“Bathers at Asnières,” oil on canvas, by Georges Seurat, 1884.
They sit in camping chairs, at the edge of the lake, the water murky as they wait for the dark to crown the night and the fireworks to start. Half the town behind them, a buzz over their shoulders of kids running and screaming, of firecrackers exploding, of teenagers holding hands and kissing under the buzzing tennis court lights. In their early forties, they’re embarrassed by their yearning, to leap into the water, to put their hands near the intimate unshaven hollows of bodies skinny with youth. Remember, he says, but her knee pops as she readjusts, pulling her shirt down over the soft mound of her belly, the same one he couldn’t keep his hands off of, the way he could feel her muscles, the way she’d shiver, and with her eyes ask for more.
“I’ve been seeing someone,” he says, between bites of kettle corn. The burnt sugar smell comes between them, and she wishes he’d stop chewing.
“Like a doctor? Or a therapist?” She sees him in his letterman’s jacket, the leather sleeves cartoonishly big, his runner’s arms more bone than muscle. He only runs on weekends now, getting slower with each mile.
“Never mind.” He swats at a bug, shreds of white dot his chest. Where were the days she’d licked them off, had bitten his ear, made him mewl with desire. The TV was turned on more than either of them, bodies orbiting, but never colliding. Even his jokes can’t roll her eyes anymore.
“I don’t want to know, Matty. Keep it hidden, don’t let anyone know, see or smell it on you.” She plucks out a handful and puts it to her lips, inhales, thinking how she could split him right down the goddamn middle with what she’s enjoyed in the safety of her head. For him. For their daughter. “I won’t be the gossip.”
The spark and sizzle of that first flare, the splash of color, the boom rattling the windows of the swanky house on the manufactured island at the edge of this greasy lake. A weeping willow and a tire swing, shadowed against the water. A place of envy. Postcarded with each flash of the light.
He reaches for her hand and she lets him hold it, fingers intertwined, knuckles already aching, his ring still fat on his finger. She tugs on it, knows how easily hers comes off each time she lotions her hands, but his won’t move past the knuckle. The scene of her standing and chucking it into the lake float away like smoke. The body holds onto what it needs. All she can think of is her hunger.
She leans in, stage whispers in his ear, a caught sound between flares, “At least she’ll know who you’re coming home to.”
She beckons for the bag and he gives it to her so willingly. A bit of mirth coloring his face, and she doesn’t know if it’s for her or for her. She dumps the popcorn on his lap, coating his chest and crotch with the popped kernels. “Enjoy your little snack.”
“It wasn’t on purpose,” he’ll tell her later on their walk back to the car, up the lengthening hills, past the church, and its cracked parking lot, dodging around the slower couples, those flagged by kids threatening to bob into the street.
But he never did anything on purpose. An argument so old it might as well have been sewed into their vows. Not even me, she doesn’t ask. Those colors, lilac, rose gold, Irish green, and blood red, superimposed over her eyes, promising something deliberate. A future as rooted as that ring on her husband’s hand, filthy with germs and grease, barricaded by knuckle and muscle and fat, and memory.
Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks, Special Like the People on TV and Covenants, and a full flash collection, Hollows. He lives in Indiana and is currently the editor of Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020, Best Small Fiction 2019 and 2022, Monkeybicycle, and numerous litmags. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.
