FICTION: After All These Years She Surprises Me Still

1450 words

REPOST:I forget why I removed the following fiction, but

Meg Oolders

asked about it, so if you missed it the first time, I hope you read it now and smile. If you remember loving it, I hope you love it still, but I haven’t edited it, so you can skip it, confident you haven’t missed a deluxe remastered reissue. If you find/found it mid, well, while I hope I’ve gotten better, please critique in the comments and aid me in my quest to write something more entertaining next time.

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This is the second flash fiction I wrote in 2021. I was still figuring out the form, so I aped the escalating structure from Donald Barthelme’s The School. The prompt was T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland: The Burial of the Dead; early versions included untranslated German, which I cut in later edits. What remains is mostly the dog¹. Be warned - I break Chuck Palahniuk’s rule not to hurt the dog, whose death is arguably unnecessarily violent, yet hopefully combines the theme of dying by choking with the flood imagery that begins the tale. Sadly, what I like most about this story will be hidden from you, in that it was the first time I wrote ten different endings before choosing the best one! Happily, I’ll include them in the comments. Amusingly, the ending you’ll read now wasn’t one of the ten, but one that grew on its own during one of my most recent rewrites.

I hope you enjoy “After All These Years She Surprises Me Still.” I enjoyed writing it.

After All These Years She Surprises Me Still

by Wil Dalton

4th draft, August 2022

Well, we had all these seeds leftover from that Farmer’s Market event in March, PEPPERPALOOZA! Because we figured that… ‘waste not, want not,’ right? So, we took them home and Janine and I aren’t planning on having kids, so a garden seemed like the next best way to be part of the neighborhood, on account of we just moved here and wanted to make friends. The groundbreaking hooted something wild. We grilled hotdogs and burgers and prepped fresh potato salad. Our neighbor, Mrs. Jensen, brewed a gigantic jug of sweet tea. The Martinez kids performed a dance show. It wasn’t scheduled, but once they started, everyone clapped and cheered. Yes, everyone had a grand time, even old Bartholomew, who since we moved here had spent his days sleeping under the orange tree. Tail wagging, tongue hanging out, he ran circles around the kids.

           All afternoon we enjoyed being outside, drinking sweet tea and planting seeds. There were enough everyone got to plant at least three. Janine had dug the holes that morning. She said peppers need at least eighteen inches separation.

            We didn’t notice until after everyone left and we went inside that someone had knocked the aquarium over, probably on the way to use the toilet. The carpet we bought on our honeymoon trip in Turkey had soaked up most of the water, but her two little goldfish – Ezra and Eliot – they were lying on the floor beside the ottoman, still and stiff. I didn’t know fish got rigor mortis.

            Janine turned real upset. But these things happen, no use crying about it. She wanted to guess who killed them and never invite them over again, but I said, “what’s done is done, we can always get new fish.”

            I would have flushed them down the toilet, but the dirt was still loose outside and it seemed… well, it seemed 'honor the circle of life' and all that. So, I buried them in the garden.

            That night it stormed something awful. At every thunder, Bartholomew barked. The first time he jumped in bed with Janine and me, we pushed him out; but the third time, we just didn’t have the heart. He’s a good boy, been with us from the beginning; a gift from Janine on my birthday the year we started dating. Lately, his hearing is almost gone and honestly, he’s always been kind of dumb and stubborn, but I always felt his lack of smarts was the perfect metaphor for my relationship with Janine.

            Because love is mysterious. It don’t lend itself to definition.

            So, for example, no matter how many times Bartholomew had seen the mailman walk up, he still yipped and spun around each time. He probably would have bit the poor man if the screen wasn’t always shut. I would say to Janine, “Damn, that dog is dumb, he’s seen a million mailmen a million times - why is he barking?”

            She’d smile and say, “He loves you.”

            She’d kiss my neck and say, “He wants to keep you safe.”

            Janine always phrases words something perfect.

            Anyhow, Bartholomew wasn’t the only pet that turned freaked out by the storm; the neighbor’s goat somehow got into the yard. I found him the next morning, face down in the soaked grass. I think he must have swallowed one of the spades we hadn’t gathered at the end of the planting party because, well… one was missing, I never found it, and blood was leaking out his mouth when I found him.

            You got to remember, we were new to the neighborhood and Janine and I didn’t want to be ‘that couple.’ You offend one neighbor and all of a sudden, no one waves during your morning jogs. So, when I told her what happened, she cursed.

            “Shit, shit, shit.”

            I hate hearing Janine curse, especially when she repeats the curse and don’t say nothing else, so I said, “I could bury him next to the fish. The yard is kind of a lake right now, so should be easier.”

