Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction (30 page)

“You do want me to be happy, darling,” she cooed.

Jeremiah faced her, staring through her spectral features, and the truth burst from him. “I don’t care! I care not a pence for your happiness!”

“You awful man! How can you speak so to me, your loving wife?”

“You hectoring horror, you dare to speak to me of love? You are dead and I’m alive—”

“There’s no need to be cruel,” she sniffed.

“Here is love,” he snapped, seizing a slab from the pile. “‘From her loving husband, Jeremiah.’” He flung it onto her grave and she leapt back with a little cry.

“You’ve fallen in love with another, haven’t you?”

“How can I? I live in a shack at your graveside!” He grabbed another shard and shouted its word, “Devotedly!” and smashed it onto her final resting place. Another: “Faithfully!”

Elizabeth wailed, her pale feet growing more pale as she danced about avoiding the stones.

“In honor! A dear wife! In mourning! In love and mourning!” Stones clattered and crashed. They broke again, the graven skulls
fractured, wings reduced to feathers, trees of life to tinder upon the flame of his fury. His hands throbbed, his knuckles scraped as he snatched every shattered stone of seventeen years and heaped them up on top of her. “In honor and love! Honored wife! Beloved wife! Faithful wife!” At every blow, her spirit faded. At every shouted word, her figure faded, until he stood at last, blinking at the empty space before him, one last stone clenched in both shaking hands. He placed it at her head, a great weight dissipating into the promise of autumn’s fire. With a sigh, he read its legend: “Rest in peace.”

He turned from the grave and finally walked away.

Megan Todd Boone

A
s David made a sharp right onto Atlantic Avenue in his highly-coveted silver roadster, for the first time in what felt like days, he could see the writing on the wall. It was over.

He was so tired that the end felt a little like sweet relief. But that didn’t make it any easier. He had built this empire from the ground up. Every transaction he had made was carefully calculated. Each property that he and his company bought, sold, or seized had been done so with such a considered hand, that, as anyone who dealt with David knew, he always played to win.

How had it come to this, his once expansive conglomerate gone all at once in a takeover that anyone would classify as hostile? He would be left with nothing, not even a small house to his name. Hell, he wouldn’t even have a five-dollar bill by the end of the hour. Obviously, he had made some mistakes along the way, but he’d be damned if they’d felt like mistakes at the time. He’d gone with his gut, which was the only piece of advice that he ever remembered his father giving him. He couldn’t help but wonder what his father would say if he were with him now.

“Half of life is chance, son. You can’t win ‘em all.”

It seemed to David, that chance counted for a whole lot more than half in this world. Business was nothing more than a fickle and arbitrary construct that could change in an instant.

“Boys! The pizza is here!”

“Finally!” Kyle gave David a cheshire smile. “Loser has to clean up all the pieces. Don’t forget any of the houses or hotels or my mom will kill me.”

Steve Koppman

E
veryone loves my wife. Friends bring smiling coffee cups to “the world’s best listener.” Students scrawl her poignant, incomprehensible thank-you notes. Principals call her godsend. Burly men in barbershops and service stations look reverent, a hint of tears in their eyes, at the mention of her name. Once a guy held her up with a gun. He sent her wallet back via next-day certified mail.

Landlords love her most. They see her through the mob, holding our little girl’s hand, glowing with unearthly light. She’s already polishing the hardwood. She’s telling them they should be charging much more.

She was like that to me before our wedding. She wouldn’t let me out of her apartment. She’d look at me and start to cry. I was unready to marry. It seemed the only way to calm her down.

Everyone knows she’s the ideal human. What they don’t know is: I’m why. What she keeps from the world she saves for me, behind tastefully sealed windows and thick blinds that keep out the light. We never stop fighting. Marriage is war pursued by other means. She never gives in. I’m not made for it. She’s hardy as apples.

She used to call what we did making love, and liked it. She almost got evicted from the screaming. Her neighbors formed a committee. Now she calls it being used for sex, and wants no part. One day she kicked me out of the bedroom. Just piled my things in a corner. Two years later in therapy, she agreed that this may have been insensitive. We’ve always been in therapy. We
used to go to dinner and therapy.

In therapy we talk freely. We express our feelings. We try to acknowledge each other’s feelings. Then we start screaming. Then it’s time to end the hour. We’re free to continue working on this at home. We’ve been featured in several prestigious journal articles. We’re the best example of something awful they can’t name.

