We miss them, the men. We miss their stomping feet, their honking noses, their hearty exclamations. We miss hearing their voice first in a crowd. We miss the space they take up. We do not know what to do with our arms and legs if we are not tucking them closer to our bodies. We miss their need for attention. We miss their egos; egos you have to hold in your hand like tiny quail eggs.
We miss admiring them, their back flips, their wheelies, their conquering, boot covered legs plowing forward in foreign lands, machetes whirring, the paths they cleared, the stones laid end to end, the castles walls built with blood and labor. We admire the windmill, the grindstone, the axe splitting wood, the holes dug, the poured cement, the roads paved. We admire their ability to gut a fish, to disembowel a deer with one swift slice, to whittle away the fur of a forest animal for warmth. We are thankful, we give thanks, even as we breathe a little more easily, wonder what might happen without them. What might we discover?
When they disappeared, we decided to give them a service. We threw open our wardrobes, but weren’t sure what to wear–the thigh length black skirt, the long one that nearly dragged on the ground, the short, short one that our fathers had forbidden. We looked at our shoes, the heels, the clackity-clacky sandals, and wondered what to wear, surely not our mother’s worn out Naturalizers with the beige soles?
Juli had the hardest time getting dressed. She said, “Like, I don’t know. Like, I don’t know what to pick.” She threw a black Spandex dress toward the fireplace. “Who am I dressing for with this macrame tank top?”
We couldn’t answer. We didn’t know either.
At the church, we lit a huge bonfire, using wood from the pews to get it started. We threw in their flannel shirts, their Carhart pants, their t-shirts from the GAP which went up in a bright burst. We bowed our heads, dark smoke swirling in the air like a swarm of bees.
Marianne volunteered to say a few words. She was the closest to them. She too had sideburns and wore suspenders. She walked with a certain swagger that made her stand out. “Dear Men,” she said, hands folded. “We wish you well.” An ash flew into her eye. “I’m not crying,” she said, wiping at her face.
We looked at one another. We vowed not to shed another tear. Really, what was there to cry about?
Bets staggered up from the main house. She was topless, dressed in just her raggedy underwear and knee-high athletic socks. Bets always took things too far. She howled, “I miss him.”
“Who?” we asked. “Which one?”
“Him! Them!” she said, stomping her socked feet.
We went back to our houses; houses that still carried their sinewy smells, still echoed with their morning coughs filled with phlegm.
Slowly, we have come to realize there will be no more dad jokes, no more soccer games on TV with the buzz of a thousand men cheering on their teams. We are starting to forget what it was like to walk with car keys laced through our fingers at night, how it felt to play possum in the bedroom when our husbands returned after bowling with the boys. Our bodies—should we be eating more or eating less? All of our favorite war programs and murderous TV shows have vanished, leaving only Fleabag and Killing Eve. No one remembers the rules to beer pong. The guns we fashioned into lamps, the tanks we converted into saunas, the basketball hoops we used, because we still liked to play basketball.
Every day now, we check our bodies for sadness, feel the bones of our arms, touch the skin on our legs, put our hands over our stomachs, feeling the twitch of our guts. Are we still okay? Will we survive without them?
Yes, we hope so.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Aimee LaBrie’s short stories have appeared in the Minnesota Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, StoryQuarterly, Cimarron Review, Pleiades, Beloit Fiction Journal, Permafrost Magazine, and others. In 2020 her short story “Rage” won first place in Solstice Literary Magazine’s Annual Literary Contest and her novel in progress won the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award. In 2007, her short story collection, Wonderful Girl, was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and published in a small print run (University of North Texas Press 2007). Her short fiction has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. In 2012 she won first place in the Zoetrope: All-Story’s Short Fiction Competition.