Barbara Diehl: FOUR MICROS • Cleaver Magazine

Flash by Barbara Westwood Diehl
FOUR MICROS

Scavengers

We end our marriage with burnt toast. We end our marriage with cold casserole. We end our marriage with undercooked meat. Untouched. Before, we buttered the toast and ate the blackened bread. We kept the casserole in the oven until it bubbled over. We pushed the bits of undercooked meat to the sides of our plates and into the napkins in our laps. We covered up. We made do. We forgave. We sponged up the splatter. We snapped what was left into Tupperware and pushed it to the back of the freezer, the fridge, the shelves. Now, we scrape all of it into the compost to rot, to decompose. Or drop it into a corner of the yard for coyotes and crows. For the animals we used to be. Scavengers. Willing to eat what we were served.

Closure

Among all the things I don’t believe in, closure ranks near the top. His message includes that word closure, and I feel it like the bite of some nocturnal animal, a raccoon clamping jaws on a brown apple core in the trash. But I meet him at a coffee shop so he can get his closure. Which is a tearing open, isn’t it? I let him paw the emptied garbage can of our marriage. But I keep my wallet closed, keep my identity, keep what I’ve earned, inside. I watch his mouth chew with pointed teeth, watch it yelp, growl, but keep my ears closed. I close the bag of leftovers, not to eat at home, but to open when I’m alone. To feed the nocturnal animals from my tooth-marked core.

Woman, Wolf

Sometimes she forgets that she has eyes in the back of her head. Eyes in the back of the head can make others feel uncomfortable. Especially eyes so disconcertingly gold. Wolf eyes. Unlike the hazel eyes on the front of her face, behind horn-rimmed glasses. So she tries to be considerate. She has had women in checkout lines tap her on the shoulder and say in a huff, That’s rude, you know. Men tend to think she’s coming on to them. More than once, she has been slipped a scrap of paper—Like what you see?—with a name and phone number. And, of course, children make faces and stick out their tongues. What ya gonna do about it, huh? So most of the time she covers the eyes in the back of her head with her hair. Sometimes a messy bun does the trick. This works until, as she ages, her hair grays and begins to thin. Through the wisps, the eyes in the back of her head appear larger than ever. And how much better to see them with. The woman who slipped lipstick into her bag. The womanizer with the wedding band. The boy who bullies the smaller child. She sees them all. And how much sharper her teeth have become. This wolf woman, amidst the bleating herd, in her gray sheep’s clothing.

Milk

He puts the glass of milk on his kitchen counter and tells me to drink. It’s wholesome, he tells me. This is what we feed babies, what we feed kids. But I’m not a kid. I’m a woman in a little black dress he met at a bar in Fells Point. Drinking dirty martinis. I’m getting the feeling this is a setup. Like if I open a drawer, I’ll find a gingham apron and heart-shaped cookie cutters. In another one, Spanx and Clairol Nice ’n Easy. What’s in the milk, I wonder. Who is this man? I take a drink, not a real drink, and leave the mustache over my lip. Like a man with salt and pepper hair. A man with a Florida tan and a wad of Benjamins in a money clip. A silver fox. Who is the man in this kitchen now?

Barbara Westwood Diehl is senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poetry appear in a variety of journals, including Fractured Lit, South Florida Poetry Journal, Poetry South, Painted Bride Quarterly, Five South, Allium, Split Rock Review, Blink-Ink, Midway, Free State Review, Ghost Parachute, Fictive Dream, Gargoyle, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Pithead Chapel, and New World Writing Quarterly. Read more of her work at her website.