Fiction
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“I’m going to need to return a piranha,” Zeirna Brinck said to the man at Red C Exotics.
“Did I sell you a piranha?”
“No.”
“Then it’s not a return.”
Zeirna studied the man. Receding hairline. Odd blue dot on his forehead. Wavy gray-blond hair pulled back in man bun. Shoulders like hunchy undifferentiated mounds. No body awareness, none at all. She’d seen the willow-thin twenty-something version of this man slouched languidly in cafes, paperback copy of On The Road fanned open face down before him, a prop for picking up girls. She’d been the girl. Was this what boys like that became? Exotic pet store owners? Failing exotic pet stores, judging from the dim lighting, the dust, the piled up tanks and boxes, the near-total dearth of animal life of any kind, exotic or just ordinary, as if the place had undergone an extinction event. There were, what, five live pets in the place tops?
“I can’t have a piranha,” she said.
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“So, um, how did you get this number, Eugenia?” Alex finally asked.
This was the moment I always failed to foresee, each time I made the decision to call Alex. The moment he reminded me I was a superfan, no less pathetic, no better able to manage my bewildering passions than an Emkay. Before I could answer, he filled the dead space on the line with a laugh that made me hate him, made me wonder how I had let this character, this kind of smart, kind of good-looking guy with the toe-curling tenor and the crackpot family, and—OK—an excellent laugh and a propensity for self-mockery that almost made up for the way he mocked me, inhabit the one hidden room of my heart and squat there for years with no rent.
“Alex.” I closed my eyes. Twirled my nose ring. Rubbed my hand through my short bristly blue hair. Too short, even for the edgy mid-to-late-twenty-something riot grrrl I aspired, in my coiffure and certain lipstick choices, to be, though too shy, too stunted to do anything particularly riotous or grrrlish in actual life.
Until now. Until now, mutha-fuckah.
I kept my voice calm, the way I had rehearsed. “I have some pictures you’ll want to see.”
Order FICTION NO. 64 to read more.
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“My two girls are home!” my mother exclaimed, shuffling across the linoleum to give my sister Celeste and me big showy kisses. Mmmmhaah. I wriggled out of her embrace as quickly as politeness allowed, handing her my six-month-old baby in the car seat as a diversion, a kind of baby shield. My mother had taken hands-off parenting to literal extremes. She had plenty of reasons for it, if you wanted to dig into her past, but it didn’t make her late-onset physicality any easier to stomach. Now that Celeste and I were adults she wanted to pretend she had been a different kind of parent, all along, and we were different kinds of kids….
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“You know why we wear lipstick, don’t you?” Aubrey for some reason finds herself saying. “Makes men think of vulvas.”
“Excuse me?” Her date stops chewing. What is his name? Eubert. His name is Eubert, and he works in game design.
Video games, she’s already embarrassingly asked him to confirm. Not, like, Monopoly or Mouse Trap.
Mouse Trap? he’d asked. That’s the game you think of, when you think of games?
Actually, when Aubrey thinks of games she thinks of the thing she’s doing with Ivan—married, Ukrainian, religious Ivan. Ivan who manages an adult family home and who, questionably, despite the very real threat of Covid in those frightening pre-vaccine days, took her mother in for hospice and allowed Aubrey to visit her until the end. You could say Ivan saved her life, and you could say what she’s doing now—what she’s done, anyway, with Ivan, twice in her Subaru while parked on the street at night by the adult family home and once in the bathroom of her mother’s old room in the home itself—is thanking him…
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“Hey there, I’m not here to sell you anything. . . .”
The salesman sticks a foot in the door before Abby can close it. Why, she thinks, did I open the door in the first place?
“You like security, am I right? You like to know there’s an alarm system in your house, to protect the little ones. Am I right?”
“I don’t have little ones,” Abby says. “I’m the babysitter?”
“But that’s exactly why you do need an alarm system!”
“That doesn’t make sense,” she says. “Are you listening to yourself? I can’t buy anything for this house.”
“You know what?” says the salesman. “I don’t think you qualify for this sale, anyway. I’ll have to check with my office. But maybe? I’ll have to see.”
“Great,” she says. “Fine. I don’t care. Because I’m not buying anything from you.”
“Just say yes,” he says. “To anything.” His eyes implore her, pouches beneath them the color of bruise. He reminds her of her father before the end, his small electronics store failing, bankruptcy imminent, still putting on the false smile, trying to believe. Tears flood her eyes. But it isn’t her father, of course, not quite. His face is rubbery, slack, somehow inexact. She smells his desperation: fresh underarm sweat in unwashed clothes. He looms in the doorway, his shoes—scuffed wing-tipped oxfords, brown and white, once-beautiful shoes of a bygone era—hanging half over the threshold. He can’t come in, she notices. Maybe he can’t.
