Elaine

Flash Fiction Story by Gina Angelone

Elaine stands at the sink most meals. Everybody does, she tells herself. She calls it her declaration of sink dependence, and is somewhat pleased with herself.

She smears a dry Swedish cracker with peanut butter and takes a bite. A John Prine song comes on her playlist and the lyrics suddenly stick in her throat: “I am an old woman named after my mother…” Elaine swallows hard. She can take a lot of things, but the pointy edges of those words jab at her gut. Just how old Elaine feels depends on the day. Today, she feels pretty ancient. And though she is not enjoying the taste of compressed Nordic cardboard, she keeps eating the cracker anyway.

“I should have had something happier, like spaghetti,” Elaine gulps some water to wash down the brown and gray paste. She imagines choking—dying right there and then. No one would find her for a good long time. The playlist would go on for days.

Out of the kitchen window, Elaine sees the neighbors pack up their ginger-haired children, orange kayaks and spotted dog into a white minivan. It’s Sunday and they’re headed to the lake. As they pull away, they suddenly stop the car like they forgot something. They seem unbothered by doubling back. If it were her, Elaine reasons, she’d mutter a foul word, slam a door, blame someone for the missing item.

Moments later, the couple exits their house with a soft-pack cooler. Elaine imagines it filled with ham sandwiches and juice boxes. Maybe some apples. Happy foods. The husband and wife share a laugh about something, and though Elaine can’t hear what it is, their transaction gives her pause. There’s honesty in the way they look at each other. No evidence of “Why’d you forget the goddamn cooler?”. She imagines they’ve cultivated a mutual understanding about life, pale children, DIY projects and trips to the lake. They also seem to agree on grilling outdoors in all kinds of weather, laminate flooring, lawn flags with benign alma matters, drugging their temperamental dog, and decorating outside for every Sharpie-circled holiday on the calendar. Elaine sees this consensus written across their peaceful, potato-faced grins. She can never decide if she envies their choices or fears them.

While looking at her reflection in the microwave, Elaine picks a piece of cracker out of her teeth and feels around her mouth with her finger. “My gums have receded like flood waters. Like a hairline. Like time.” She wonders how John Prine would sing about such things.

She knows she overdid it: she brushed too hard for too long. She was only trying to do things right but she wore everything down. Same as she did with her husband. She doubts she’ll ever get another chance to share an honest smile with someone.

As Elaine places her plate in the dishwasher, a fork jabs her thumb and draws blood. “I even rack dishes too hard,” she says to no one at all.

Elaine hunches over the dining room table folding laundry and talking to her yoga pants. She caresses them gently and promises not to over-dry them again. She throws in a vow to exercise more. Elaine recognizes the breaches in her logic and the gaps in her life. She is aware of the empty conversations in her head. And because of this dismantling, she offers words of gratitude to all the socks with small holes before throwing them away. She does not mend things or attempt to make the broken whole. In this way, she tells herself, she is quite impeccable.

As a longtime filmmaker and storyteller, Gina Angelone is currently writing stories that step briefly into a moment in time—mundane minutes that draw a simple sketch but somehow capture a portrait of longing. Her hope is to explore fractured desires and the people and places this desire inhabits.