Americana Stories – Prose

At the Breakfast Table—Fiction by Francine Witte

I’m staring down Dooley again. I’m thinking where you goin’ today, Muthafuck? He is covered in missing Loretta, his blue eyes clouded with a coat of longing they get when he hasn’t seen her for awhile. You want eggs? I ask him, and when he says, yeah, scrambled, I tell him ha! we don’t have any. I want to say that maybe Loretta does, but I keep that in my mouth and suck it like a hard candy.

Our apartment is too small for all the hate Dooley and I have for one another. The hate knocks at the walls every night as we go to bed, try to dream each other gone, but then morning comes and the hate wakes up with us same as always.

Now at the breakfast table, we are sipping orange juice and pouring cereal into Melmac bowls, the kind of bowls that last forever but aren’t made out of any anything real. We each lay our distaste for one another out there on the table. We do this without saying a word.

Who really knows what brought us to this, maybe boredom and time, and, oh yeah, Loretta. If I left there would be freedom, a chance for love, the kind that comes in a real china bowl.  And Dooley could take off to Loretta, and he wouldn’t have to wear his mopey, piney face at me even at 7 o’clock in the morning.

Once, I suggested this to Dooley. That maybe we should just break up. We were eating dinner, and honestly I had had a whole day of it. I made a really good meal of pot roast and mashed, Dooley’s favorite, but still he was all about Loretta. I would have thought he’d be relieved but instead he said, look we got more good here than bad. You don’t really know what’s out there, so let’s just let it alone. I thought this ought to make sense, ought to make me happy. Maybe there was a part of Dooley that still loved me just a touch.

And maybe he was right, that the world out there was just an endless rainstorm of sketchy jobs and peely apartments and men who only take you out for coffee. That seemed more real than freedom. I think about that on mornings like this, and I take a sigh, and everything’s quiet as I pour milk onto my cereal, the flakes going snap and crack, making an awful racket, the way they always do.

I sit here alone,
After you. Park bench, treewhisper, birdflitter. Over there, by the lake, a man and a woman. Bended knee and will you? will you? I could tell her where this is going and to keep her heart inside. If you don’t, I would say, if you give him the chance to hold your heart in his hand, he might pocket it and then run off. Sometimes, I would say, it doesn’t happen like that. But then, if I had to, if she asked me, I would show her my chest with its invisible scar, the exact spot my heart passed through when you asked for it. I would warn of the sweet heat that love gives off on a lush April day, and how later it breaks into a million sticks like a summer oak, sheds you of your autumn leaves, till one day you are nothing but winter, heartless, forgotten by the time another spring comes around.

At the movies 
Suddenly the film starts running backwards. Digital glitch. All sorts of un-walking, unraveling embraces, and knives being pulled out of chests. All the undoing and then the announcement, we will resume shortly. Lights go on and I pull out my phone for entertainment. Harry’s gazillionth apology text showing up on the screen.

We were young, oh yes
Love was plump. It swelled like oven bread, the fingers of aroma pulling us in off the street. The tiny shop across from the park where we bought a still-warm loaf, a brick of cheese. The old shopwoman, forehead scraggled with branches, sold them to us for money and the slightest whiff of our romance. We were like this for months. The tick of our hearts, the itch of our fingers, but soon there was the layering of one rain on top of another. Rings grew inside us, and one day the shop woman stopped looking at us, and we’d pay our few dollars and we had nothing else that she wanted, and we’d go to the park, sit under our favorite elm tree, drops of moisture on the leaves that showed up even without rain. Round and clear as tree-tears. The bark of the trunk scratchy as ancient fingers and when we settled in and finally took a bite of the bread, the crumble of crust on our tongues.

Your Life in Reruns
Somehow syndicated, you are streaming on Netflix and Hulu. This is the you you used to be, so you climb back into bed, where you want to be anyway. Why waste another grain of hope? You are watching the episode where your husband is still your husband. Probably Season 2. Season 4 is where you see your first wrinkle and  those texts on your husband’s phone. You snuggle into your silky pillow, search back to Season 1, episode 1. You, in front of a Christmas pine. No wrinkles yet. No broken husband. You could watch that one a hundred times.