Francine Witte
This Is a Secret, So Shhhhh
Bennett doesn’t know that I’m leaving.
Bennett is a hill all swaddled in Grandma Holler’s quilt. Patches of gingham and dots. Wedding present she made with her twisty fingers and tiny sight. Family treasure until Bennett drunk-ruined it one too many times. Now, it’s his all alone.
I ease our honeymoon suitcase from the closet. Hawaii stickers, hula girl waving hello. It opens like a chattery mouth. Like next door Ruth who will surely swoop in on Bennett, like I know she has before.
Like the times I came home early and found wiped-off lipstick on a wine glass, Grandma Holler’s quilt in a forgotten, nauseous heap.
Bennett goes from gurgle to snore to gurgle. I throw one blouse into the suitcase. I’m going to need lots of room. I flip the floorboard where I’ve hidden the money. The 40K Grandma Holler had wrapped in the quilt. That I hid so good that Bennett has torn up the apartment a time or two and still never found it.
The night we opened the quilt and the money fell out and we covered it, joked it was my lover and I was still stupid and in love. I have to keep my lover hid, I told him with a wink.
The money goes quiet into the suitcase. Bennett will look for it way before he looks for me. I look at Bennett under the quilt. Pile of bad money, Grandma Holler would say.
I close up the suitcase’s open blabbery mouth. Without another sound, we slip secret out the door and into the world.
Francine Witte
Francine Witte’s flash fiction has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Mid-American Review, and Passages North. She has stories upcoming in Best Small Fictions 2021, and Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton.) Her recent books are “Dressed All Wrong for This” (Blue Light Press,) “The Way of the Wind” (AdHoc fiction,) and “The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon” (ELJ Editions,) Her latest book is “Just Outside the Tunnel of Love” (Blue Light Press.) She is flash fiction editor for Flash Boulevard and The South Florida Poetry Journal. She lives in NYC.