The Last Word

After thirty years of listening to her, I decided, no more. The good times, I’d revisit in memories. Like the trip to Coney Island, when we ate too many Nathan’s Hot Dogs. Like twin rivers, our guts let loose beneath the boardwalk. Together we laughed.

“Told you we ate too many,” she said, wiping vomit from her lips with the sleeve of her hoodie.

Then we kissed with vomity lips, and laughed like fat, little lovers do, when they dismiss what others think about their bodies, or what they do with them. God, I loved her.

I might have taken what she’d said as a portent, though. Now, we lived not in some Edenic harmony, like Adam and Eve before the snake and apple, but tearing through decades like a bird shot from a cannon, then whipped away in a nightmare-laden derecho.

One night, she corrected me fifteen times. So, I asked her if she still loved me.

“Sure, I do,” she said.

“Maybe once, then, you don’t correct me?”

"Maybe once,” she said, “you do something right. Like putting toilet paper on the right way.”

A man can only take so much.

Next day, I stopped at Bill’s Family Pharmaceuticals, where Wilhelm Homberg, Jr., proprietor, sold me a case of twenty boric acid suppositories.

“Wife gotta problem?” he said.

“No,” I said. “Wife is the problem.”

Before Lucille came home, I loaded the reservoir of her C-PAP machine with nearly all of them.

And then, a sign of Cupid, who instilled love with a weapon, unseated me. Tonight, Lucille would receive me completely; this time, she’d not correct me. Quick as a bunny, I’d impress her with my manhood and leave her speechless.

BIO: Retired English teacher Jon Gluckman writes in a small southern New Jersey town outside Philadelphia, PA, USA. He is grateful that he gets to share his life with his beautiful and brilliant wife, Barbara, and his two lovable, knuckleheaded rescue puppies, Arthur and Bella. He believes, regardless of the hardships, that "Life is Good."

He has published work in Micro-Fiction Monday Magazine, 101 Words Weekly (x6), Mystery Magazine, Grim & Gilded, Mobius Boulevard, Frontier Tales (x2), The Best of Frontier Tales Anthology Vol. 15, Punk Noir Magazine (x2), Flash Frontier, Black Sheep Magazine Issue 21, The Fifty & Up Writer Awards: The Table Issue #4 (2nd place finalist runner-up), Dark Harbor Magazine, Urban Pigs Press, Weekly Contest (1st place) Author’s Only Collective, 365tomorrows, Close to the Bone (Pending 2.13.26), Literary Garage, and a finalist for Money Chronicles: A Story Initiative, a national short story contest supported by Principal Foundation, The Center for Fiction and Short Edition.