Free Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories by James Thomas and Denise Thomas and Tom Hazuka Page B

Delilahs. Two months had passed since I’d seen him, yet his hair was neat and trim.
    It felt as if the meaning of a dream were suddenly revealed, as if a foreign code had been cracked. The broken Valentine’s weekend, the missed phone calls, the colleague he always needed to see. Suddenly in one lucid moment, standing there in the airport, my family by my side, his next to him, all of us happy to be in a place where it was sunny and warm, the pieces of the puzzle fit together as I had been trying to get them to for so long.
    It was a crystallizing, a coming together, an epiphany, if you will, as if a fog had lifted. I had no more doubt. Nothing was unsure. As he stepped forward to embrace me, I said, “Who cut your hair?” He stepped back, but I held my ground. “Tell me,” I said, moving our child to my shoulder, “Who cut your hair?”

V INES
    L ately I notice that I smell more. I used to be able to wear the same shirt three or four days without being aware of it. Now, even in the course of a day, it smells foul. I smell foul. It doesn’t seem to matter whether or not I take cosmetic precaution. My deodorants smell foul by the end of the day. Along with this my feet are getting colder and sweating differently. My blood is circulating less. I think about my teeth a lot. Not too long ago I used to begin days feeling on top of things. Lately I realize I’m full of little stratagems to hold it all together. I wiggle a toe here, take an extra breath there, tighten my buttocks inconspicuously on the subway. I asked my wife recently whether or not she ever got that rotten fruit feeling, that sense of galloping inner deterioration before falling from the vine with a sickening plush . She answered quickly and emphatically, as befits a Vassar girl: “No,” she said, “I don’t. I get tired. I get headaches. I get disgusted. And I get periods.” There was a pause. “ Sometimes ,” I said, repaying her for the speed and emphasis of her answer. She cackled. All things considered, she wasn’t bad.
    Not so my friend Norman. “What do you mean, that rotten fruit feeling?” he said. Norman is a health culturist. He does a lot of yoga and eats well. He impresses people as having a clean system. “Look,” he said. “Maybe you’ve got to go, but I don’t.” I wondered whether he had moved on to something besides yoga. “I’ve told you for years,” he said, “that you are literally full of rotten shit.” I don’t really like talking to Norman. For one thing, he never knows what I’m talking about. But my wife and his went to elementary school together. I’m really waiting for him to get a hernia before I talk to him seriously. I have several friends like Norman.
    It actually comes down to the fact that I can talk to my wife best of all. Not that I don’t make her sick a lot. But we’ve been together twenty-five years. That kind of thing is stronger than just about anything. Who else, for example, knows how many inconsequential and humiliating things my body has been through? “Look,” she said, “the fact is that you’re going to die sooner or later. Some bodies are in better shape for it than others.” It was a devastating statement in its ambiguity. “You know,” I said, “Norman isn’t really so dumb. What kind of shape is Marie in?” Marie is Norman’s wife. “Do you really want to know?” she said. “Well, yes. Why not?” “She thinks she might have cancer. She’s having a biopsy Tuesday.” “My God,” I said.
    My wife has a way of shortening my conversations. It’s not just that she’s a busy and successful woman. Through inadvertence or intent she frequently misconstrues my words just to that extent that I cannot respond to what she says. I am very subtly confused. I used to consider it girlish charm, but I don’t anymore. It rather upsets me. I met Norman later in the week of his wife’s biopsy. He practically hugged me. “Listen,” he said, “why don’t you start working