Peeling
Mike Hutka, when he was home from selling on the road, never seemed to leave his house and yard. The car stayed in the driveway day and night. “He has some sense about himself, at least,” my mother said, “not like that wife of his showing herself to the world every day like a floozy.” She huffed a bit and made a face like the one she put on when she caught me picking my nose. A floozy, my mother explained, was what Mike’s wife June would be if she wasn’t married. “And that’s all you need to know until you’re old enough.” I was almost thirteen. I kept to myself that floozies were what I imagined twice a day when I locked myself in the bathroom to jerk off. But I didn’t argue because she would hate June Hutka even more for letting me twice sip her drink when she invited me over to listen to her old 78’s, most of them what she called “weepers.”
“Her poor husband,” my mother said more than once, “a vet like your father.” My mother thought surviving a war amplified good qualities a man might have, and, at least for a time, was an excuse for any mistake he might make. “It’s hard to settle down after,” she said. “You didn’t know your father back before you were born.”
Mike was a Korean war vet. My father had made it from North Africa to Italy, surviving a year in combat before he was sent home with a wound that kept him from being able to turn his head. “He doesn’t talk about it,” my mother said every few months, reminding me never to ask. Like Mike, I never wore a shirt outside. I didn’t sunbathe, but I was always picking at the skin on my shoulders where I was peeling from my annual sunburn.
One Saturday afternoon in July I saw two older boys I didn’t recognize smoking in the yard behind the Hutkas’. They held their cigarettes alongside their bodies, arms extended, until they lifted them to their mouths. They looked so cool, I was sure they’d stood in front of mirrors to practice. Johnny Ray was singing “Just Walking in the Rain” from June’s suitcase record player. There was no sign of Mike, and those boys finished their cigarettes before they laughed and walked away.
The grass in her yard was high. I thought she needed somebody to cut it; I thought I’d walk up and ask her. Mike always used a push mower like the one my father owned. It wasn’t noisy, and I’d be able to hear every song she played. “I’ll do it for free,” I imagined myself saying, something that would make her smile in a wistful way.
But without Mike working in the yard, she looked different, and I didn’t move from where I stood in my backyard. She lay still the whole time I watched, not sitting up to drink or smoke. Johnny Ray started over again six times, but after a few minutes, it was like looking at a magazine.
After dinner, as it was getting dark, I put on a shirt and took the cigarette I’d stolen from Mike’s pack the Saturday before from where I’d hidden it behind my set of Hardy Boys books. I walked out of our backyard and cut between two houses to reach the street that ran through the nearby housing plan. I put the cigarette in my mouth and lit it with a match. I wanted to walk in the near darkness to see how it felt looking like somebody else. I didn’t try to inhale, but the cigarette glowed when I sucked on it. I could be a tough guy in the dark. I could be a boy with a pack of Lucky Strikes and a lighter from Atlantic City. My back itched, I reached up to peel off a curl of skin from my shoulder, but there was nothing there. The cigarette burned down nearly to my lips, and I dropped it on the street and crushed it with my shoe before walking back to where our yard bordered the Hutka’s.
From where I stood, I could see all six houses on our side of the street. Four had lights on, including ours, the kitchen and living room. My sister would be talking on the phone. My mother would be sitting on the couch working the crossword puzzle from last Sunday’s paper, trying to get it finished before the answers arrived tomorrow morning. After that, she always said, there’s no point because anybody could peek and pretend they hadn’t. In a few minutes, I thought, she’d open the back door and look out, scanning the yards to find me before she called my name.
Where the Hutkas lived was completely dark. June might have been sleeping at ten o’clock, but with Mike gone for nearly two weeks now, I decided she was out having drinks in some bar with a juke box that played sad songs like the ones by Johnny Ray. I imagined that if I could stay outside for another hour something a sad song might be about would happen. I hunched down and worked my way to the back of the house where the Hutka’s’bedroom window was open.
