Bill
by Meg Pokrass
Her husband said that an old friend would be coming to stay for a few nights. Bill, he said.
She was surprised that her husband was in contact with an old friend she had never heard mention of.
“How many years has it been?” she asked.
“Can’t remember,” he said.
“I didn’t know you had a friend named Bill,” she said.
“I’m sure I mentioned him before.”
It was true that her brain was unreliable. For example, she could no longer remember their deceased cat’s nickname. But she still sang to the cat, buried in the backyard. Sang to her on the Day of the Dead. You are My Sunshine, her husband’s favorite song. Sad, but also happy.
. . .
“Draw me a sketch of Bill. If he’s staying here, I want to get a sense of him.”
“Fine,” he said.
He sat down that evening and made a child’s drawing of a skinny human with a dotted nose.
“Are those pock marks?”
“No, they are nose holes.”
“Are those big hips?”
“No, they are just bones, you know I’m crap at this.”
The name. Bill. Straight ahead, simple. How easy it was to feel suspicious. The cries of a distant animal. A phone ringing late at night when her phone was turned off. Somebody calling her husband, as in a dream.
. . .
Where does Bill live? New Zealand.
Why is he coming? His marriage to the Greek woman has broken up.
Greek woman? Yes.
You know his woman? Yes.
What is her name? Athena.
“How sad,” she said, imagining a man with a dotted nose, crying somewhere in the Bush. Imagining a man with large hips wobbling back and forth from shock of being divorced from the goddess of wisdom.
“Has Athena met someone else?”
“How would I know?” her husband said. “I haven’t seen Bill in dog’s years. Bill is a high wire act,” he said.
. . .
The dreams started rolling in. In one dream, freshly divorced Bill at the seaside. Bill, with his large, human arms. The smell of testosterone mingling with the scent of old shells. Coconut tanning oil glowing hot on a hairy back. Sunburn resistant, not like anyone else. A sand flea crawling right up her husband’s pink cheek, Bill poking it away with his lips. Pulling out a bar of imported chocolate filled with absinthe cream. Unwrapping it for him to nibble.
I’m glad you’re coming, Bill, she said. Her husband moaning in his sleep, kicking her shins like a goat, waking her up.
. . .
The song was playing over in her head. You are My Sunshine, on the Monday Bill was supposed to arrive. Her husband, loping around in the kitchen, noshing on carrot sticks. Pacing, like a reduced animal.
“I’ll cook up a pot roast,” she said. His bunched-up forehead.
“That would be too much,” he said.
She sat there thinking about the lyrics to the song. How the spirit of the song felt so different from divorce, or death. How the love for a cat was like no other love.
“What time does Bill get here?”
“I’m not sure he’s coming now,” he said. “He and Athena have reunited.”
“Really?” she said.
A big salty tear following the lines on his cheeks. His nose, its leaking holes.
Tuna noodles for dinner.
. . .
She wondered about what it meant, his love for this man she had never met. A man with the world’s most boring name. Her growing envy toward a woman called Athena. How lucky Athena is, she thought. To love a man, leave him, and then love him again. To start over. Only the goddess of wisdom could pull that off.
She puttered around the dimly lit kitchen, trying to figure out what to do with the food she had bought for the arrival of Bill. Baby rhubarb jelly, lavender honeycomb, halva with semolina. The stuff her husband had always wanted to try, but never had the heart to admit it.
MEG POKRASS is the author of 8 flash fiction collections and 2 flash novellas, including Spinning to Mars (Blue Light Book Award 2021) and The Loss Detector (Bamboo Dart Press 2020). Recent collections are Disappearing Debutantes (Outpost 19 2023, co-authored with Aimee Parkison) and Kissing the Monster Hunter (Bamboo Dart Press 2023). Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, American Journal of Poetry, Smokelong Quarterly, Washington Square Review, and has been anthologized in 3 Norton anthologies: Flash Fiction International (WW Norton 2015), New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (WW Norton 2018), and Flash Fiction America (WW Norton 2023). She is the series co-editor of Best Microfiction and founding editor of New Flash Fiction Review. A new collection, The First Law of Holes: New & Selected Stories, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books. Meg lives in Inverness, Scotland.