In the storm of Goodman’s life, he is always a minute from finding shelter, a tin roof, a striped awning, hell, even a tree. His life has always been a storm, all 63 years, but now with Hannah gone, he feels the bite of wind everywhere he looks.
Especially when he looks in the mirror, which has always told him the truth, unlike Hannah, and it looks even truthier today. It frames his reflection like a Dutch Masters painting, except that Goodman’s shoulders are hunched, and his mouth is in a permanent droop. The truth tells him he is a bird’s nest of hair and cheeks that are pouched with all the lonely years waiting ahead.
He tries to see what Hannah must have hated. What made her turn away as she slept with Klein the butcher in the back room of his tiny shop. Goodman doesn’t understand what could have been so hard for Hannah to look at, and yet, she could stand the stink of chops and hooves that surely coated Klein’s beef hands when he touched her breasts.
Goodman leans into the mirror. The grizzle of beard, the bulbous nose. But behind all that is also the kindness in his cloud blue eyes. The crinkle in his forehead from when he worried with Hannah the night Poofy, her three-legged dog, died last winter. If Hannah had looked at Goodman once in a while, she would have seen his insides, too.
In the storm of Goodman’s life, this minute is the start of a tornado. More than the simple needle of rain he is used to. No, this is a big one. Soon his heart, his liver, his kidneys will be swirled away and slung over a tree branch. But what shelter can he take?
He remembers his uncle, his mother’s brother, drunk by 10 am each morning. Little more than a bad sheep Goldman’s mother would shake her head about. Still his uncle always seemed happy, and for a moment, Goodman wonders about the comfort of rum. Possibly there’s a bottle leftover from New Year’s, or did Hannah run off with that, too?
Then Goodman thinks about food, how it filled up his own brother all those teenage years, swelling him into a ball no one would date. His brother finally learned to love the fluff of a pancake more than the soft hand of a girl in a movie theater.
And what else was there, a poker game with Schwartz, or maybe a walk in the park? All of these were thin umbrellas whose spokes would give up like steel spiders at the first hint of wind.
In the storm of Goodman’s life, he knows he has to find shelter now, no more standing out in an open field. He looks even deeper at his reflection. Maybe shaving his beard, or parting his hair to the left, but he knows that won’t make him young again or bring Hannah home. Instead, he stands up straight, fixes the line of his lip, stoic, pretends he is someone he’d seen in an old painting, someone not to be swept away.
~
Francine Witte is a flash fiction writer and poet, and the author of the flash collection RADIO WATER. Her newest poetry book, Some Distant Pin of Light, has just been published by Cervena Barva Press. Her work has been widely published, and she is a recent recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York City. Please visit her website francinewitte.com. She can be found on social media @francinewitte.