8 OPIUM
THOMAS COOPER
†
at sorority-girl butt. None of them, I’m sure, knows what it’s like to have their histories questioned by a foolish stranger about to learn a lesson. “What can I say about Adelaide that you don’t already know?” this Archie says from across our back corner booth. He stares poetically at the smoky ceiling as my hands shake around my beer bottle. “Looked like the Clabber corn-starch girl. Used to have the worst headaches, but she kept her spirits up. Loved to dance, the Lindy Hop. And plus, the thing that always broke my heart, she saw Spanish galleons in the clouds. They threw away the mold when they made that woman. So, you knew her, too?” I hate to laugh in a situation as serious as this, but I do, right in his senile face. This man is clearly in a late stage of dementia and never knew my poor darling wife at all. I have half a mind to strike him over the head with my cane and set the record straight, when I remember one of the things Adelaide used to say about me: that I had a mean streak as wild and wide as the Colorado River. How she put up with me all of those years is still beyond me, but she was capable of seeing the best in a person, and she stood by my side the old-fashioned way, like all the good women of her generation. If abiding this charlatan means honoring her memory even just a little bit, then so be it. “Sure, corn starch and clouds,” I say. “I hear you. Go ahead, let it all out.” “Ach, it almost hurts too much to continue,” Archie says. Sunk in some kind of reverie, he rests his glazed eyes on the table. When he mentions Adelaide’s sad life, her loneliness, her childlessness, I think that these are things that could be true of anyone. But then when he mentions that time she broke her arm at the skating rink and was too embarrassed to go to the doctor’s, I get up, something in my chest flaring like flint against steel. I settle this the old-fashioned way, shooting out a big calloused fist that hits him square in the face, because when you get to be my age, history is the only thing you have left, and I’ll be goddamned if anybody’s going to take that away from me.
Thomas Cooper lives in Florida and has work currently appearing or forthcoming in Lake Effect, Bayou, Pikeville Review, and Storyglossa, among other places. He’s at work on a collection of stories and a very bad rock album.