I heard a voice then, like somebody taking a breath after they’d held it as long as they could. And then the sound came again, more than a breath, and I knew it was June. There was no other voice, June humming now, and I thought this was sex she was enjoying, but by herself, the way I enjoyed it, tuned to what made her moan out loud. I sat against the wall, the window two feet above my head, memorizing the way she sounded, keeping my hands away from my body so I wouldn’t scream with her in the dark.
~
Satisfaction
Happiness isn’t expected to last, your father said. Even the miserable has some because it can come and go in doses that last, sometimes, a few seconds. Satisfaction, though, is rare because it has to stick. Consider on that and you’ll see what I mean.
Back then, you thought your father sounded like song lyrics, but now that you’ve spent a few weeks patrolling a mall to pay your bills, you have plenty of time to think about satisfaction and none of your thoughts are happy, not even for those few seconds he promised.
Tonight, you see two teenage boys who look to be drunk or high, harassing three girls. “What you have going on under those skirts?” you hear one say. There’s hardly any foot traffic nearby. The girls look your way, and you take it as a signal. “Hey, fellows,” you say, “I need you to quiet down or leave.”
“You trying to throw us out?” one boy says. “This place is public.”
“I’m asking you to coöperate.”
You can tell they hear the uncertainty in your voice, something they will interpret as fear. “Asking? What kind of weak ass cop are you? If all you’re doing is asking, we’re saying no.”
You notice that people are gathering in small groups to watch and listen. A ragged circle forms. Another minute and you’ll be a spectacle. “I can’t take no for an answer.”
“Yes, you can. Words can’t be illegal unless we yell ‘fire.’ We’re not loitering because we both have store-bought stuff in these bags.”
“Boys,” you begin.
“Boys? Call for backup, asshat.” They walk away, laughing. “Boys,” you hear one of them call out in a high-pitched voice, and they laugh again.
Two older women with packages shake their heads. The rest of the onlookers break up quickly, and you can see that the three girls have drifted away. “Nice work,” one says as you stride past them as if you have somewhere important to go.
You nearly flinch but keep walking. “What a pussy,” another says loudly, and the other two chorus, “High five” in unison, reach up, and slap.
Maybe they deserved to be harassed, you think. Maybe there is such meanness in the young there’s nothing to be done. By the time you walk the length of the mall, you even see refusal in the faces of the elderly.
When you were a boy, your father left. Each time you visited him, he said he was never satisfied, not back when he lived with you, and not now that he lives alone. When he saw you looking confused, he said, “Not ever, get it?” and started his sing-song philosophy, sounding like a station playing classic rock.
Now, you go into the mall’s men’s room, enter a stall and sit. Your hands are trembling. It surprises you that the room stays empty for five minutes, but finally you hear two voices at the urinals, both sounding younger than the ones who defied you.
One accuses the other of peeking. “You want a good look?” he says, and soon you can see him by the sinks through the crack in the door, maybe twelve and showing himself to the other boy who says, “Knock it off.”
“When I’m ready, fag,” the first boy says, not zipping up.
You step out of the stall and slap the kid’s face. “Don’t talk like that to your friend.”
The boy looks surprised, and when the other one laughs, you strike him too. “Grow up,” you say, and then you walk out and stop outside the door.
When the boys come out, they avert their eyes and cower, and you feel a rush of something as you stride back into the shopping area. For a minute, you watch and listen closely for another face to slap. You feel happy, but already you need more.
You walk to the department store, the only one of the three anchors that is still in business. One wall in sporting goods is covered with rifles and shotguns. There are “target pistols” under glass. The clerk waits while you examine them, not touching the glass.
“Those two,” you say. “I’d like to see how they feel,” and the salesman doesn’t hesitate.
You heft each one, feeling their weight, imagining you are acting like a man who’s handled guns, an army veteran maybe, who is doing mall security to supplement his early pension. Not an out-of-work middle-aged man. Not an otherwise unhappy man. At the end of your daydream, when you close your eyes, the gun is in the hand of a stranger who says, “Asshat” over and over to prove that his father was right.
~
Gary Fincke’s latest flash collection is In the Light and Dark (Pelekinesis 2026). His work appears in the 2026 Wigleaf Top 50. He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.