“No,” she says.
“Do you like blue skies? Do you like rainbows?”
“No.”
“Do you like apricots? Is today Thursday?”
“No.”
“It is, though. You know it is!”
“No.”
“Do you want me to go? Do you want me to leave you?”
“Yes!”
“Thank you!” His words are a gasp, a chuff of air. That’s all he is now: air. For a shimmery moment she can see through him, see through his saggy cheeks to the clumps of white snow falling behind, lit by streetlamps, plopping onto the asphalt and disappearing. And then, as a swell of wet cold air washes over her, he’s gone. Across the street a neighbor man slams the door of a pickup. Soft light pools from his open garage. He’s hoisting a box of tools from the cab when he looks up, catches her eye. He’s the sort of specimen she’s learned to be wary of. A husband and father. A family man.
The sort of specimen who’s taken everything she’s ever had.
Correction: the sort of specimen who was the rocky outcropping to her storm-tossed sea vessel. The sort of specimen she once smashed herself against, ruining everything for everyone forever.
Not that her particular specimen, her particular rocky outcropping, would look at her now.
Nonfiction
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Flicker- February 2024
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One—As Is
After my father died, my sister and I thought, Now my mother can start living. Time for her second act, the one we always knew she had in her.
"The old girl will surprise us yet," my sister said, while my mother grieved about her old life and flitted about the old house. For a year she grieved and flitted.
We, meanwhile, waited for her to come alive. A new goal, a new dream, a new story arc—that's what we wanted for her. Reinvention. Transformation. A character in a book would come alive. A character in a movie. We wanted this for her, too, this woman who had laughed too loud, had worn the wrong things, had seemed, in all the old pictures and stories, carefree yet caged, with a wider, wilder spirit than life and marriage had allowed for.
She took steps. She sold the Virginia house "as is," picked through the detritus of decades, and filled the back of her Corolla with the sorts of necessities betokening if not revival then at least survival: her mildewed shower curtain, her mismatched cutlery and plates, a dish drainer, her well-worn bedding and pillow, her TV. She packed a few knickknacks: an old metal mask with gem-blue eyes, a plastic California Raisin figurine, a card my father, from the depths of late-life dementia, had scrawled on with black Sharpie. (She kept this message on her wall for years but I can't recall now what it said. Something like: Remember: go to JC Penney! Or maybe: Urgent! Do NOT lock car!)
She had sold one table in the Richmond Pennysaver. Everything else she left behind: chairs, sofa, rugs, lamps, books, letters, houseplants. Two hundred VCR tapes we inherited from my lonely bachelor uncle, movies he'd taped once for us, anything risqué hand-edited out, along with scenes he accidentally slept through. Cups still in the cupboard. Food still in the pantry. As is, my mother was told. As is, it was.
Among that everything else: photographs. Her marriage, early motherhood, the Jersey house, the Virginia one. Older photos, too: black-and-white glimpses of my mother, glamorous in a miniskirt and short-cropped [End Page 157] hair, laughing with her head thrown back, a glass of something in her hand. My mother again, slender, young, posing with friends I've never heard about on a New York City street. My mother with a crooked smile bent over a sink in an apartment packed with friends. This is the woman we wanted to see reawakened. The woman who had come through a shitty, abusive childhood, who had been briefly single in New York and free, who had settled into an old-fashioned model of marriage with a kind, exuberant, intensely religious older man, who had had a year now to regain herself, regroup.
My mother moved out west. There—here, where I live—she volunteered at the senior center, the children's hospital thrift. She took care of my children: drove them to preschool, elementary, middle, high. She cheered for their teams from soccer sidelines and gymnasium bleachers. She took guided daytrips to mountain viewpoints and nearby towns. She took exercise classes, met friends for lunch. She came to my house for dinners, holidays, brunches.
But there were no romances, no makeovers, no new image or career. She failed to take up travel or any other passion. She watched a great deal of TV. My mother seemed in some ways to have assumed the infirmities of the much older man she had married: fear of driving, iffy balance, difficulty seeing at night. A desire to stay put. She spent a lot of time alone.
My mother was sixty-three when my father died. Still young. She still had time to become.
Two—Grown-Up People
I was reading Middlemarch during my mother's hospitalization for lung cancer in late 2020, sixteen years after my father's death. Her hospital stays accelerated the mental fog that had advanced on the sly through the pandemic months. A neurologist finally made the call: early onset Alzheimer's, not fixable..