ABSENT MINDED by Epiphany Ferrell
SHE FORGOT THE WORD “impenetrable.” It just wouldn’t come to mind. The kind of thing that happened often at work to people even younger than she. It wasn’t unusual. Nothing to worry about. She was so unworried that she told Elise about it. Elise laughed, confessed to similar occurrences.
The next day she couldn’t remember the street the Newark Café was on. It wasn’t Newark, there wasn’t even a Newark Street in town. It wasn’t Broadway. It was that other main street in town. No, not Main Street. Center? Market? Later in the day she remembered it was Market.
She lay awake that night next to Allen, listening to his reassuring breathing and quiet snores. He was two years her senior. At 57, he ran his three miles every morning, and he’d joined a seniors rowing team on which he was the second youngest member.
At 55, she felt her knees creak when she weeded the garden. She walked four times a week, not three miles but a single, fast-paced mile. And she bicycled to the corner grocery if they forgot something rather than getting into the car and driving to the Publix. Unless it was really cold. Then she’d drive.
She wondered what it would be like to have Alzheimer’s. She wondered what it would be like to love someone with Alzheimer’s. She wondered why such ridiculous thoughts kept her up at night. She was far too young for Alzheimer’s.
She remembered an ex from years ago. She never called him by his name. She called him “Dinkus” or “That Mindless Waste of Molecules.” She’d been married to him ten years. Ten. She’d been married to Allen twice as long as she’d been married to Dinkus. Douglas. Every time she said Dinkus or That Mindless Waste of Molecules, she remembered his name was Douglas.
Not that there was ever much of a reason to talk about him. Or think about him. He’d been a mistake, an older boy who cajoled her schoolgirl self into drinking beer, having sex, telling her parents to kiss off, to elope. He’d had her so twisted around. Married at 18. Divorced at 28. Both processes happened so fast they seemed almost trivial when in fact they were momentous life changers. She praised the God she rarely prayed to there had been no children.
She couldn’t say the same about her relationship with Allen. She didn’t praise God for the lack of children there. He had two from his previous marriage. They were grown now, they didn’t come around very often. They liked her well enough, and she enjoyed their visits. But still, she felt like an outsider. She was an outsider. She hadn’t been there to change their diapers, she hadn’t stayed up with them when they had the flu, she hadn’t been the one to take them to doctors and dentists and opticians and orthodontists. She loved the stories they told over and over when they came to visit. She knew those stories so well she almost felt she’d lived them, too. But she hadn’t.
There was a video going around on Facebook, a man’s record of his mother’s decline into Alzheimer’s. She called him by his father’s name. By a neighbor’s name. By a name he didn’t recognize. “She doesn’t know me,” he said to the camera. “This is the saddest day of my life.”
Dinkus. Douglas. Bev found herself reliving some of her worst moments with Dinkus. When he’d backed her into a corner, screaming at her until she collapsed on the ground, and then he’d knelt down and screamed in her face. The time he’d kicked out the legs of the chair she was sitting on, spilling her onto the porch. The time he’d grabbed her elbow and steered her out of the restaurant because he disapproved of her order. The time he slapped her. The time he spit in her face.
Douglas. His name came to her unbidden at odd moments during the day. Why not “impenetrable?” Why not “Market Street?”
She closed her car door on her scarf leaving work. “Goddammit Douglas!” she said and then she bit back a sob. That same day she’d forgotten the name of the Mexican restaurant that closed last year and was reopening as a sushi place. She and Allen had enjoyed going there. Tequilas? El Jalapeño? No, no. No. It was.
Sergio’s.
Douglas.
They, she and Dinkus, used to go to a place called The Barrio. She always had to order the same thing when they went there. Tradition. He said tradition was important.
She began to have nightmares about him.
She forgot the student worker’s name, not the current one, but the one from the previous semester. Greg? Craig? “Carl,” Elise said, laughing.
Douglas.
Allen.
She and Allen made love on an evening when they were both home early, when it was pouring rain outside, the same way it had been the night they’d first declared their love for each other. God, she remembered every detail of that night, the way they’d talked on her front porch for hours, she unwilling to invite him in, because she knew—god she knew—and then it started to rain and still they sat on the porch, and then the lightning cracked across the sky and they looked into each other’s eyes in the electric air and then the rain came like buckets and blowing and they went inside and Allen didn’t leave until the morning after the next morning.
She reached for him in the dark. He was there, reassuring and warm and solid and not Dinkus.
She had another Dinkus nightmare that night.
She stared at Allen over her coffee the next morning. “I love you, Allen,” she said.
He kissed the tip of her nose. “I love you too. Beverly.”
“You talked in your sleep last night,” Allen told her.
“What did I say? No, don’t tell me. No, wait. What did I say?”
Allen chuckled. “The bacon went bad.”
“Is that all?’
“Guilty conscience?”
She laughed, weakly, wondering what bacon, vowing to clean the refrigerator right away.
“I love you Allen. Allen, I love you.”
“I love you too, Baby.”
Beverly locked away the image of Allen, his name, her love for him, his love for her.
Not Dinkus, not Douglas.
Not Baby or Bear or any of the other endearments they used. Allen. Allen. Allen. Allen.
EPIPHANY FERRELL lives perilously close to the Shawnee Hills Wine Trail in Southern Illinois. Her stories appear in Best Microfiction 2020, New Flash Fiction Review, Ghost Parachute, Dream Noir, and other places. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and won the 2020 Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Prize