Patricia Q. Bidar
Recovery I
Recovering from foot surgery, Oscar’s mother is always fucking home. In the recliner or her desk chair. Parked before the television. Always near the door and ready to siphon Oscar’s life force with her lonely inquisition. His girlfriend has bailed, a fact he blames on his mother. Who worries about Oscar’s drinking, his solo nature, his unfashionable glasses, his driving, his position at the firm, his pallor. She frets, she says, he’d be an Eleanor Rigby.
After Oscar’s shift, he hustles past, praying she’s asleep. Nothing doing. She’s animal alert to his scent. In thirty years she’ll still be in that recliner. All her body parts patched and replaced in turn. Her and his clear and green and brown bottles mingled in the bin. Oscar, having forgotten trash day, seething in his dark room. Her, just outside. The television’s undersea light animating her face as she darns their socks.
Recovery IV
After an angry dealer tried to run him down, Maire’s son was left with a broken foot and splinted soft dressings. That stifling summer, Casey lived in a studio atop a steep stairway. Threw his crutches down the stairs and followed them on his butt, step by wooden step. He wouldn’t stay away from his drug addict friends. Wouldn’t let Maire help. The city bus knelt to take him where he wanted to go.
Four years later, after surgery on her own left foot, Maire, stoned, listens to true crime podcasts into the night. Behind her recliner the window is open exactly an inch. Pain pills, snacks, and lotions are within reach. A ten-week convalescence. Club Med! she calls it online. Young Casey has a girlfriend now. The bill that will bankrupt Maire has not yet arrived. It waits, fat in its envelope, in a canvas Post Office trolley cart three cities away. After 63 years, Maire believes time is finally on her side.
The Moment We Almost Love, We Begin Dying
How charmed he’d been after their first date, when Lana kissed the top of his motorcycle helmet after saying good night. Another time, riding on the back, they’d seen a shoe in the road and he’d said, A shoe, and Lana’d said, Gesundheit. The time his futon had collapsed with their urgent congress. The waffles they made in the morning. And then the descent: that long night of tequila shots at the no-name bar next to the Roxie. Lana’s idea was a night out, some fun. Their bond was coming apart, she knew. It wasn’t his scene. She’d excused herself to hurry a cigarette near the toilets, but his eyes had found her in the mirror behind the bottles of spirits. Lana had a feeling then like earth was abandoning her. It was too late to go home. Too late to have The Conversation. They’d gone back and, in the morning, had sex in his dirty shower both pretending to like it, both playacting their orgasms. And then those lost, lost weeks began, where most of Lana’s brain was occupied with thoughts of him, feverish calculations about where he could be. This was all decades ago now, but Lana can abandon earth by snap-summoning her old lover’s newspaper and green onion smell. The unkind expression on his face that night in the mirror behind the bar. His workman’s hands and the way they had held her.
Patricia Quintana Bidar is a native of Los Angeles, with ancestral roots across the American Southwest. Her work has been widely anthologized, including in Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton), Best Small Fictions 2023 & 2024, and Best Microfiction 2023. Patricia is the author of Wild Plums (ELJ Press) and Pardon Me For Moonwalking (Unsolicited Press). She lives with her family and unusual dog outside of Oakland, CA. Visit patriciaqbidar.com
