After Henry by Barbara Fried

Mine eyes are spent with weeping. —Lamentations 2:11

There is a basic question for all fiction: “What made you want to create this piece?” The judges found the winning entry answered this question with a palpable sense of necessity and urgency. Of course, as in all the best Flash Fiction, every word was essential.
—Judge Ron Koertge on LAR Flash Fiction Award winner “After Henry” by Barbara Fried

When Henry died, I stopped going to the movies. I couldn’t see the point. If someone dies, that someone is Henry. If no one dies, then what is it to me? Also, I stopped answering the phone or opening e-mails marked urgent. If they have to find you, they’ll find you.

I don’t go to museums after noon anymore. I want to be long gone when the loudspeaker erupts—a bomb exploding in a safe house—reminding us all that the end is near. I hate that voice. It is the gate clanging shut, the repo man at the door, the last train out before Paris falls.

Before Henry, I loved to walk the city late at night, a proud burgher surveying her demesne, river to river, up and down deserted avenues, past knots of drunken teenagers, street schizophrenics shouting at god, and, complacent fool that I was, I’d think to myself, even here there is life, and hope, or some such sentimental rot.

Now, all I see around me is death: the museum shut up like a grandee’s tomb, its entrance bathed in ghastly footlights; the park thrumming with murderous thoughts; restaurants padlocked and dark, save the green glow of the Emergency Exit sign, with its droll promise of salvation. Don’t tell me everyone will be back in the morning. Sometimes they won’t.

When I detect the telltale signs of a store in trouble, I stop going. I don’t want to be there when the Everything Must Go!! sign is taped across the front window, its hysterical imperative telling us what we already know. I don’t want to see the scuffed-up walls stripped bare, clothes tossed in bins, light fixtures ripped from the ceiling like eyeballs harvested from the dead. I don’t want to worry about the people who work there, whether they miss each other, whether they found new jobs, whether they feel like someone they love has died. I want to be able to tell myself that maybe I was wrong, maybe it survived after all.

The day Henry died, I ripped the peonies out of my garden, the bloodroots and sweet peas too. Such profligacy, such great expense for a moment’s beauty, flowers blown almost as soon as they are burst. My garden now is made of rock and sow thistle, toad rush and milkweed. It is the color of concrete, the feel of barbed wire and the cool stone monastery floor. It lives on whatever it finds—air, the sound of sirens, yesterday’s news. It will still be here in a hundred years, long after we have ceased to haunt anyone’s dreams.

And when I see a ten-year-old boy crossing the street, I turn away. If at that moment a driver should lean over to change the radio station, or glance up at the darkening sky, at least I will not be there to witness it. At least it will not have happened to me.

Barbara Fried’s short stories have appeared, among other places, in Bellevue Literary Review, Subtropics, Guernica, and Word Riot. Her story “The Half-Life of Nat Glickstein” was chosen as a Distinguished Story of 2013 by the editors of Best American Short Stories. Other of her stories have received recognition, including finalist in the Bellevue Literary Review’s 2013 Fiction Contest, top 25 in Glimmertrain’s 2014 Very Short Fiction contest, long list in Fish’s 2014-15 Short Story Contest, and semi-finalist in New Millennium’s 2011 Fiction contest.

In her day job, she is a law professor at Stanford University, in which capacity she has written widely on political and moral theory for academic and general audiences.