2 stories by Beth Sherman

Assassins

You go outside to drink your morning coffee and witness a scene of wanton destruction. Lettuce decimated. Tomatoes devoured. Cucumbers gnawed off their stems. Voles! You catch sight of one lurking near the back porch. A cute little fellow. Brown, mouse-like, with too many whiskers. Assassin, you cry, as it tunnels into the grass. Turns out there are many burrows in the lawn. You step in one by accident and wrench your ankle. What did you expect, says Matt, as he wraps your foot in gauze. We’re way the hell out in the country. 

Actually, that’s not correct. Hillsdale is only two and a half hours north of Brooklyn, where you used to live. There’s a gas station and a general store. A Whole Foods under construction 15 miles away. Matt has always worked remotely so he shouldn’t mind. And the view, you enthuse. Those purple flecked mountains, that tie dye sky. Hawks gliding above fields of wildflowers. From your office at the community college, you see deer drinking from a brook. Deer! It’s too pretty. Some might say perfect. 

But Matt refuses to adapt. He doesn’t want to meet the neighbors. Won’t go to the Dean’s potluck supper. Sleeps in the downstairs bedroom, which is claustrophobically small with no air conditioner. He will do this until he forgives you. Until he realizes everything will be fine again.

As for the voles, the exterminator suggests poison, which is unacceptable. You bait a wire trap with peanut butter, hoping you can catch them and drive them somewhere else. A state park. The woods. But voles creep in during the night, lick the cage clean and saunter off, victorious. They’ve eaten all the vegetables Matt planted and have started in on the flowers.

Back when Matt found out what you did, he didn’t talk to you for a week. You expected him to leave or ask for a divorce. But he simmered, resentments piling up like used tissues. So, you filled the silence – explaining, apologizing, offering to go to couples counseling. Until he said the only thing you could do to fix it was move.  

Now Matt orders two vintage croquet mallets on Ebay for 10 bucks. To scare the voles away, he says. You look at the heavy wooden mallets, dubious. We could play, you say. There’s an old pool table in the basement with the right-sized balls. We could make wickets out of willow branches or buy real ones on Amazon. Matt shoots you a pitying look. This isn’t Alice in Wonderland, he says.

You taught Alice last semester, at NYU. The before time. Scent of pipe smoke and dark chocolates. Unbuttoning a pressed cotton shirt. That hotel in Washington Square overlooking the park. You will not let yourself remember those things, you will not. Alice used live flamingos for mallets, hedgehogs for balls. Somehow, none of the animals got hurt.

After sunset, Matt pulls an Adirondack chair up to the ravaged flower bed. They work at night, he says. He’s holding one of the mallets, tapping it against his thigh. You’ve known him since you were 15 and he walked over to you in Social Studies and said we should go out sometime. He always thought he understood you better than anyone. You thought so, too. You lie on the grass next to him, study his familiar silhouette, close enough to touch. Stop punishing me, you say. I can’t go back and undo it, you say. You want to unlace the past but the strings are tied too tight. A rustling in the dark. Matt heaves the mallet and fireflies scatter. Would you really kill them, you say. You hear him take the low shallow breaths of a man who can’t breathe right. Picture furry bodies, crushed by his wrath. The rustling has stopped. Tomorrow you will pack your things and go back to the city. You peer into the dark, imagining mountains behind the trees, how something you can’t see is still there. 

Hearts

The four of us sat around the card table, naked, on a damp Thursday night. We’d eaten dinner, drank some wine, and now abandoned all pretense of small talk. We were nervous, of course. The promise of things to come undid us – caused the backs of our knees to sweat, our eyes to go hollow and famished. We’d answered their ad, were in their small, cluttered apartment, their turf, so to speak. We avoided looking at their bodies: the rolls of flesh like Pillsbury cookie dough, the ropy veins on the back of their hands, the chicken wing arms, the skin that refused to smooth. None of us could be considered young anymore. 

We were here because, well . . . why were we here? There was no sensible answer. At first glance it seemed like a foolish thing to do. When we could just as easily stay home watching TV dramas, feeding the cat, who was also old, but who loved us with a fierceness hard to come by these days. I suppose we were tired of the usual fare. Sex had been off the menu for a while. We gave each other pats instead, pats and hugs. Each morning, we asked each other how we’d slept, how we were feeling, if our joints still ached, if our stomachs still felt unsettled from last night’s dessert. We had turned into fossils without meaning to, a collection of bones you’d find in a museum before moving on to a better exhibit. We wanted newness to shock us back to life.

If our children could see us they would have laughed. Or been appalled. We couldn’t tell which was worse.

We listened as the couple described various options: costumes, bondage, missionary, toys. It reminded us of those old take-out menus. One from Column A, two from Column B, three side dishes – packed in a brown bag to go. They must do boring stuff, too. Shop at Publix. Learn to play Pickleball. Dust the apartment once a week. Count how many years are left before they die.

Once we drove all night to the Florida Keys. We hadn’t booked a hotel and slept on the sand under a quilt of stars. Our limbs braided together, our mouths tiny pink caves, the smell of salt nestling under our fingernails, the waves tempting us to dream.   

Now we find each other’s hands under the table, squeeze. We wonder if this will tear our marriage to pieces, like a ship that splinters on hidden rocks. We can still get up and leave. There’s still time. In the moment before we pair off and head to separate bedrooms, we glance at each other and 32 years of memories spill across the worn carpet like tears. We’d say we were happy if people asked. But no one ever did.    

Beth Sherman’s writing has been published in more than 100 literary magazines, including Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, and Bending Genres. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024 and she’s the winner of the Smokelong Quarterly 2024 Workshop prize. A multiple Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net nominee, she can be reached on X, Bluesky or Instagram @bsherm36.