WELL DONE! Flash Fiction ACCOMPANIED by Diane Lefer

ACCOMPANIED by Diane Lefer

Do dead people know when you’re thinking of them?

There was a certain feel to the air, to the hum and quiet if she happened to be out walking on a Sunday morning. The streets weren’t dead. There were people, cars, but few, and she noticed them more because she felt accompanied but not imposed on. The song he used to sing, the title at least, always came back to her just then. Somewhere in her many moves she’d lost the record and she couldn’t remember the lyrics, down-and-out they were, she’s sure of that much, nothing like the peace and quiet of her morning walk.

She feels peaceful most days. She’s got past it all. So many years ago, one night in the rain she walked out in traffic hoping to be hit. She’s embarrassed now to think she could ever have been so despondent. Ashamed now too, because she hadn’t cared how running her down would have blighted a stranger’s life. Of course that didn’t happen. Horns honking, headlights, people shouting and she was back on the sidewalk.

Standing outside a club. No cover charge so she went in.

You were singing to me, she thinks. The desolation in your voice, that was like my own. But then you laughed at yourself, gently, and what I heard next was defiance. Something shifted that night. I may not want to live, she thought, but I will resist.

On a napkin she wrote You saved my life. She gave it to a waiter, Give this to him, please, and left.

Years later, they crossed paths, briefly, and she dared tell him.

That note, he said. That was you.

And that was it, the one time they met.

Years later, she heard he had died.

She doesn’t believe in an afterlife. But on the Sunday street, she wonders if he knows she thinks of him. It’s strange how she never thinks of the men who once drove her to despair. She says their names now, one by one, on the street, testing. There were days she thought she’d give her life at one time or another for each of them, would hold her hands in fire to ease their pain. Now she says their names aloud and feels nothing. There is something very cold inside her. Maybe she’s reached a perfect Buddha state of detachment. Maybe there’s something wrong with her.

But when she says his name, her body responds with a tender unfurling. While he? Does he stir, confused, wondering what has troubled his rest? Do the dead know? His peace disturbed with a flicker of recognition, Oh, that was you!

Diane Lefer’s most recent novels feature scientists who become terrorism suspects (Out of Place) and baboons with broken hearts (Confessions of a Carnivore). She is the author of three story collections, including California Transit which received the Mary McCarthy Prize. Diane has worked with asylum-seekers, men on parole, youth affected by the criminal in/justice system, and vulnerable children in Colombia and Bolivia. She lives in Los Angeles where her only phone is a landline.