Scales
by Richard Weems
Yesterday, I’m making my man sloppy turkey: ground turkey with my secret ingredient (ground clove…shhh). When my man is over for dinner, my standards go way way up. If I brown an onion when I should have only sweated it, I nearly hurl the whole shebang out the window, skillet and all. I was all about stirring the sauce to achieve the ideal reduction and keep the meat from sticking, so I barely noticed when my man twisted open a beer, but I heard it when he said, “My brain is dying.”
I didn’t want to turn away from the turkey, but this announcement shattered me. We’d been dating seventy-three days, and this was the moment to reveal his imminent demise? Was he expecting me to notarize his final wishes? Call his family? How much family did he have, anyway?
He took another swig. “Like just now, ‘poof,’” he said as he made an explosion gesture by his temple, “a few thousand-plus cells just died on me. Dead space up here,” knocking on his noggin.
I stared into the skillet as though through a porthole at a wet, fresh crime scene.
“At this rate,” he said, “I’ll have no brain left in 48, maybe 57 years?” My man is 27 years old.
This is the perspective my man has of the world. Say we’re walking down the street, my arm around his because I’m clingy. He’ll point to the sky and announce, “That star there? Hurtling at us right now at thousands of kilometers a second.” He’ll look around as though he hopes panic will ensue in the immediate vicinity. And it has: I’m evaluating nearby shelter candidates for their possible rat density, proximity to food and water, number of exits.
Then he’ll squirm free of my grip and spread his arms. “Only several million years before impact!” My man is all forward trajectory, his present expanding like the post-Big Bang universe itself.
Josie considered these boil and simmer episodes (where I boil and he simmers) a setup. “He’s shtupping someone else for sure,” she concluded, wine in hand (wine is requisite for our association). “He gets you thinking globally or even galactically, and him passing on a communicable doesn’t seem so catastrophic. Member the last one?”
I don’t really remember the last one because I am, of course, small-scale. I relish the lump of my man’s bicep or forearm in my grip, BOGO sales on ground turkey, the crinkle paint flecks make when I peel them from my bedroom wall. If I don’t have an item of eminent importance in my immediate grasp, I fall into a torpor of uselessness and fear I may slip scarlessly under the surface of existence. Mom had four jobs and otherwise presented herself as little more than a lump on the couch my two brothers and sister waved me away from while they tended. And what is a dad? Last and smallest in line, I lived on what others had already partaken of. Acknowledged only when in the way.
I mean, look at me! I cling to my man because I’ve had so little to cling on to.
My man and I retired to my futon with our sloppy turkey and beers and cranked open my laptop for a movie. I voiced a fondness for the lead’s hairstyle. My man thought the trope of the professional woman desperate for motherhood was overplayed and the voiceover so Scorsese.
The next day, Josie and I pair our requisite wine with cheese fries, and I tell her most of how things went the night before. I tell her he won’t be coming around anymore. I tell her he’s gone.
“But is he? is the real question.” Josie dangles a cheese fry over her glass as though considering a dunk. “I’m not sure how easily you can shake a guy who references Scorsese during Look Who's Talking.”
I set my face to channel serious and assure her he’s gone…well, not quite. What I say is, “He won’t be walking through my door again.”
Josie looks like she wants to be convinced, but still, “That’s what you said about the last one.”
I didn’t mean it then, so I say, “I didn’t mean it then.”
Josie takes a long pause, as though she can pressure me to crack. She can, but she doesn’t pause long enough. Rather, she sighs as though letting out a held breath and says, “We’ll need another fries, I guess. Making this a celebration might give us both hope.”
Hope? Hope’s for those who busy themselves with tomorrow. My only hope right now is that I’ll be able to sneak parts of my man out the window to the dumpster below (see? not through my door ever again) so I can keep just the parts I want to remind me of him. The parts that will make me feel he’s never left.
That night, I clung to my man and took it on faith that the jargon he used and the critics he cited were actual, that every movie ever made had been slipped into its properly labeled drawer in the history and breath of the medium by people smarter than me. My man was wearing the shirt I liked so much, square of plaid after square of plaid as though with a plan, but I didn’t care what larger pattern it formed. I admired how each square slid along against itself when pinched. My man yapped along about something, probably intended to impress me.
What was his name again?
No matter. I realized what I needed to do to satisfy my needs.
I pinched this square in front of me to test it, to see if he could manage its way out, like a lizard giving up its tail to a predator.
Richard Weems (@richardkweems) is the author of three short fiction collections: Anything He Wants (finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize), Stark Raving Blue and From Now On, You're Back. Recent appearances include North American Review, Aquifer, 3Elements Review, Flash Fiction Magazine and Tatterhood Review. He lives and teaches in New Jersey.