Flash Reprint: Susan Jackson Rodgers’s “That Reminds Me”

[Editor's Note: Each Wednesday, FF.Net will feature a reprint of our favorite flashes that originally appeared in print.]

I'm in the kitchen, slicing carrots for minestrone, and the way I chop them—on the diagonal, so that the carrot becomes a neat row of oval disc—reminds me of Gerry, who used to watch me prepare carrots this way. He took to slicing carrots this way, too, and he said to me, "Now whenever I slice carrots on the diagonal, I'll think of you." And I knew he meant: after we're over. He meant, "When we're no longer together and I am doing the carrots for someone else's salad or stew—for my new girlfriend or wife—the slicing of the carrots will bring you back to me, and in this way I will not forget you. Or if I do, for a period of days or weeks, there will always be a time when I will once again slice a carrot, and you will come back to me."

When he said, and implied, all this, I laughed and said, "That's funny, because when I slice carrots this way, I think of Rick" (my boyfriend before Gerry). I learned to slice carrots on the diagonal from him, so whenever I slice carrots I remember Rick's Chinese cleaver rocking back and forth against the wooden board—he'd worked as a cook before going to law school—and how he tied a bandanna kamikaze style around his forehead to keep the hair out of his eyes. He played Robert Cray or Stevie Ray Vaughan on the stereo, and we danced in the kitchen while vegetables simmered, and we drank. Gin in the summer, scotch in the winter. "So now," I told Gerry, "whenever I slice carrots, I'll think of you thinking of me, and I'll think of Rick, and I'll also just be in my kitchen of the moment slicing carrots." And he laughed too and said now he'd have to think of me and Rick, who is someone he used to be friends with, and he'd also have to think of me thinking of Rick and thinking of him.

But I wonder now if he does. If he remembers what I said about Rick teaching me the whole carrot on the diagonal thing, if he remembers that while I was chopping carrots to make dinner for him, I was thinking of Rick, and not of him. I wonder if he thinks about the carrots at all, or even chops carrots, or when he does maybe he just slices them in the old way, the way he used to before we met. Sometimes I do the carrots that way too, just so I can avoid this whole chain of thoughts, though of course I can't really avoid it because thinking about avoiding it is really the same as thinking about it, and everything is like this, one leading to the next. The carrots are just the beginning.

Published in Quick Fiction #11.
Reprinted in the forthcoming Ex-Boyfriend on Aisle 6.
Appears with permission of the author, © Susan Jackson Rodgers.

Susan Jackson Rodgers is the author of The Trouble With You Is and Other Stories (Mid-List Press, 2004) and the forthcoming story collection, Ex-Boyfriend on Aisle 6 (Press 53). Her fiction has appeared in journals such as New England Review, North American Review, Glimmer Train, Quick Fiction and Prairie Schooner. She is a past recipient of two Kansas Arts Commission Fellowships and two Pushcart Prize Special Mentions. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon with her husband and three children, and teaches literature and creative writing at Oregon State University.