Midsummer Dream House

 

Probably a Name for It

The overwhelming smell wasn’t the traditional one. With only the two sisters and their families this year, there was no need for a kid’s table. Instead adults and children alternated. But counting it up, a place-setting short. Where was her husband?

The wine they’d brought never made it to the meal. He considered the missing husband, his brother-in-law by some definition. Men married to sisters, there was probably a name for it. His not being there a surprise, but less so than the newly red walls, matching the paint on his sister-in-law’s thin wrists. He sat next to his nephew, the youngest and only boy among the cousins, dished out his food, cut up his meat. A fat kid, quiet unlike his Dad. Trying to impress him the reason for the expensive wine. No doubt the reason it had been whisked away.

On the way out, he tried to find the bottle in the refrigerator crowded with plastic tubs and tin-foiled turkey. On the drive home, they argued while the twin girls slept in back. Your sister has been through a lot, he said, remembering her moving from the kitchen in her loose pale green dress and her paisley head-scarf, to the head of the table. He couldn’t get around her being that sick. No symptoms at all—but then the harsh pronouncement after a routine exam, treatments looming like a bully waiting after school. He decided he was okay with the missing thirty dollar Riesling. The turkey was dry, pre-cooked. Without giblets it came to table without gravy. If I’d known, his wife said, I would have brought some. But then I suppose that would have disappeared too.

Her sister’s troubles had always trumped hers. She’d hadn’t had it easy either, she reminded him later, in the dark. He’d fantasized about sex with his sister-in-law countless times. In spite of the illness and rigor of the possible cure she still looked good, although hadn’t worn the perfume he liked. At dawn the next morning, his turn for the dog, pulling on his pants and new sweater bought especially for the holiday, it came back—no turkey cooking, instead that fresh thick paint smell, still in his clothes. Walling them in with her, brick red.

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Fiction by Jon Fain

First published in (mac)ro(mic) in June 2020

 

 

Jon Fain’s recent publications include a pair of short stories in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, a flash fiction in The Broadkill Review, and micro fictions in Blink-Ink, ScribesMICRO, and The Woolf. He has stories in the 2023 anthologies Tales of the Apocalypse from Three Ravens Publishing and Crimeucopia: Crank It Up! from Murderous Ink Press. His chapbook of short fiction Pass the Panpharmacon! is available from Greying Ghost Press. He lives in Massachusetts. Twitter:
@jonsfain