Flash Focus: Read a Reprint, Eric Bosse’s “Onion Ring”

Today's reprint comes from Eric Bosse, and it originally appeared in Snow Monkey. Commentary follows.

ONION RING

Dolores dips a napkin into her water glass and dabs the wet corner onto a spot of ketchup on her sweater. As she does this, I watch her finger--the one where the platinum band used to be.

"Don't be eccentric," she says. "I grind my teeth when you're eccentric. You know that."

She smiles her way through a club sandwich with fries on the side. When she's done, she tucks her bra strap under her sweater and says it:

"I met someone."

The tiny hairs on the back of her ringless ring finger, where no imprint remains in her skin, have grown dark.

"We're really happy together," she says. "We met in Paris."

I sip my water and set the glass back on its circle of condensation.

Dolores tilts her head to the left. "He's great. It actually amazes us both, what we had to go through to find each other."

I dip an onion ring in ketchup and smear red loops around my plate. "Wow," I say.

"Uh-oh." Her eyes are full of whatever fills burnt hazel eyes when they try to express an emotionally correct blend of love, kindness, and resolute detachment. "Are you upset?"

I poke the onion ring at the Catalina dressing.

She reaches across the table and puts a hand on my water glass. "Are you crying?"

I fold the onion ring in half. The breading cracks at the creases. The whole thing fits into my mouth. It's salty.

"Oh my God," she says with a smile then a frown that makes her lips puffy. "I didn't think you still felt that way."

I lift my water glass to my mouth. Her hand retreats to her lap. As I drink the last few drops, the ice slides down to my nose. I hear teeth grinding--could be mine, could be the toddler's in the next booth.

"I'm speechless," she tells me. "I suppose right now you're going through what I went through eight months ago, a year ago."

The waiter refills our water glasses, smiles at Dolores, takes her plate, and walks away. Dolores leans back against her bench. "You should find someone to talk to," she says. "You have to forgive me, and then you have to forgive yourself. Love yourself. You and I, we had--" She shuts her eyes. "We had wildly different marriage acumens."

I dip another onion ring, a small one, in ketchup.

"It's so hard," she says, "but I made it through."

I roll my eyes as if a fly were swirling around my head--a routine that once made Dolores laugh, back when she wasn't sick of me.

"You'll make it," she says through a clenched jaw. "You'll see."

I steady my gaze on the bridge of her nose and extend my hand, open, across the table. Her left hand reaches for mine.

"Just let go," she says. "Know what I mean?"

I squeeze her hand, fold most of her fingers over her palm, and slide the onion ring around her ring finger. "I do," I say. "I totally do."

_______________

It begins with that un-ringed finger and ends with "I do." Does that mean that we've witnessed some kind of ceremony? Is it one of union or separation? In between Dolores and our narrator is that onion ring, dipped in ketchup, looped on the plate, poked into dressing, folded in half, cracked at the creases, dipped again, finally slid and slipped on that ringless finger.

How wonderful are Dolores's first words: "Don't be eccentric. I grind my teeth when you're eccentric."

It's telling (and a cool choice by Bosse) how the narrator's feelings come to us through the Dolores filter, even though it's written in first person:

Are you upset?

Are you crying?

Oh my God.
You're going through what I went through....

You'll make it.

Besides that final "I do," the narrator speaks only one other time. "Wow," he says, the loop-smeared ketchup perhaps looking something like a heart. Against that "emotionally correct blend of love, kindness, and resolute detachment" in those burnt hazel eyes that no longer burn for him, he has set himself, and that emptiness that has attracted his attention from the very outset has been filled, for the moment, with a ring of onion, a layered thing, a thing that draws out our tears, in spite of any effort we might make to hold them back.

Note: Eric Bosse has a collection, Magnificent Mistakes, forthcoming from Ravenna Press in late 2010.  Read more of him at his blog for young and late-arriving and returning writers: 39th Draft.

For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.

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