The Short Story of Success

By Angela Yeh

She wandered the aisles listlessly. She picked up a can of beans and set it down. She didn’t have anyone to cook for now. She let her memories draw her down to happier days. She sighed as she picked up a jug of orange juice. The small one this time. No need for the gallon jug. Not anymore.

When she reached the cashier, the kid barely glanced at her. She studied her stained flowered dress, and caught herself frowning, a pale reflection in the plastic divider. Dividing them and her. She slipped her hand underneath to take her change back.

“Have a blessed day,” he said, and she caught his eye this time. He leaned back, visibly shaken by whatever he perceived in the depths of her pupils. She smiled thinly and shuffled out of the way of a busy mother of three, monkeys leaping around her like crazy suns orbiting an exhausted moon.

“Enjoy these moments,” she announced to the mom because she was feeling mean.

The mother stared at her blankly but nodded, trying to be polite.

She reached her car, a beat-up gray Honda Civic with expired plates. She didn’t bother to buckle as she careened around the parking lot, being careful to avoid a stray dog limping by. She had the sudden destructive urge to run over the dog and put it out of its misery. She passed by, leaving the mutt unharmed, alarmed by her own thoughts.

When she got home, she threw her keys across the kitchen table and put the orange juice in the fridge.

The air conditioning unit buzzed and clanked, working as hard as it could in the hundred-degree heat. Still, the smell of rotting meat cloyed around the corners. The neighbors would call the police soon. That was okay. She was almost done.

“Hello, darling,” she said when she stepped airily into the living room. George sat where she shot him, one palm still curled around his beer, stiff with rigor mortis. His brain was sprayed against the back wall, although some had dripped to the brown carpet and congealed there. Flies were starting to find cracks and holes in the house and congregate at his shredded neck. She noticed the stubble on his chin. He would hate that.

“No need to shave anymore, George,” she said helpfully.

“You’d be proud of me. I only bought exactly what I needed. No silly spending on organic bread or expensive fruit. No, I got the orange juice and that was it,” she smiled, waiting for his approval. It never came. It didn’t now.

Sirens rose in the distance, and she wondered if they were coming for her. She stepped to the living room window and flicked up the beige curtains. No. They drove by, on their way to someone else’s house.

She turned back to George. “What? It’s too late for you anyway. I’m going to make some breakfast for supper. What do you think of that, George? And I’m going to watch TV. And I’m going to eat it in here. WITH the ketchup!” She grinned, caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror hanging beside the window, and froze.

“Well, hello there! Who are you?” Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of something awful, horrible, too nightmarish to process.

She turned, sure what she was seeing must be wrong. A trick of the light. Her right eye twitched.

George stood up, fully intact, burped, and lumbered to the kitchen.

Her shoulders tensed as the fridge door was jerked open, then slammed shut.

“Damn it, Charlene, you got the wrong size OJ again. And you forgot the Gin. Damn it, woman!” He thundered back into the living room, “DO I have to do EVERYTHING my own goddam self!?” His rage, instant, brilliantly hot, blasted over her like a supernova.  “You’re fucking useless. A goddamn burden. Good for nothing.”

She started to cry, falling to her knees, despair rushing over her, her soul sucking out through her toes.

“Oh, just cry again; that’s your favorite thing to do. Make me look like the bad guy. Manipulative bitch.”

Her spirit puddled out and squashed under his anger. His voice seemed far away now. When she looked up, he’d gone, slamming the front door so loud the screen door banged and snapped open and shut again. The Honda started up and roared out of the driveway.

She lay her hot cheek on the brown carpet; the individual threads could have been worms. Laughter bubbled up inside her. Was she dead already? She closed her eyes. Was she in the ground? A memory flashed behind her eyelids. Her, as a young girl, swinging through the maple trees on her grandmother’s farm. No. She was not dead yet.

She could swing one last time. Or she could leave. Start over. Death of a different kind. She looked around their small home. It wasn’t much, but it was all she had.

She was still wandering the rooms, as if memorizing them, taking one last look around when she heard the tires screech, someone laying on a horn, and a terrific crash, then awful silence. She waited, daring to hope. When she didn’t hear his heavy steps on the stairs she floated to the window. What she could see of the Honda was the trunk, which popped open on impact, the front end disappearing inside the bowels of a garbage truck. The driver staggered out of the high seat, lurching back to see what had hit him.

She found herself beside the car, peering inside the mangled mess of broken metal and snapped bone. The bottle of Gin was still rolling around in the back seat. The silence held. Hope grew. Relief bloomed, flowered, took root, and grew so fast she felt taller physically, and laughter escaped between her grinding teeth.

“I’m so sorry, ma’am. I don’t know what happened. Is he—oh god. Dios Mio. Oh god, oh god, o—” The man turned green, spun away from her, and threw up on the sidewalk.

She needed to be sure. Sirens wailed in the distance, rapidly growing closer. Someone had finally called 911.

She walked quickly to the driver’s side. His face was gone, melded into the back of a rusted piece of grinding machinery. A rotting banana was flung over his shoulder and scraps and curls of discarded paper leaked into the backseat. She marveled at herself. There was no pity. No grief.

A strange feeling washed over her. It was light like a fire, burning and scorching as it filled her chest. She looked away from the wreckage, holding her stomach and doubling over with laughter, with relief.

She was led to the back of the ambulance. “Hysterical,” one said, shaking his head. “Must have been awful. She probably saw the whole thing. Poor girl.”

Kindly, he swabbed her arm and injected a low dose of droperidol.

“It’s alright, ma’am, he didn’t suffer at all. Happened instantly.”

As the drug began to calm her jagged nerves, she heard their voices in the air, floating like they were in dialogue bubbles. “— see what caused — someone said — driver didn’t see him coming — a dog.”

She sat up slowly, with help, as the second paramedic climbed into the back with a brown bundle of fur. In a flash of recognition, she realized this was the mutt from the supermarket.

“Is this your dog, ma’am?”

She looked into its liquid brown eyes, the whites showing from fear, and she nodded, folding the frightened dog onto her lap. “Yes. His name is George.”

Angela Yeh is an East Coast Canadian native who grew up a stone’s throw from Stephen King’s Maine. She now lives in Texas and sees Chuck Norris on the always. Angela is a short, tall-story-teller who loves to garden, write about magic, and eat cake. Her first published novel, “A Phoenix Rises,” was a finalist in the Dante Rossetti Book Awards for Young Adult Fiction. You can follow her antics on Twitter @thatplukcygirl and Instagram @thatpluckygirl and at her website www.thepluckycanadian.com.