You have no items in your cart. Want to get some nice things?
Go shoppingMirsky was working in his home office writing ad copy for a housing brochure and for the life of him couldn’t think of the word for the bump that went from the road surface to the sidewalk. Driveway. Divider. Edging. These words came flying back and forth into his head and he knew they were wrong, and he also knew that he had thought of the right word when he began to write the copy but the harder he tried to think of it now, the farther from his grasp it slipped.
[private]He felt the spasm of an anxiety attack. Mirsky was only fifty-five years old and this was another in a series of words that he’d been forgetting lately. About six months ago he noticed his wife Elaine was finishing his sentences for him. Mirsky had always been a fast thinker and a fairly rapid talker so while he’d observed this behaviour in other couples, it was a new experience for him. He laughed about it with Elaine when it started, and even later on when friends or co-workers began doing it to him too. No one thinks much of tossing a word into another’s sentence; it’s a common phenomenon, and has been forever, probably.
But at his age, when friends and relatives are talking about their parents’ dementia or Alzheimer’s, Mirsky has started to worry. Until this moment with the sidewalk word, he hadn’t shared his thoughts with anyone. Putting his pen down, he reflected on what was happening, and why people were finishing his sentences. Mirsky thought that perhaps his voice trailed off, or he spoke slower as he came to the end of a sentence. Then he realized that he’d really and truly been having difficulty thinking of last words.
As Elaine walked by his office door and smiled at him, Mirsky waved her in. She had a great smile and used it often. “What do you call this part of the subdivision road?” he asked, pointing to the line on the plot plan. “The curb?” she asked without hesitation, as if he’d sprung a surprise quiz on her. “Why? Are you looking for another word for curb? Have you tried the thesaurus?”
She must have noticed the sad look on his face as he grabbed the pen and quickly wrote curb before forgetting it again. Elaine, his wife of almost thirty years, and proud that she was still able to fit into her prom gown, walked over and kissed the top of his head.
“I’m worried,” Mirsky said softly. “This isn’t funny any more.”
“It never was,” she said.
“There’s something wrong.”
“You’re just over-worked and tired,” she said, kissing his head again and throwing a little extra wiggle into her walk as she left the room. Mirsky knew her ‘follow me’ wiggle when he saw it, so he quickly capped his pen, turned out the office light, and headed for the bedroom.
As he was walking by the kitchen Mirsky saw a loaf of rye bread on the counter. He paused and tried to remember why he was standing outside the kitchen. Automatically his hand moved up and his thumb and forefinger massaged the creases between his eyes as if that would answer the question. How nice a salami sandwich would be, he thought, so he put together a dandy one with stone ground mustard, Muenster cheese, and a huge hunk of lettuce on that seeded rye. As he was opening a can of Coke Elaine walked into the kitchen in her ‘take me’ nightgown.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“Bite?” Mirsky offered, holding out his sandwich.[/private]
Paul Beckman is a real estate salesman. Sometimes his fiction writing sneaks into his real estate ads. He earned his MFA from Bennington College. Some publishing credits: The Connecticut Review, Playboy, Onthebus, Short Story Library, 5 Trope, The Scruffy Dog Review, Fiction Warehouse, Web del Sol, Long Story Short, Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette, Riverbabble, Exquisite Corpse, Collectedstories.com, and Postcard Shorts.
