said and tickled his chin.

“He loves us all,” Phyllis said, “but he really loves Daddy because Daddy’s a boy too!”

The grandmother sat down on the edge of the bed and said, “Look at its little arm! So fat. And those little fingers! Just like its mother.”

“Isn’t he sweet?” the mother said. “So healthy, my little baby.” And bending over, she kissed the baby on its forehead and touched the cover over its arm. “We love him too.”

“But who does he look like, who does he look like?” Alice cried, and they all moved up closer around the basket to see who the baby looked like.

“He has pretty eyes,” Carol said.

“
All
babies have pretty eyes,” Phyllis said.

“He has his grandfather’s lips,” the grandmother said. “Look at those lips.”

“I don’t know . . .” the mother said. “I wouldn’t say.”

“The nose! The nose!” Alice cried.

“What about his nose?” the mother asked.

“It looks like somebody’s nose,” the girl answered.

“No, I don’t know,” the mother said. “I don’t think so.”

“Those lips . . .” the grandmother murmured. “Those little fingers . . .” she said, uncovering the baby’s hand and spreading out its fingers.

“Who does the baby look like?”

“He doesn’t look like anybody,” Phyllis said. And they moved even closer.

“
I
know!
I
know!” Carol said. “He looks like
Daddy!
” Then they looked closer at the baby.

“But who does Daddy
look
like?” Phyllis asked.

“Who does Daddy
look
like?” Alice repeated, and they all at once looked through to the kitchen where the father was sitting at the table with his back to them.

“Why, nobody!” Phyllis said and began to cry a little.

“Hush,” the grandmother said and looked away and then back at the baby.

“Daddy doesn’t look like
anybody!
” Alice said.

“But he has to look like
somebody
,” Phyllis said, wiping her eyes with one of the ribbons. And all of them except the grandmother looked at the father, sitting at the table.

He had turned around in his chair and his face was white and without expression.

L
OVE
P
OEMS

H
e has written her a St. Valentine’s Day love poem. It is very beautiful; it expresses, embodies a passionate, genuine emotion, emotion of a sort he hardly realized himself capable of, tenderness that is like the tenderness of a better man. At the same time, the imagery is hard, diamond clear, the form intricate yet unobtrusive. He says the poem out loud to himself over and over. He cannot believe it, it is so good. It is the best poem he has ever written.

He will mail it to her tonight. She will open it as soon as it arrives, cleverly timed, on St. Valentine’s Day. She will be floored, she will be blown away by its beauty and passion. She will put it away with his other letters, loving him for it, as she loves him for his other letters. She will not show it to anyone, for she is a private person, which is one of the qualities he loves in her.

After he has mailed the poem to her, written out in his interesting hand, he types up a copy for his own files. He decides to send a copy to one of the more prestigious literary magazines, one into which he has not yet been admitted. He hesitates about the dedication, which could lead to embarrassment, among other things, with his wife. In the end he omits the dedication. In the end he decides to give a copy also to his wife. In the end he sends a copy also to a woman he knows in England, a poet who really understands his work. He writes out a copy for her, dedicated to her initials. It will reach her a few days late, she will think of him thinking of her a few days before St. Valentine’s Day.

N
IGHT

H
e woke up. He thought he could hear their child’s breathing in the next room, the near-silent, smooth sound of air in and out.

He touched his wife. The room was too dark to let him see her, but he felt her movement, the shift of blanket and sheet.

“Listen,” he whispered.

“Yesterday,” she mumbled. “Why not yesterday,” and she moved back into sleep.

He listened harder, though he could hear his wife’s breath, thick and heavy next to him, there was beneath this the thin frost of his child’s breathing.

The hardwood floor was cold beneath his feet. He held out a hand in front of him, and when he touched the doorjamb, he paused, listened again, heard the life in his child.

His fingertips led him along the hall and to the next room. Then he was in the doorway of a room as dark, as hollow as his own. He cut on the light.

The room, of course, was empty. They had left the bed just as their child had made it, the spread merely thrown over bunched and wrinkled sheets, the pillow crooked at the head. The small blue desk was littered with colored pencils and scraps of construction paper, a bottle of white glue.

He turned off the light and listened. He heard nothing, then backed out of the room and moved down the hall, back to his room, his hands at his sides, his fingertips helpless.

This happened each night, like a dream, but not.

M
ANDY
S
HUPE

I
’m thinking about you today, Mandy Shupe. Thinking about you dancing on a picnic table at Crystal Beach. Wondering about the true story and how that image often comes to mind when things are bad for me.

My mother told me about you when I was a little girl. Why, I don’t know. Something to do with self-control?

What sank in was that Mandy Shupe, a Mennonite, left the church and danced naked on a picnic table at Crystal Beach. Crystal Beach, longest roller coaster in the world, so the sign said. Bright pink castle fun house and a crowded beach. Blacks from Buffalo, Negroes we called them then. Flashy clothes and an aura of perfume, though Mother said they were poor, lived in slums, weren’t treated well. Didn’t look poor to me. And the gangs of teenagers, slicked back, duck-tailed hair (duck’s ass the less polite kids at school called it). The girls in short shorts or tight skirts showing off all they had as Mother would say. The smells of popcorn, dust, and sweat mixing with the screams from the roller coaster and loop-de-loop. The dance hall with its chandeliers, dance band, laughing couples.

I pictured you in your long gray clothes leaving the Mennonite church, walking the three miles to Crystal Beach with a man. Even then I knew somehow a man was involved. I saw you climbing up on the bench of the picnic table, the man giving you his hand.

You take off the big gray bonnet and the small white organdy underbonnet. Lay them neatly on the bench. With a shake of your head, uncoiling your dark hair. Removing the long gray dress, the chemise, and the heavy flannel petticoat. Unlacing the corset. Slipping down the hand-sewn cotton bloomers. Folding each garment neatly there on the bench. Stepping from bench to table.