Why won’t you listen?

What you’re saying’s too awful.

You won’t hear me.

You want me to agree with you.

I do not.

I can’t say what I want.

Say what you want to.

You’ll shout me down.

I WILL NOT.

I can’t stand the way you think of me.

Why don’t you change what you do to me then?

I can’t.

Try.

We both wait for the other to walk. Sooner or later she’ll saunter off, kid in her arms, music in the background, surrounded by adoring crowds of landlords, principals, grandparents, and other upholders of the community.

We’re skating on thin earth, she says, living pretty low on the shoestring, rubbing each others’ elbows the wrong way. See the natural lampposts of spring, she says, there’s a golden rainbow just around the corner, let’s buckle down the hatchets and strike while the lightning is hot. We’re still green behind the ears, she says, maybe we need to get out more and chew the flesh.

I had a dream last night. I was running up the highway, my wife driving alongside, pacing me at fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour, us laughing together, proud of what good shape I’m in, how I can
run fast as a car just like I used to when we met. I woke and felt how much part of me loved part of her and wished I had the space and time to figure it out.

Let’s try again—I catch her in the kitchen—work things out. I’ll do this, you’ll do that, let’s promise to be better, meet halfway, negotiate, compromise, deal like we never could before, talk to me, please.

She heads for the front door.

It’s hopeless, she says, how could we be happy? I’ve tried so hard so long, she says, I’m used up.

I still want a miracle, I say.

Her little white hand turns the doorknob. There’s no miracles, she says, and it falls off in her hand.

Tara Laskowski

L
ouie the hamster escaped from his fish tank cage two days ago, and I can hear him scratching behind the walls in the kitchen after everyone else has gone up to bed. It is a desperate grasping, tiny rodent paws against drywall, and I believe there are only a few more days before we will be unable to tell the kids he’s going to turn up.

Earlier tonight after dinner my husband pushed back the stove from the wall, hoping to find the hole where Louie crawled through, but eventually he felt that was enough effort and went up to fall asleep to the Orioles game, leaving me to this guilt. Unlike him, I am afraid if I nod off I will have horrible dreams about the poor little guy meeting spiders and beetles and other lurking insects that built their own cities inside the walls and don’t want unexpected tourists. I pull out all of the cleaning bottles we’ve accumulated under the sink in the past thirteen years—three bottles of Windex, Drano, leather conditioner for an old chair from my husband’s bachelor days, Clorox, plant food, dried and twisted sponges, silver polish for a tray my mother bought us when we were married (a tray we never use), baby wipes, crusted superglue, inexplicably one of Samantha’s tiny pink flip-flops—and sweep a flashlight to the back panel where the sink pipe disappears through the wall, leaving enough space for a hamster to squeeze in, fall to the floor, and realize too late that he can’t clamber back up.

Now I find Samantha’s school ruler and Damien’s twine-and-popsicle-stick building set and I jury-rig a ramp worthy of Evel Knievel, all the while popping slivers of carrot down that hole
as in the news story I read a few months ago where a little girl trapped in a mine survived for days eating scraps of food they were able to send down to her in a sawed-off plastic soda bottle. Louie scratches in rhythm to my breathing, reminding me he is there.

There are several moments after I maneuver the ramp down behind the sink that I believe I have failed; the hamster is chewing on his own escape route and I realize I am counting on the logic of an animal with a brain the size of a pea, and in these moments I think not of the hamster’s limitations but of my own, and that I must’ve failed as a parent, that this shoddy ramp would get a C at best in Mrs. Thomas’s arts and crafts, that I shouldn’t have let Louie escape, and that I should never, ever be the cause of such a crestfallen look on Damien’s face. Because Damien especially is a fragile kid—Samantha is more headstrong, confident, parading on stage in the fourth-grade winter play like a Broadway star with a paper crown—but Damien is more internal, more sensitive and thoughtful (more like me, I think, which comes with its own kind of guilt), and one day the both of them will grow up to be their own people, and I will have to let them scurry into their own dark spaces. And just about that time, the hamster stops eating his safety net and perches just at the bottom; I can feel his weight as he tests the ramp, imagine his pink nose quivering upward, and I hold my breath as we both wait, wondering if we can trust it.

Jason Sanford

I
’d never given much thought to how different Edward and I were—though I’d had reason enough in the last few months of our whirlwind romance. But now that we were finally on our honeymoon, the differences were becoming ever more evident.