Assistant Editor Lily Davenport: I loved the wry, carefully modulated humor in “New Normal” from the moment I finished its first paragraph. It’s a snapshot of an uneasy moment in both individual and collective time—pandemic lockdowns have ended as their specter still haunts public spaces, while the protagonist muddles through a present moment shaped in every particular by a marriage that no longer exists.
New Normal
For months he’d been ordering traps online. Now, because he was lonely and the pandemic was supposed to be over, he walked five miles to the hardware store. He had a car but not a driver’s license. He had a fireplace but no reliable source of firewood. He had peanut butter but no jelly. He had a parrot but not a talking parrot. He had a toaster but not a toaster oven. And now he had an infestation of mice but not a single trap. He made it to the hardware store in less than an hour.
“Mousetraps, right?” the clerk behind the counter said. “I can always tell.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Will you marry me?”
“No,” said the clerk, who was not a stranger but his ex-wife. “I’ve already done that.”
“Right,” he said. “Where are the mousetraps?”
“We’re out,” she said. “Supply chain.”
“Sure,” he said. “Don’t lie.”
But she was not a liar. She was a flight attendant who had been fired for cause. And what had been the cause? She served everyone tomato juice. Everyone. No matter what they’d asked for, she poured from a can of V8, which was not technically tomato juice, but it might as well have been because that’s what it said on her official notice of termination. Serves too much tomato juice.
“Try Walmart,” she said. “How’s Lucifer?”
Lucifer was their non-talking parrot. Now his non-talking parrot.
“Lonely,” he said. “He misses you.”
“What about the mice?”
“What about the mice?”
“They can be Lucifer’s friends.”
He hadn’t thought of that. But they were all members of the animal kingdom. The mice could scurry at the bottom of Lucifer’s cage. Lucifer could sing to them and ring his bell for them and together they could put on a play. Suddenly, everything seemed better. He looked up at his ex-wife.
“When are you coming home?”
“I’m not.”
It had been a long shot anyway. Amazing she would even still speak to him, here in public. He had a queen-size bed, but no queen. A wedding ring, but no wedding. He turned to leave.
“You take care,” he said over his shoulder. When they’d been married, he never said stuff like that.
“I’m so thirsty,” she said. “That’s the problem with this life.”
“There are so many,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “But fewer now.”
Dinah Cox is the author of short story collections The Paper Anniversary (Elixir, 2024), The Canary Keeper (PANK Books, 2019), and Remarkable (BOA Editions, 2016). She lives and works in her home town of Stillwater, Oklahoma.
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