Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (14 page)

Not looking at one another now, rigidly fixed upon the task which awaited them, they separated at the cabin door. She was to follow the trail that led north. On the path leading in the opposite direction, he turned for a moment to watch her running, her hair loosened and flying. He ran in turn, crouching among the trees and hedges until, in the yellowish fog of dusk, he could distinguish the avenue of trees which led up to the house. The dogs were not supposed to bark, they did not bark. The estate manager would not be there at this hour, and he was not there. He went up the three porch steps and entered. The woman’s words reached him over the thudding of blood in his ears, first a blue chamber, then a hall, then a carpeted stairway. At the top, two doors. No one in the first room, no one in the second. The door of the salon, and then, the knife in hand, the light from the great windows, the high back of an armchair covered in green velvet, the head of the man in the chair reading a novel.

Translated by Paul Blackburn

T
HE
P
ARING
K
NIFE

I
found a knife under the refrigerator while the woman I love and I were cleaning our house. It was a small paring knife that we lost many years before and had since forgotten about. I showed the knife to the woman I love and she said, “Oh. Where did you find it?” After I told her, she put the knife on the table and then went into the next room and continued to clean. While I cleaned the kitchen floor, I remembered something that happened four years before that explained how the knife had gotten under the refrigerator.

We had eaten a large dinner and had drunk many glasses of wine. We turned all the lights out, took our clothing off, and went to bed. We thought we would make love, but something happened and we had an argument while making love. We had never experienced such a thing. We both became extremely angry. I said some very hurtful things to the woman I love. She kicked at me in bed and I got out and went into the kitchen. I fumbled for a chair and sat down. I wanted to rest my arms on the table and then rest my head in my arms, but I felt the dirty dishes on the table and they were in the way. I became incensed. I swept everything that was on the table onto the floor. The noise was tremendous, but then the room was very quiet and I suddenly felt sad. I thought I had destroyed everything. I began to cry. The woman I love came into the kitchen and asked if I was all right. I said, “Yes.” She turned the light on and we looked at the kitchen floor. Nothing much was broken, but the floor was very messy. We both laughed and then went back to bed and made love. The next morning we cleaned up the mess, but obviously overlooked the knife.

I was about to ask the woman I love if she remembered that incident when she came in from the next room and without saying a word, picked up the knife from the table and slid it back under the refrigerator.

T
HE
W
IDOW

Q: Nice place you have here.

A: I try to keep it up. But it’s hard. It’s hard.

Q: How many years has it been now?

A: Seven. Seven come September. He was sitting in that chair, right where you are now, and the next minute he was gone. Just a kind of long sigh, and he was gone.

Q: Sounds like a pretty good way to go. Since we all have to go sometime.

A: That’s what everybody said. The minister, the undertaker. I suppose I should have been grateful, but if it had been less sudden, it might have been less of a shock. It was as if he
wanted
to go, the way he went so easy.

Q: Well. I doubt that. But it’s you I’m interested in, you in the years since. You look wonderfully well.

A: Ever since I stopped taking the pills. These doctors nowadays, they prescribe the pills, I honestly believe, to kill you. I was having dizzy spells, one leg seemed to be larger than the other, my hands felt like they were full of prickers . . . it all stopped, once I stopped taking the pills.

Q: And your . . . mental state?

A: If you mean do I still have all my buttons, you’ll have to judge that for yourself. Oh, I’m forgetful, but then I always was. I know if I stand in the middle of the room long enough it’ll come to me. It’s like the sleeping. At first I used to panic, but now if I wake up at three in the morning I just accept it as what my body wants. Trust your body, is the moral of it all I suppose.

Q: By mental state I meant more grief, loneliness, sense of self, since . . . you became a widow.

A: Well, first, there’s the space. No, first, there’s the ghosts. Then there’s the space.

Q: Ghosts?

A: Oh yes, right there. All the time. Talking to me, telling me to put one foot in front of the other, not to panic. Rattling the latches at night. As certain as you’re sitting there. Many a time I’ve seen it rock by itself.

Q: Perhaps I should change chairs.

A: Oh no, sit right there. People do all the time.

Q: After the ghosts, space?

A: An amazing amount of it. Amazing. I never noticed the sky before. Seventy years on earth and I never looked at the sky. Just yesterday, there were clouds in it with little downward points, like a mountain range upside down, or a kind of wet handwriting, it looked ever so weird, I can’t describe it properly. And the trees. The way the trees are so patient, so
themselves
, gathering their substance out of air—it sounds silly, in words.

