NEW BEGINNING - Flash Fiction Story By Kenneth Pobo

 

NEW BEGINNING

Flash Fiction Story

By Kenneth Pobo

 

A few months after we met, Harlan started comparing me to rain.  He thought this was funny and accurate.  I didn’t get it, but mostly ignored it until his comparisons focused more of the bad side of rain. 

“Lenny, you’re a rainstorm, a flash flood in a kitchen.” 

“Lenny, at a party you’re the lightning bolt that makes people shriek and run home.” 

“Lenny, living with you is like living under a rain cloud.” 

Sometimes I’d ask him why he thought of me in this way.  He shrugged.  Shrugged!  We broke up. The fights had gotten loud and long.  Kisses became stubbed-out cigarettes. 

Before he left, bags all packed, I reminded him that rain makes the flowers grow.  When it’s hot, rain cools.  No kid ever disliked a puddle from a summer rain. 

He said I was being evasive—and left. 

I felt half sad and half happy that he was gone.  I met a couple of other guys, but they didn’t last long enough to compare me to anything.  My nights were tepid.  I got into watching Everybody Loves Raymond and The Golden Girls reruns.  I felt like Robert before he married Amy.  I felt like Rose, never quite following along. 

After a little more than a year, Harlan called out of the blue.  He wondered if enough time had passed.  Maybe we could be friends again.  I said I’m still rain, right?  He laughed and said he wouldn’t make that comparison anymore, so I agreed to see him.  At a restaurant, not at my house. 

A nervous dinner, but it went better than I had feared.  He seemed a little lost.  Maybe I did too.  We kept getting together, usually once a week, and by then I was ready to have him over to my house.  I won’t say that the old feelings came back.  They had been washed away.  New feelings emerged.  We didn’t say words like love.  Too soon.  And risky. 

Here it is, October, and we’re together again.  I’m happy, kind of.  There’s still some mistrust, the dark expectation of something that will break us apart again.  He has been good about freeing me from his rainy comparisons.  Though I had to admit I can be stormy.  Like rain, I know how to fall.  I look for flowers to rest on.  Until my drops evaporate.  Or find their way to roots needing water.

Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of thirty-three chapbooks and fifteen full-length collections.  Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), and most recently, At The Window, Silence (Fernwood Press) and It Gets Dark So Soon Now (Broken Tribe Press). His work has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Amsterdam Quarterly, Nimrod, Mudfish, Hawaii Review, and elsewhere.