April Flash Fiction: Audrey Hepburn by Joseph Reich

Audrey Hepburn
Joseph Reich

women are noble getting their outfits ready the night before

my wife with her audrey hepburn striped turtleneck

and cords draped over the hamper

for her lovely and holy job as a substitute teacher in the elementary school

for all those half-crazed delinquents and everyone knows her in the neighborhood

nobody knows me…

and i’d be lucky just to make it through a night of nightmares

having to fight back like a drunken bukowski against all the freakin’ phantoms

using tourette’s to my full advantage

as even the devils try to creep in there

like hitchcock’s infamous portly silhouette pushing me up against the passengers

and that very well-groomed, thin asian man with his

cattle prod to prove that i am the ultimate stranger

(when i went to social work school to get my masters

i had a full pile of dirty clothes and what i thought clean clothes

on the floor and would sniff each one before i headed to yeshiva.

there was a body punching bag hanging from the ceiling my fiancee

and present day wife would bump into before she relieved herself

practically every evening, and so cute would ritualistically throw jabs

at it expressing how it drove her crazy and what was it doing there)

women are so noble and will get their clothes ready the night before

like audrey hepburn’s striped turtleneck and cords draped over the hamper.

Joseph Reich is a social worker who lives with his wife and twelve year old son in the high-up mountains of Vermont. He has been published in a wide variety of eclectic literary journals both here and abroad, been nominated seven times for The Pushcart Prize, and his books in poetry and cultural studies include, “A Different Sort Of Distance” (Skive Magazine Press) “If I Told You To Jump Off The Brooklyn Bridge” (Flutter Press), “Pain Diary: Working Methadone & The Life & Times Of The Man Sawed In Half” (Brick Road Poetry Press), among others.