From the Flash Stash IV: Story Board

(Originally published in the chapbook, Here Comes Herodotus, Again! (and other microhistories), by Buttonhook Press, 2021.

—Wayne Cresser

Someone had taken me to the break room at the back of the store. The employees’ room, I guessed. The light was harsh. Butchers’ aprons hung on pegs, a rack of timecards made a column next to a timeclock, which emitted a low hum.

“You’ll keep an eye on him, then? I’ve got to get back out on the floor,” said a green smock disappearing through a swinging door.

I was aware that I was the one who needed keeping an eye on, but I felt uncertain about everything else.

My friend Roger, whom I thought looked very pale, sat next to me at a table. I knew him from the community band and the library.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

 “We’re waiting,” he said.

As he said this, he began removing what appeared to be crumpled homemade flyers from my hands. They advertised Italian lessons at home and outboard motors for sale, charity 5ks and flower shows. And I held them in tightly clenched fists, like a crabby schoolteacher who snatches paper airplanes out of mid-air.

“Ah, we’re waiting,” I said. “For what?”

My hands uncoiled and I flexed my fingers. I sighed deeply for I felt that it had been a while since I could breathe. Then I remembered making a scene in the front lobby of the supermarket.

“I guess I lost it,” I said. “Did they call the police? Are we waiting for them?”

 “No, of course not,” he said. “They know you’re a regular. A stand-up citizen. Your ex-wife is on her way.”

“I didn’t know Margaret was on the island.”

 “I don’t think she was when they reached her. Anyway, she’s on her way.”

Roger, the percussionist, was ten years older than I, and from the time I met him, he seemed scattered, frail and aging rapidly. Now sitting next to him under the flickering fluorescents of the break room, the wrinkled ruins of my outburst littering the table before me, I knew he’d outlast me. I knew too that by now, I looked like his older brother.

The previous winter, I told the band I was ill and had to dial things back. Now I was forever ducking the phrase “palliative care” because it was difficult for me to say, and it didn’t sound like a real thing. Even though I was on hand for my mother-in-law’s experience with it and know it’s real and helpful.

I ignored my diagnosis through jaundice and weight loss.

Roger, always reed thin, a twig really, now looked positively robust next to me.

 “Okay, we’re waiting,” I said. “I don’t remember running into you in the store, Rog. You know, I come here a lot, to look at food I no longer desire. I just want to look at it, that’s all.”

“That’s okay,” he said.

“Also, Margaret used to make lists and send me here all the time. I guess the habit stuck.”

I stopped, aware suddenly that I was spilling.

“Don’t stop,” Roger said. “You want to talk, talk.”

“I don’t remember what happened,” I said. “Where you come in.

 “I came to the rescue,” he said. “You were tearing up the community bulletin board in the front lobby when I walked in.”

 “Yeah?”

 “At first, I watched you remove some pushpins, and you know, somebody’s ad for a boat dropped to the floor, then the poster for Our Town at the Baptist church, then you started pawing the board, like a hamster working a treadmill, taking down anything you can get your hands on. You looked furious. Nobody coming or going wanted to get near you. Somebody alerted the management though.”

He paused.

 “I’m guessing you’re feeling a ton of stress these days. I get that, but dismantling the community bulletin board, do you know what that was about?”

“I guess I do know, yeah,” I said.

 “Well?”

I didn’t want to say. It was stupid and selfish.

 “Well?” He repeated.

“I wasn’t angry about any of this until now. All of you, you know, you’ll go on. The plays at the church, the community band, boats sailing in and out of the harbor, lighting the Christmas tree down at the ferry landing—everything else will, I don’t know, blithely sally forth without me.”

 He laughed. “And you thought you could change that by taking down the story board?”

“I doubt if I was thinking of anything at all,” I said. “I was reading it as usual and then I just felt myself getting pissed off and then, more and more pissed off until I just kind of went for it.”

Roger glanced at the flyers on the table. “Let’s do something while we’re waiting. This room can’t be helping, and you seem yourself again. Are you?”

 “Sure, yeah,” I said. “I’m in your custody until Margaret gets here.’

He pointed to the flyers. “Then let’s gather those up. Can you keep it together?”

“Sure.”

 “Sure?”

 “If at any time I appear to be losing it, you have my permission to beat me like a drum.”

 “Will do,” he said, knowing full well he lacked the will to do it and I the will to take it.