Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: We published a poem of Chelsea Rathburn’s in our Issue 13.1 and are honored to be the venue publishing her first piece of fiction! This story reveals the complicated experience of grieving for a former spouse who’s passed away, using the best tools of flash: quick and clear characterization, superbly specific details, and a final image that completes the tone. I’ll think of a cat’s tongue differently from now on . . .
To hear Chelsea read the story, click here:
In Memoriam
For many of the years they were married, Joan wished for Rick’s death. She was not proud of this. Alone at night, she’d pray for a one-car accident on some dark country road, Rick too drunk to find his way home, or for electrocution-by-faulty-karaoke-microphone, or for an aneurysm that would fell him on the front porch for their grumpy mailman to find. Something fast and painless and hurting no one else.
After they began the ugly business of untangling their twined lives, she sometimes wished it more fervently, only without the quick or painless part. Then years passed. She rarely thought of him at all.
Those late nights when she’d longed for his demise, Joan worried she would feel guilty if the worst actually happened, if Rick crashed his car or keeled over a gaming console. But her husband was accident-prone, even sober. He lived on Big Macs and Beefeater and pushed her hand away when she tried to take his keys. Perhaps, she’d thought then, it was only a matter of time.
Now her friend Susan is calling: Rick has died, and she thought Joan would want to know. No, Susan doesn’t know how, and seems surprised by the question, which is more polite than what Joan really wants to ask—do death wishes have a statute of limitations?
The online obituary says “sudden” and “tragic,” and Joan imagines something ridiculous—a jet-skiing accident, choking on a corn dog at the fair—then sees donations can be made to the American Heart Association. She studies the guest-book entries beneath the obituary, life of the party, never met a stranger, how funny, so kind, and tries to stifle the little voice offering objections; after all, Rick always was a different person when others were concerned.
She considers sending flowers, remembering the deaths they weathered: Rick crumpled against her at his grandparents’ viewings, Rick attending her best friend’s funeral mass and complaining it lasted too long. She’d last heard from him when their cat died, many years after the divorce. A beautiful email about their brief good times as a couple, how they’d found the calico kitten shivering under a porch, how it followed them on walks and slept in a ball on her chest at night. He attached photos of the kitten and the regal old cat it had become, the one she’d never once visited after their split, though she’d loved it fiercely. She felt her heart thawing at this small kindness, only to notice that Rick had copied Joan’s parents on the email, making the gesture another elaborate show.
Joan will be better than that, she decides. She will not send flowers or make extravagant donations, and she will not feel guilty about old wishes or saving herself years ago. She feels oddly free, untethered, but for one impossible desire: she wants nothing more than to touch her old cat’s fur again, to feel against her palm its little barbed tongue.
Chelsea Rathburn is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Still Life with Mother and Knife (LSU Press, 2019). She teaches at Mercer University and serves as Poet Laureate of Georgia. In 2021, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to create Georgia Poetry in the Parks. “In Memoriam” is her first fiction publication.
