Christmas Commercials

He was selling his dead wife’s jewelry.  He cut a pathetic figure, a schlub on a bender. 

“I got no need for it,” he said. 

“I’d rather have another vodka,” I said. “I’m not a frills person.”

“It’s from Jeweler’s Row.” He pulled a silver band out of an Acme bag. “It’s really pretty.”

“Find a pawn shop.”

“Can’t get a beer at a pawn shop,” he said. “Figured I’d come here.”

I decided to bite. The game wasn’t on yet anyway. “Okay. How did she die?”

"I begged her to wake up," he said instead.

"I'm guessing she didn't."

"She didn't," he said. "Ah, fuck it."

There was more vodka. Time broke and spilled onto this surface we sat at.

"Alright. I'll buy the silver band,” I said after an hour.

He looked fit to weep. "Excellent," he said.

Later, we sat there in the dark on my couch, unsure and dehydrated. I fiddled with the silver band. I waited for him to compliment me. After all, I did bring him home. I almost wanted to choke him, just to hear a sound, but he stayed silent, focusing on the television instead of my arm.

“Does this look as good on me as it did on her?” I said.

He shrugged. “I’m not really sure. Her skin was more tan than yours.”

I could have annihilated him.

A really awful Macy’s commercial came on, with perfect white people happily throwing presents and fake snow around. He started to laugh.

“What?”

He pointed, a thin spittle of saliva hanging from his lip from the laugh. “These Christmas commercials. Aren’t they fucking bullshit?”

I wondered how long she hated him, how long she debated annihilating him, if her tan skin smothered his on beaches, in beds.

“Aren’t they?” He turned to me.

I nodded, then pushed him back on the couch. I unzipped his pants and put my hand down in, made sure to say nothing. I began to move.

"She did it faster," he said after a moment.

He turned to look at me, but I held his neck with my free arm.

“I can’t look at your eyes anymore,” I said. “Just watch the screen.”

I emulated speed. I moved. I looked down at my hand, my wrist. The jewelry looked nice. His wife had good taste. I wished she was resting peacefully.

He made a childish moan. It wasn’t a sound a real man would have made.

On the TV, a voice said, "Only now at Macy's."

Kevin Richard White's fiction appears in Grub Street, The Hunger, Lunch Ticket, The Molotov Cocktail, The Helix, Hypertext, decomP, X-R-A-Y and Ghost Parachute among others. He is a Flash Fiction Contributing Editor for Barren Magazine and also reads fiction for Quarterly West and The Common. He lives in Philadelphia.