Flash Fiction by Thaddeus Rutkowski

Wheezer

My mother looked into my room and asked, “Are you wheezing?”

I was lying in bed, sleeping, but I woke at her voice and listened. I heard a squeaking coming from my throat, signaling my airway was partly blocked. I coughed, but it helped for only another breath or two. Then the croaking came back—my lungs were being squeezed. “No,” I said faintly. “I’m not wheezing.”

“Do you have asthma?” my mother asked. “Are you turning blue?”

She switched on the light, and I looked at my skin; it wasn’t blue. But I couldn’t see my face; it might have been blue. 

“I read your horoscope,” my mother said. “It said that with the eclipse of the moon, you will have a reversal.”

She meant that I might recover from wheezing. But what I heard was, I’d go from being in good health to being on my way out. But I saw one benefit from my frailty: Asthma might keep me out of the military draft. Many of my peers were getting called for service.

“Can I ask Dr. Winter for a letter?” I asked. “I’d like to get a medical exemption for allergies.”

“When the moon is right, you can ask.”

✶

Of course, when the time came, the allergist refused. “I’d need to see you have an asthma attack,” he said. “I’d need to see you collapse—fall onto the floor. When you gasp for breath and choke, you’ll be almost there. When your lungs fill with liquid and your heart almost stops, I’ll know. Then I’ll tell the Army you aren’t fit to serve.”

I went on squeaking while I slept. My mother kept checking on me. I resolved that, when I started to choke, I would rouse myself, but only long enough to make it back to the doctor’s office. There, I would fall off my chair or stumble blindly until I went down. That way, a medical professional could give his expert opinion on my unreadiness to serve. I would obviously be too feeble to become a professional killer.

Traveling Pants

A few days before my wedding, I bought a velvet suit and left the pants at a tailor shop to be shortened. While I was waiting for the pants, I heard from my brother. I’d asked him earlier if he would be my best man, even though I knew he was recently divorced.

“I can’t be anyone’s best man,” he said.

I took a cab home from the tailor’s, and after I’d walked away from the car I realized I’d left the pants on the back seat. There was no way to retrieve my pants.

To replace my brother as best man, I asked a woman friend if she would take the role. “Yes, absolutely,” she said.

When I told my brother I’d found a best man who was a woman, he said, “I heard you left your pants in a taxi.”

I went to the store where I bought the suit and asked for the same pair of pants. “Do you want the jacket to go with the pants?” the salesperson asked.

“No,” I said, “just the pants.” 

“We have a jacket that matches those pants.”

I wanted to say, “I bought the whole suit here and left the pants in a cab,” but I was too embarrassed to explain.

The wedding was held in a carriage house in Greenwich Village. Upstairs, there was a small prep room for the bride. I went up there (my wife-to-be didn’t mind). But somehow my brother showed up in the secret room. “I see you picked a winner,” he said to me.

“Get out!” the bride shouted at him.

I thought my velvet suit looked fine during the ceremony. The pants matched the jacket, as I knew they would. I noticed that many of the men at the celebration (as well as the woman who was best man) were wearing suits, but none had a velvet suit. I didn’t know if that said something good or bad about my sense of fashion.

Banana in the Hereafter

My mother was certain my brother had planned his own death, but she wasn’t sure how he did it. After he’d passed, she talked to him every day, addressing his soul, wherever it was. She asked him straight out what he’d done.

“Do you remember,” she said into the ether while standing in her yard, “you weren’t supposed to eat any solid food, but you asked for a banana?”

My mother had always kept bananas around when we were children. Maybe they reminded her of the warm-weather city in Yunnan where she’d grown up. We ate the bananas when they were yellow on the outside and firm on the inside—before their skins turned brown and their insides turned to mush.

As my brother was fading, a banana seemed soft enough for him to swallow, even though his throat was paper thin. He was still strong. He moved a bed the day after he came home from the hospital—slid the bed from one part of the floor in an upstairs room to another. My mother was impressed with his strength, after all of the treatment. 

“Did you ask for the fruit because you wanted to end it all?” she asked.

My brother made no denial.

He’d left half of the banana uneaten—as if he couldn’t swallow any more. 

When the bleeding started, my mother tried to save him but couldn’t. She had some kind of vacuum pump given by the hospital team but didn’t know how to use it. She held the mask to his face, but the machine did nothing. He fell backward from his seat at the kitchen table—a bad sign. 

Later, I heard that no one could have saved him, not my mother and not the EMTs, even if they’d arrived in time. 

My mother blamed it all on the banana, on his insistence on the banana. “You wanted it,” she said into the air, “but you shouldn’t have had it.”

My brother gave no answer.