By Steve Gergley
1. Candied Pears
My wife and I eat dinner on the back deck of our rotting French colonial. It’s August. It’s ninety-six degrees out. It’s been nineteen months since we spoke to another human being. The sun bakes my hairless skull like a smooth stone stranded in a Texas scrubland. For the next forty-three minutes, I watch my wife devour the mound of candied pears sitting atop her spotless ceramic dining plate. As she eats, her lips shine sticky with sugary syrup. The shadows of the circling buzzards flicker across my mud-crusted fingerpads. A pond of silky blood kisses my gold-plated salad fork. Excusing myself from the table, I clomp into the overgrown backyard and begin digging the rectangular hole at the foot of the gnarled sugar maple.
2. No Names
There is a room with no door at the end of the upstairs hallway. My wife has been in there many times. At dinner she talks about the elderly man and his young trophy wife who have lived in that room for the past fifty-nine and one-sixth years. By my wife’s word, the couple spends their long days in the dark carving foot-sized blocks of yellow cedar into intricately-detailed sculptures of Tudor-style mansions. Sipping my sparkling water, I tell my wife that this is a beautiful and interesting story. I tell her that she leads a complex and thrilling life. I tell her that I am glad she regularly experiences these fascinating adventures. In response, she sips her sparkling water and agrees with a satisfied smile. We eat in comfortable silence for three minutes and forty-four seconds. The man across the street tries, and fails, to slam his front door. The ice cream truck with the unsettling robotic voice drives past the front of our house. I ask my wife to spell out the names of the married couple living in the sealed room upstairs, but she only surrenders the middle three letters of the old man’s first name.
3. My Greatest Ambitions
At 6:17 a.m., I wake up on my back in bed. My wife lays on her side beside me. We do not get up for many hours. A square of yellow sunlight crawls across the carpeted floor. Our cell phones buzz on the end table like ambulances dissolving into a humid summer night. Next door, the teenager with the coal black hair plays a riff on his electric bass for two hours and twenty-three minutes. At noon, a male goldcrest lands on the sill of the open window and stares at us through the thin mesh screen. I stare back at the small bird and yawn. A red Honda Civic parks in front of the Tudor-style mansion on the other side of the street. The teenager next door begins playing a new riff. The male goldcrest flies away. My wife rests a soft hand on the warm skin of my throbbing shoulder. The stabbing feeling in my stomach disappears for the first time in thirteen years. These are the days that supply the component parts of my greatest ambitions on earth.
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.