Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories (24 page)

After this last, he began to tire of his promise, and brought the flowers in the most unromantic, offhand manner, plucking a few dandelions or a clump of clover from the yard on his way into the house, and once returning from the market with a sack of pastry flour and handing that to her, as a kind of awful pun. He began to hate himself for his weakness; and though his wife had many times told him that he needn’t adhere to the promise, she now began to resent his disrespectful, passive-aggressive tone, and fights ensued. One night they actually began shoving one another around, and the next day his wife filed for divorce.

While the divorce was pending, our friend sent daily bouquets of absurd proportions to his wife’s new apartment, accompanied by little cards printed with insults and vulgarisms, and on the day the divorce went through, he sent her one hundred black roses. The roses nearly wiped out his savings, and when he went snooping around her place that night, to see if she was having an affair, he found the hundred roses lying in the dumpster out back, along with the gigantic ornate vase they came in.

Our friend has since realized that she would have married him anyway, without the promise, a thought that pains him terribly. But, he says, he takes some small comfort in knowing that he did indeed keep his promise, and that, though deeply lonely, he is a man of unswerving dedication, which is not something most people can say about themselves these days.

Heirloom

I remember deer hunting with my father when I was a young man. He always carried the same antiquated rifle, its stock and trigger worn from use. Once he pointed out the nearly obliterated remains of a carved set of initials, and he told me the rifle had belonged to his own father, who killed himself when my father was still a boy. In fact, he said, the suicide was committed with this very rifle.

It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized how horrifying this revelation was, so horrifying that I later convinced myself I had made the whole story up.

When my father shot himself, I inherited the rifle. By now I had a child of my own, but I had given up hunting in the fall. I put the rifle, along with some other possessions of my father’s I couldn’t bear to sell, into a self-storage warehouse outside town.

At those times when my unhappiness becomes most difficult to bear, I drive out to the warehouse and stare at the gray corrugated-steel door my father’s things are stored behind. This never fails to improve my mood. I don’t bring the key on these excursions, of course; I haven’t seen the key in years and would be hard pressed to tell you where it is.

Brevity

A local novelist spent ten years writing a book about our region and its inhabitants which, when completed, added up to more than a thousand pages. Exhausted by her effort, she at last sent it off to a publisher, only to be told that it would have to be cut by nearly half. Though daunted by the work ahead of her, the novelist was encouraged by the publisher’s interest, and spent more than a year excising material.

But by the time she reached the requested length, the novelist found it difficult to stop. In the early days of her editing, she would struggle for hours to remove words from a sentence, only to discover that its paragraph was better off without it. Soon she discovered that removing sentences from a paragraph was rarely as effective as cutting entire paragraphs, nor was selectively erasing paragraphs from a chapter as satisfying as eliminating chapters entirely. After another year, she had whittled the book down into a short story, which she sent to magazines.

Multiple rejections, however, drove her back to the chopping block, where she reduced her story to a vignette, the vignette to an anecdote, the anecdote to an aphorism, and the aphorism, at last, to this haiku:

Tiny Upstate town
Undergoes many changes
Nonetheless endures

Unfortunately, no magazine would publish the haiku. The novelist has printed it on note cards, which she can be found giving away to passersby in our town park, where she is also known sometimes to sleep, except when the police, whose thuggish tactics she so neatly parodied in her original manuscript, bring her in on charges of vagrancy. I have a copy of the haiku pinned above my desk, its note card grimy and furred along the edges from multiple profferings, and I read it frequently, sometimes with pity but always with awe.