MEG POKRASS: Cages

Flash Fiction by Meg Pokrass

Facebook Lover

Facebook lover promises to fly out to see her again in the spring, and the next day, his wife posts that he has died. “We’re not happy, but we’re not miserable,” he once told her. She perches there wondering how to grieve. His profile page has become a wake of condolences for his family. In his final profile photo he’s wearing the tangerine shirt she gave him. She touches the photo, blood rushes back to her fingers. Each morning, she’s back there looking at him, and as always, he almost smiles. 

Cages

We were sleeping in a converted treehouse on a forlorn beach this time. All of the real B & Bs were rented. We had escaped our spouses as if our lives were at stake. “My husband is so young he still scrubs his facie skin,” I told him, and here he pretended to faint. It was as if finally, I could hear what my father was saying. I had scattered his ashes near the plum tree, and here he was again, eating packaged waffles in the morning, kissing me on my toothpaste-bespeckled chin. This happened when the old guy and I slept together. This time, sitting on a beach so rocky it injured his bony bottom. “I love you, I said. “Thank you,” he said. Smaller than last time, his cheeks sinking into the cage of his face.

Not Guilty

He did not let his wife make him feel guilty about abandoning her and the old dog. There were things he couldn’t say to her anymore. The friends stopped asking if he had come home yet, knowing he probably hadn’t. He did not want his wife to serve him yet another price-reduced cake, or buy one more dress they couldn’t afford just to try and knock him back.

He no longer held the crusty duty of kissing his wife’s cheek, hiding a dead-to-me smile. He did not let his wife’s emotions burn up their house. He did not think his wife should feel sad. He did not hide the hickeys on his neck that needed to be calmed. He did not go to the store and buy her one last nearly expired cake to serve him.

He no longer tried to see things from afar, he was finally right in the center. He was no longer falling down, he was falling back up.

At the risk of startling their friends, he didn’t talk to them for almost a year. At the risk of startling their friends, he did not say there had always been problems he couldn’t fix. He was tangled up in a net and pleased for wriggling. He had been trapped on the bottom of a silty river for too long. “You must remember what joyfulness feels like,” he finally wrote to their friends, as if conventional people could possibly understand— while his wife sat on the living room sofa with the dog, stunned as a fish knocked bloody on a rock.

Dance Lesson 

You imagine this is your wedding day. It’s time for the first dance and the band has just struck up a spirited rendition of “You Send Me”. In your imagination, he takes you in his arms and you fall on your ass. “I’ll need a dance lesson, I haven’t danced in years,” you tell him. 

Fred is sulking because you keep saying you wish you could elope.

No laughing, in a bad mood. His shirt came back from the dry cleaner with a spot on it. But his name is waiting, and you’ve tired of your own.

So you ask your best friend to help. There’s an orchestra warming up in your imagination. And your friend has a romantic image in her head of just how she wants you to look when you walk up the aisle.

“With your hair like this,” she says, lifting it delicately off your neck.

“Okay,” you say, although you don’t want your wrinkly neck exposed. Still, she has always liked your neck, and it would be sad to create any fiction over a matter of no consequence. “It feels good when you raise it that way,” you tell her. You remember how when she was married she told you that she was planning to keep her name.

“I like Fred’s name,” you say.

What you don’t say is that this is because it sounds smooth and lucky. She knows your name has always been full of potholes. And what you don’t say is that kissing him feels like a terminal illness, but she seems to know.

Hands you a tissue to dab your wet face before trying the dance steps— standing near you, so tall. 

And it’s only once you’re standing next to each other now as you have for years, moving your shoes, gazing into each other’s faces, yours smaller and sadder, hers prettier and brighter— that you ask your bridesmaid to pose with you as groom.

“Romeo and Juliet style,” you say. 

MEG POKRASS is the author of nine collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies of flash including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International; Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023; Wigleaf Top 50 (4 times); and places like Electric Literature, Five Points, Split Lip, McSweeney’s, Washington Square Review and Passages North. Her new collection, The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories by Meg Pokrass, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books in late 2024. 

Flash Boulevard is edited by Francine Witte. Banner photograph Wes Candela.