Like Love by Sherrie Flick

Roger was a top marksman on the university rifle team—clay pigeons and postal competitions. He ended all that when one day he found himself sighting someone from his dorm window. University of Michigan, 1972. He leveled his rifle, had the guy in the crosshairs. 

He stopped himself—or someone came into the room. He says he can’t remember, but his hands started shaking that day and haven’t stopped. He became a photographer: nude, semi-nude shots of women, the camera firmly clamped into a tripod in his second floor reading room. I imagine it’s the same thrill as a deer, a man, a big red bull’s eye, a fake bird. He sights us up, coaxes our clothes off us. 

Roger took me out to a barn in the dead of winter one time. He said he had an idea. He draped a fake fur coat across my shoulders. There was a dirty, cracked window, some stairs leading to a loft, the smell of hay and ancient manure. But he forgot his tripod, and could only cup his unsteady hands around the hard metal camera, like it was a baby bird he was trying to save. The photos were all blurry. “Unsalvageable,” he said, and threw them into the garbage can. 

At his house, I sit in his rocking chair, the one he made the summer he secluded himself in a cabin for months. That summer it rained every day. He’d thought he was going crazy, listening to the sound of coyotes at night, high-pitched birdsong and scrabbling chipmunks along the roof in the morning. So he’d made his idle hands busy. He sawed and sanded and fitted the chair into itself, forming it from vines and trees on the property using his dad’s old tools. 

In his youth Roger had been an Eagle Scout, and I can see it—in his posture and exacting side part. In his earnest, nerdy, unsuspecting looks. I can see him in a uniform working steadily toward a badge, mastering the idea of self-sufficiency. Roger lives alone in this house, in this storybook town, where I also live for now, working as a waitress at the Red Bull Inn. He’s my manager five days a week. 

I sit in the rocking chair in his upstairs room on my days off from the restaurant. Of course, I recognize other waitresses’ faces on the walls of his hallway. Roger scuttles in front of me fiddling with speeds and apertures. The big, bright lights blare. The room is quiet and empty except for the chair resting on the glossy wooden floorboards. 

He hands me a book, a big, leatherbound thing, and says it was a present from his dead father. He moves his hands behind his back, nearly standing at attention. It’s the only present his father ever gave him, and he doesn’t understand why. I’m dressed in Roger’s dark blue robe: thick terry cloth with a wide belt. My clothes—jeans, t-shirt, sneakers—are heaped in a pile in his bathroom. He wonders if I have something to say about the book. He says it seems like I should have something to say, because his father sure as fuck didn’t. The pages are so soft as they flutter through my fingers. I do have things to say about how fragile everything is. Everything. But this isn’t the time or place for such talk. I know that.   

The robe is a warm blanket, a big drowsy hug, and I drape my naked legs over the arm of the chair, rocking myself, absently turning the thin, slippery pages filled with romantic poetry from the 17^th century. 

In his office across the hall and down from his reading room Roger has a photograph of his ex-wife waist deep in the ice-blue water of some gorge. The light is clear and cool. She has freckles scattered across her back. Her head is turned, smiling, like she’s in love. When I commented on the photo, Roger said, “If I’d just waited a couple more seconds I would have had the perfect light.”

When the late afternoon sun hits the corner, he asks me to turn and drop the robe down my back. He asks me to look over my shoulder, not at the camera. Not at him. I drop the robe. The air rushes to meet my skin. I turn with my arms crossed over my breasts. I can feel my skin glowing. I stare right into the camera’s eye. 

I know I could take a man like Roger and turn him inside out. Hit my target. Smash the bird. I know what crosshairs are. I understand pulling a trigger. My hands tingle. It starts at the tips of my fingers, circles my palms.

Sherrie Flick is the author of a novel and two short story collections. Recent work appears in Ploughshares, New England Review, Booth, and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. She is a senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly and co-editor of the anthology Flash Fiction America (W. W. Norton, 2023).

2 September 2022