- Heavy Cream
I decide to memorize one new word from the dictionary each day, so I sit in the center of the living room and stare at the heavy book in my lap. Gunshots and train whistles burst from the television behind me. Insectoid letters scuttle across the brittle page crinkling between my fingers. Eighty-nine percent of a decade passes in the manner of a dripping faucet. At some point I ask my wife to tell me about the first time she tasted heavy cream. Laying on her back beside me, she looks up at the ceiling and begins to talk. I rest my head on her bare stomach. Seventeen days pass, etc., etc. I love every second of it. I tell her to keep talking. I tell her to tell me everything. I tell her to describe the sensations in her tongue and her lips and her cheeks and her throat. She agrees. She tells me all the buzzing details. She talks until the morning fades to black. She talks until the world chills to ice. She talks until my eyes harden to stones and the hair on the back of her head pillows about her ankles.
- The Local Place
My wife and I got dinner at the Italian restaurant where the local mobsters sit in the back and do business. I ordered the chicken parm. My wife got the penne alla vodka. The food took forever and the sauce was a bit oily for my taste, but it was a good meal. Just after 9:30, three guys barreled past our table in a hurry. My wife searched for tomorrow’s weather on her phone. I checked the score of the Jets game on ESPN. Gunshots exploded from the back of the restaurant like fireworks. My phone flew out of my hand and danced in the air above my head. My wife and I scrabbled to the floor in a panic and hid behind the dessert cart. The shooting seemed to last forever. A woman screeched something unintelligible as the three guys jogged out the front door like spooked squirrels. The smells of gunpowder and chocolate tiramisu floated in the air around us. When the police questioned us about the shooting an hour later, I looked at my wife and said, the whole place just blew up like the Fourth of July.
- Senior Cut Day
During gym class, my wife and I pinballed between the sunbaked sidelines of the far tennis court, slamming the ball across the net to each other. Our bodies gleamed half-naked and sweatpolished in moisture-wicking running shorts and black and purple Nike singlets. The thirty-foot rectangle of chain-link perimeter fence rose up around us like a prison wall. The scrunching scrabble of our scuffed-up sneakers sliced through the breath-drenched murmurs of our classmates’ conversations. No one bothered us. We would’ve ignored them either way. Senior cut day this year was June 8th, almost two weeks away. We didn’t care. After spending the last twenty-nine of our thirty-five years living in this school, we decided to do things differently this spring. So I gripped the handle of my racket with both hands and sent our sunbleached tennis ball sailing over the fence with an open-stance homerun swing. My wife flashed a balm-glazed grin and turned her head to watch. Our gym teacher, Coach Bennet, yelled at us to knock that crap off right quick. Then he ordered us to fetch our ball and to give him our rackets because we were done for the rest of the period. We snickered to ourselves in secret. We surrendered our rackets without a word. We threw open the door of the perimeter fence and jogged into the field surrounding the tennis courts. Seconds later we reached our ball, but we didn’t stop there. Instead, I snatched the hairy globe off the ground, winged it over the fence at Coach’s head, and made a mad dash for the river behind the school.
~
Steve Gergley is the author of The Great Atlantic Highway & Other Stories (Malarkey Books ’24), There Are Some Floors Missing (Bullshit Lit ’24), Skyscraper (West Vine Press ’23), and A Quick Primer on Wallowing in Despair (Leftover Books ’22). His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in X‑R-A‑Y Literary Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, Passages North, Hobart, Always Crashing, and others. He tweets @GergleySteve. His fiction can be found at: https://stevegergleyauthor.wordpress.com/. In addition to his own writing, he is also the editor of scaffold literary magazine.