GÜNTHER'S WIFE

Flash Fiction by Yvonne Zipter

The first time Maureen saw him there, all curled up under the end table, she worried that something was terribly wrong. But now this curl of boy is just another feature of morning in Günther's house. Günther's house: she still can't think of it as hers, too, in spite of their marriage ten months earlier.

With morning just beginning to weave through bare elm branches across Honey Creek Parkway, Jamie—Günther's son—is merely a dim shape between the table legs, folded to fit as much of his tiny self in front of the vent as possible. Without looking, she knows his hair is still shaped by sleep into a thatched straw lean-to, his shirt is untucked, and there is likely a pants leg half in, half out of his sock. It is the heat he comes here for, she has learned. In the summer, her own girls, Erin and Kate, played in Round Lake for hours, coming out only when hunger and darkness demanded. Jamie, lugging fins, mask, and snorkel to the shore, always joined them but was soon watching from the pier, his lips a deathly shade of blue in the bright August afternoon and his pale body wrapped in a towel that replicated every spasm of cold that shook him.

Now, in the winter months, he positions himself each morning for a charge of heat, like a thermal-powered engine. Actually, what he most reminds her of is the wild baby bunny the girls had brought home once, years before. Their ardent desire to hold this soft trembling creature had sent it running from their overanxious hands right past a nail protruding from underneath the couch: it had literally skinned itself. Its brown fur peeled away from its quivering back to expose a perfectly pink surface, the veins right there on the surface, revealed to air and eye alike. In Jamie, she has learned to distrust what seems a similar sort of vulnerability, despite Günther's stubborn conviction that his youngest is perilously frail.

As enticing as his thin seven-year-old frame is—especially now, draped across the heating vent—she knows that to touch him would be like stroking a sleeping badger: a snarl. A snap. And soon you'd find yourself with one less digit. She has seen him threaten older brother Will with a butter knife, spit venomously at an elderly uncle, and look on placidly as Günther punished Kate for scratching her initials in the door, a deed, as it later comes out, Jamie himself has committed.

Maureen cannot reconcile these two Jamies, and for now she does not try.

Instead, she engages herself with packing lunches, letting the hum of the refrigerator put her under its spell. Meditatively, she lays out the bread, assembly-line fashion, spreads a dollop of mayo over each, slaps on two circles of bologna, adds another slice of bread on top, cuts each sandwich in half, left to right, and slips them into plastic sandwich bags. As she is folding the tops of the bags over, the girls come bouncing into the kitchen like atoms knocked free from a molecule, ricocheting from cupboard to table, to fridge, to drawer, getting breakfast, jostling each other, talking. Maureen considers the decibel level, decides it will not wake Günther, who likes to sleep until chaos swirls from the house with the children.

When Günther was courting her, whisper-singing "Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch" into her ear and bringing small tokens to the girls (marbles or Slo-Poke suckers), she hadn't pictured life together to be exactly this. But, he's a good provider, she thinks to herself with a sigh, as she remembers the cramped apartment she and the girls had shared before Günther. She looks out, now, at the pretty little yard, the dark branches of the apple tree counterpointed with thin lines of snow, the remnants of the girls' snow fort hunkered down below.

She puts the five sandwiches into four brown bags (Will, almost a teenager, gets two), adds fruit and a snack. Before she can even fold down the tops of the bags, Will clips through the kitchen, grabs a bag, and says, "This mine?" She nods.

"See ya," he calls, as he slams out the door.

As if on cue, Erin and Kate rise noisily. Bowls clatter in the sink, the closet door opens and closes, a couple of quick kisses on the cheek, and the girls are off to school as well. Maureen listens to the silence rush into the room in the wake of the kids. She leans against the countertop, closes her eyes, and absorbs the stillness. The click of the coffeemaker pulls her out of herself again. She pours herself a cup and sits down to plan her day: first, the dishes, then a load or two of laundry, then. . . . "Jamie!" she thinks to herself. "Where is Jamie?"

She clanks her cup to the table top and scrapes her chair back to go find him.

There he is: asleep by the vent. For one moment, she panics: maybe he's not asleep. Maybe the oil fumes from the furnace have suffocated him. Maybe, he's dead. She reaches a hand to shake his shoulder, to draw him to her, his pallid face looking sweet, almost cherubic, in the dim light. The knife, the spitting, the plotting: she pulls her hand away.

She pushes her toe, then, against his small rump.

"Jamie," she says. "Jamie, come on—you're late for school."

He rubs his eyes (not dead after all), turns toward her, and stretches the compact stretch of a small boy. He is just a small boy.

"C'mon, Jamie, let's go," Maureen says one last time, her voice thick with shame. She does not look at his blue-tinged blond features again as she heads back to the kitchen, where her own blood will rise to the surface of her skin and she will try to wash away the remains of the morning.

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Yvonne Zipter is the author of the poetry collection The Patience of Metal (runner-up, Poetry Society of America's Melville Cane Award, and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist), as well as the nonfiction books Ransacking the Closet and Diamonds Are a Dyke's Best Friend and the nationally syndicated column "Inside Out."

Her poetry has been published in numerous periodicals (including Spoon River Poetry Review, Primavera, The Bark, The Willow Review, and modern words ), as well as anthologies such as My Lover Is a Woman, The Poetry of Sex, and Where We Live.

A short story, "Third Date," is due out in spring 2004 with Blithe House Quarterly. She is a recipient of the Sprague-Todes Literary Award and an Illinois Arts Council Finalist Award and holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. Her current poetry collection, As If the Night Could Heal Itself, was a finalist for the May Swenson Poetry Award.

She can be reached by email at yz@press.uchicago.edu

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