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Bright
By Randall Brown
In court, she called him gormless. He had to look it up. Lacking intelligence and vitality; dull. At a restaurant months afterwards, his date called him handsome—and he said, "Wheedling will get you everywhere."
She said, "Wheedlers wobble but they don't fall down."
He didn't know what to do with that. He said, "I do."
"Do what?"
"Fall. Sometimes. For wheedlers."
It had gotten beyond him, but she kissed him on the cheek. She asked him if he'd ever watched a moonrise. They sat on a bench on the pier and waited for it. When it came, she said it looked like a shoeshine. He didn't know what to say. Some stars came out and he said, "Look, there's Cornucopia."
She pointed somewhere else. "Look, handlebars."
She shared things, a childhood shyness, sitting alone on monkey bars and in lunch rooms. She had empathy now, a sadness that drew her to sentimentality. She could cry from a greeting card, a life insurance commercial, an unattached star.
And you, she asked, what do you have?
He had an ex who had fallen out of love. He believed what people thought of him.
A pause. To end it, he asked her, "Do you think I'm gormless?"
"You are chock-full of gorm," she answered.
He didn't know what she knew, what she pretended to. He guided her finger to a cluster of stars, held it there, searched for something to say.
Randall Brown teaches at Saint Joseph's University and Rosemont College, holds an MFA from Vermont College, and is the Lead Editor at Smokelong Quarterly. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, Quick Fiction, Gargoyle, Connecticut Review, Saint Ann's Review, Evansville Review, Laurel Review, Dalhousie Review, Night Train, upstreet, and others. He is the author of the award-winning collection Mad to Live (Flume Press, 2008) and will have an essay on (very) short fiction in the forthcoming anthology The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field (Rose Metal Press, 2009).
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