            Would you believe it wasn’t easier, just wetter?

            Bartholomew would sniff and scratch at the spot where we buried the goat, but the Jensens never suspected. Just last Tuesday, I went over there for Mike’s weekly poker game and Janine is choosing the title for Linda’s book club next month. Janine loves book club.

            Well, not long after burying their goat, the rain stopped and the sun began to bear down like a bully. I had to hose the garden twice a day to keep the dirt from cracking. It was about this time the incident with the street kid occurred. I was eating lunch downtown on a park bench near my office. She looked hungry, so I gave her half my sandwich, but she must have been allergic because she started clutching her throat like she couldn’t breathe. I sped to the hospital, but before I even reached the parking lot, the girl had quit thrashing around the backseat and lay still.

            I should have called the cops, but we have history in another city. My fingerprints don’t exactly match the name on my driver’s license. It’s no big deal, I know lots of people who live life in assumed identities, but needless to say, I seek to avoid involving the authorities unless absolutely necessary. In this case, I assumed they wouldn’t know how to find the next of kin any better than me. But I also didn’t want to leave the girl on the street. Discarding her like garbage seemed wrong and disrespectful. Plus, who knew who would find her? If it was another little kid, that could be traumatizing. I didn’t want to add any more suffering to the situation.

            So, I buried her in the backyard by the goat.

            I thought maybe when her corpse decomposed, she would fertilize the peppers, which still weren’t sprouting. Or well… she would have been good fertilizer, if the next morning the damn dog didn’t dig her up.

            I was almost done reburying the girl when the mailman came around back with a package. Janine had ordered a custom watering tin off of Etsy. The mailman saw me swinging the child’s stiff corpse into the hole I had spent the morning deepening. He mumbled something about wanting to be nice, got to be careful about porch pirates… I’m not sure what the next explanation he thought would allow him to retreat from the scene would have been, because I hit him in the back of the head with the shovel and threw him and his mail sack into the pit, keeping Janine’s package (of course), and a catalogue for meats that looked interesting.

            After packing down the dirt, I took a nap. Maintaining respectability in the neighborhood was exhausting, but I knew Janine would turn depressed something awful if she ever got uninvited to book club. (She chose In Cold Blood for the ladies to read. Revisit the classics, she said).

            I woke when I no longer heard Bartholomew’s whimpering and pulling on his leash. Janine had come home and released him. I found her in the kitchen. She had opened a bottle of the white wine we had got on the California trip and was midway through a new true-crime book. Over her shoulder and through the window, I saw Bartholomew, surrounded by freshly dug up dirt, pulling on the pants leg of the dead mailman. He shook the leg back and forth. His tail wagged up and down.

            I watched Bartholomew play. I looked at Janine reading. I looked at my dog, dumb and happy. I looked at my wife, smart and pretty. I cursed, silently.

            Shit, shit, shit.

            I kissed Janine on her neck, below the mole she wants removed, and shut the window blinds.

            Bartholomew was gnawing the dead man’s leg when I put the garden hose into his mouth, pushing past his throat, deep into his gut. I stood on his neck as his belly slowly expanded. The ground around us got soaked. I stayed standing on his neck until he quit kicking, and then another minute more, just to be sure. Then I widened the hole and gently laid him down within.

            Janine was still reading when I came back inside. If she noticed how long I been in the backyard or that I had been crying, she didn’t say anything.

            I assumed Janine had no idea of what was under the garden until July that year, when the peppers had grown large, yellow, meaty and sweet, and I made her a salad, and she said, “I’m not eating those peppers.”       

The End²

1. “That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland

2. For your pleasure, the unused endings. #6 had been the closing line prior to how it ends now.

1. Also, love is knowing the wide range of evil actions your beloved commits and forgiving each one, because deep in your heart of hearts, you know you are the motivation behind everything.

2. Love is seeing the mistakes and the clumsy attempts to correct them, and staying anyway, because you know they were done for you.

3. Love is watching your husband bury the mailman and staying, laying next to him all the nights of the rest of your life, and knowing he only did it so you could make friends on your street and enjoy book club next door. 

4. Love is knowing your beloved will never hurt you, no matter how many bodies he buries. 

5. Love is accepting the occasional corpse in your garden.

6. A robin lands on the windowsill. Its song fills the kitchen. I take Janine's hand and we look out at our garden together. 

7. Love is knowing the good and the bad and sharing all the joy and all the hurt together. 

8. Love is knowing all the good and all the bad, but not talking about the bad if it's not going to change anything anyway. 

9. Love is knowing each other's faults and ignoring them.