WHILE YOUR WIFE IS AT A MEMORIAL SERVICE

HAD gives a nod to early, minimalist web journals (elimae, McSweeney's, eyeshot, Surgery of Modern Warfare...). Here is a short story by Robin Meeks:

She’ll be gone a good hour, maybe two. You’re happy, of course, to watch the kids while she pays respects. Don’t think, obviously; nothing good can come of that. Try to make yourself useful instead. Maybe look for the long blue spatula, the one good for flipping hash browns for The Boy. It was a friend of hers, younger than you both. You’re getting to that age where such things shock but no longer surprise. Keeps them crispy to flip them all at once. The hash browns. Funny phrase “paying respects,” as if respect were a kind of currency, with death calling in a loan. Also “paying attention,” though the expense of that seems to make more sense somehow. What language has us do. Speaking of which, the pencil sharpeners probably need emptying of their dust. And Q will always be up for a game of Crazy Eights or Go Fish, played, if she has her way, with the novelty deck from the Boot Hill gift shop, the one with the neat hole in the middle pretending to be from a bullet. She can beat you now without your help, and the game will provide a good fence against your thoughts. The spatula should be in the drawer by the stove, like always. She had two children, both boys, one very young, not yet able to remember. You won’t be able to decide at which age it’s better to begin not having a mother. You will be sore tomorrow from those push-ups. Now is not a time to make promises to yourself. Better to see if anyone needs a snack. The Boy — these days you can almost see his cells doubling themselves — will undoubtedly want something. Not you, though; you have to protect yourself from your body. Drink more coffee instead. Now they say that it’s good for the brain and the liver, that you can never have too much, and you can have too much of so many things. Don’t imagine her never coming home, the house full of her things suddenly become the only bits of her you’re allowed to hold.

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