I called him originally because I was too lazy to keep looking and he was available.  We went on a date because I wanted someone to teach me about love.  I’d enjoyed drug crazes and orgies, fresh fruits and diamonds.  The occasional dive bar.  After our date, the-reasonably-attractive-man-I-then-had-no-interest-in watched me cry.  He told me I was pretty.  He told me love wouldn’t be found by anybody looking, was like a lost earring or unlocatable plane ticket.  He said if I took off my clothes just then, he’d show me love.  

Really? I said.  I told him nudity between strangers was more about sex.  And did he think I just fell off some turnip truck?  It occurred to me suddenly that I had never seen an actual turnip truck, which rankled.

I’m not going to touch you, he replied.  Just get naked.  You’ll see.

I said I didn’t believe.  Said I had to work in the morning.  Said, I have big male balls, Jason.  Is that your name?  Said, I have issues.  Added, I’m not even sure I like you, though you seem nice.

He said you should believe me.  My grandmother had an ankle to ribcage scar that made it hard to believe she'd even lived through the injury.  She believed I could show people love with just my gentle glance, and their nudity.  Her name was June.

I thought June’s big ole scar was my heart, but said, so this story pertains how? Seated in his dingy apartment that reeked of bananas, I wanted bread with sweet rot and threads of brown.  Biological heirlooms.  Pleasant quiet. 

I didn’t regard him. He watched my ass and shoulders and lips.

It’s a way I have of regarding naked people, he said to the back of my neck, weaseling close.  Grandma said it’s a look of pure love.   You want it?  The come on baby was silent. He was working on my acid-blue jeans, the buttons of my sweater, my blouse already half off.  Love, he said.  Pure love.  Jared.  That’s me. 

The sex happened briefly, like a San Diego hail storm.  Afterward, I didn’t know him or anything else better.  He was small everywhere.  My fingers smelled like condoms, which smell like the reek of chemicals fabricated to avoid some accidental interspecies breeding.

Your grandma lied, I said.  No particular way you looked at me made me feel loved. Not once.

He said, Grandma was blind.  Maybe she meant it was more like a feeling I give people.

Naked people? I asked.  Did she once specify nudity?

Right, he replied.  I’m sure she did.  I took care of her at the hospice.

But, being naked, having suddenly imagined the exact turnip truck characteristics, I could claim this wasn’t true.  Right, I replied.  Keep on believing that.  Make some bread with those bananas.  And tell your blind grandma in hospice I love her scar.  It’s very big, you know?

I would, he said.  But she’s dead.  Can I call you sometime?

I said, Jared, I wanted somebody to talk to who could tell me about love.  Real love.

I moved a pen over paper for him.  Chicken scratch. The number I left on his table was not mine.  Sometimes I wonder who he called then.  Wonder: Why?


Heather Fowler reads a lot, writes a lot, and sometimes teaches.  Please visit her website at www.heatherfowlerwrites.com for a linked-in bio and lists of current activities and events.

 

I am sitting at the kitchen table.

In the center of the kitchen table is a lazy Susan.

On the lazy Susan is an arrangement of flowers from my husband, an arrangement of flowers for our anniversary.

This writing that I’m doing falls on a page that already holds the criss-cross shadows of those flowers. I don’t have on my glasses, but I can tell the shadows of those flowers fall artistically. Yes, I can easily see the dark and the light. I have no problem there.

Where I have a problem is more in the gray areas, you know, the ones that are neither light nor dark. The ones that are somewhere in between, where the light and the dark become brothers, or mothers, or lovers, or unclarified butter, or clabbered milk, or sea foam and sand, or vomit—gross, lumpy homogenized vomit.

My hand, in its long, cursive want to write, floats to the top of the second page and scoots under the shadows of the flowers my husband bought for our anniversary.

I think how he didn’t have to do this thing, this ordering of the flowers, this picking up the phone and dialing and answering and placing the order and telling the words for the card and hanging up and hoping the arrangement would be fine, just fine.

He didn’t have to invest, but he did, and as I write on down this second page, the words emerge again, out of the shadows. Bit by bit, they progress into the lighter light, where the effort becomes difficult, even after thirty years of stringent practice, to ignore the actions of my gentle and beloved husband.


Jan Parker's work, Hard Times and Happenstance won First Place Novella and gained publication in the 2009 Press 53 Open Awards Anthology.
Visit www.writerjanbparker.com to learn more. 

I was feeling bad about the breakup.  It was mutual, I know.  I mean, neither of us was happy.  Better to end it now, we agreed, while we still liked each other.  Still, it hurt.

Karen even helped me pack my stuff.  I joked about how glad she must be to see me go if she was willing to help me move.  She didn't laugh as much as I had hoped. 

"I just need time on my own," she said.

"I know."  What I really knew was how friendly she had gotten with Kyle, her officemate at work.  For a while, she'd tell me about him--things he said, jokes he made.  Then she stopped mentioning him.  The silence told me much more than her words.

Karen and I had dated since our junior year in college.  When we graduated, we found jobs in the same town and moved in together.  It just seemed like what we should do.

Of course, at first we spoke of marriage.  But it never felt real to me.  The fact is neither of us set down roots.  This was just a stopover before the next move.   Like two children playing house, we were just going through the motions of living together.  I understand that now; I sensed it then.

As we got involved in the routine of our new jobs, we stopped talking about our future.  Then we stopped talking.  It took a while before we realized it was over.

A month after I moved out, I still felt uncomfortable.  I still wanted to call Karen when something funny happened at work or I found something for my new apartment.  But I was setting it up the way I wanted--a recliner I found at Goodwill in front of the TV, a colorful bedspread, that kind of thing.  I even went to a flea market and bought some stuff for the walls.  Still, I moped around like I was a guest in a stranger's apartment.

It wasn't simply that I pined for Karen.  The new place didn't feel like home.

Then it hit me, like some kind of epiphany.  My place didn't smell familiar.  Karen placed lilac potpourri in every room and she insisted on brewing burnt-bean Starbuck's coffee every morning.   What I realized was I never liked the way Karen made our apartment smell.  It's dumb, I know, but I laughed out.  I was free to make my place smell the way I wanted.

So I did something I hadn't done since I started living with Karen.  I cooked my favorite food the way I liked it.  I took out a frying pan and heated some oil.  Then I fried garlic and onions before tossing a couple of burgers into the sizzling oil.

Karen hated the smell of onions.  I hadn't realized how much I missed it.



Wayne Scheer has locked himself in a room with his computer and turtle since his retirement. (Wayne's, not the turtle's.)  To keep from going back to work, he's published hundreds of short stories, essays and poems, including, Revealing Moments, a collection of twenty-four flash stories, available at http://www.pearnoir.com/thumbscrews.htm.  He's been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net.  Contact Wayne at [email protected].