Q: So you would say then that since your husband’s passing your life has taken a turn toward the mystical?

A: Not mystical,
practical
. The income tax, for instance. I do it all myself, federal and state. I never knew I had it in me to enjoy numbers. And people. I have friends, of all ages. Too many at times, I take the phone off the hook. I think what I meant about the space before, it’s space you can arrange yourself, there’s nobody pushing at you with
his
space, nobody to tell you you’re crazy when you’re weeding the peas at four in the morning and start singing.

Q: You often sing to yourself?

A: I’m not sure.

Q: I don’t mean to pry—

A: Then don’t pry.

O
ne must be prepared, in interviewing the elderly, for these sudden changes of mood, for abrupt closure of access. Human material rubbed so thin by longevity resembles a book whose pages in their tissue fineness admit phrases from the next page or, in their long proximity
en face
, have become scrambled inky mirrors one of the other. Paranoia is the natural state of a skidding organism. Volatility is the inevitable condition of angels. The widow’s face, so uncannily tranquil and spacious before, has grown hard and narrow as a gem that is cutting the transparent interface of the interview. One must return to scratch.

Q: But, er, ma’am, prying wasn’t—I mean, what we want to do here, your testimony is so positive, so unexpectedly so, that we want to bring to the widest possible audience . . . uh, its great value in this era of widows, to all those others who find themselves alone.

A: You are not alone. You are not. Not.

W
HAT
H
APPENED
D
URING
T
HE
I
CE
S
TORM

O
ne winter there was a freezing rain. How beautiful! people said when things outside started to shine with ice. But the freezing rain kept coming. Tree branches glistened like glass. Then broke like glass. Ice thickened on the windows until everything outside blurred. Farmers moved their livestock into the barns, and most animals were safe. But not the pheasants. Their eyes froze shut.

Some farmers went ice-skating down the gravel roads with clubs to harvest the pheasants that sat helplessly in the roadside ditches. The boys went out into the freezing rain to find pheasants too. They saw dark spots along a fence. Pheasants, all right. Five or six of them. The boys slid their feet along slowly, trying not to break the ice that covered the snow. They slid up close to the pheasants. The pheasants pulled their heads down between their wings. They couldn’t tell how easy it was to see them huddled there.

The boys stood still in the icy rain. Their breath came out in slow puffs of steam. The pheasants’ breath came out in quick little white puffs. Some of them lifted their heads and turned them from side to side, but they were blindfolded with ice and didn’t flush. The boys had not brought clubs, or sacks, or anything but themselves. They stood over the pheasants, turning their own heads, looking at each other, each expecting the other to do something. To pounce on a pheasant, or to yell Bang! Things around them were shining and dripping with icy rain. The barbed-wire fence. The fence posts. The broken stems of grass. Even the grass seeds. The grass seeds looked like little yolks inside gelatin whites. And the pheasants looked like unborn birds glazed in egg white. Ice was hardening on the boys’ caps and coats. Soon they would be covered with ice too.

Then one of the boys said, Shh. He was taking off his coat, the thin layer of ice splintering in flakes as he pulled his arms from the sleeves. But the inside of the coat was dry and warm. He covered two of the crouching pheasants with his coat, rounding the back of it over them like a shell. The other boys did the same. They covered all the helpless pheasants. The small gray hens and the larger brown cocks. Now the boys felt the rain soaking through their shirts and freezing. They ran across the slippery fields, unsure of their footing, the ice clinging to their skin as they made their way toward the blurry lights of the house.

T
EDDY’S
C
ANARY

“A
nd Louise calls him down—she’s screaming her head off because the pipe just blew totally and water’s shooting out from under the sink and Bernie must think she’s popped an artery or something and he’s out of that bathtub like a goosed whale.”

Everybody around the table in Teddy’s rec room is looking at each other, trying to imagine that. “I can just see him,” I say, “dripping wet, leaving a trail of water on the steps and you know Bernie, with that major-league beer belly of his he must have looked like the Jell-O Monster and there’s Louise pointing to that pipe and him huffing and puffing and then he yells to her to go to the basement and shut off the water and you can imagine him trying to get his big ass under the sink and try to stop the spray with his towel.”