Tags
Aging, Flash Fiction, Growing Old Together, Love, Love Story, Marriage, short stories, short story
Us, Ancient
by Deborah J. Brasket
You know what I love most about swimming? How perky my breasts get. All round and full and buoyant. Gorgeous, really! And floating right up there where they should be.
It’s so deflating when I get out.
My husband tells me not to worry. He still sees me perfect.
“What? When you shut your eyes?”
“Well, I don’t have to shut them.”
“I’m just saying . . . .” he says, when I give him that look.
He tries.
But I know what he means, this man who is fast turning into his father the older he grows. And his father! That scrawny, bald-headed buzzard was never much to look at, even when we met. Certainly nothing like his son, who I’m telling you, was hot enough to burn rubber back then.
But that’s not how I see him now. Not as his father, and not as he 
was when we first said I do.
There comes a time when the body loses its elasticity to such a degree, that you just start spilling out of it. You just aren’t there anymore.
That person in the mirror? Not me now. Not sure where I am. Hovering somewhere around the body maybe. But more outside than in. And him, too. This man I married.
What I see now is not a body, but a being. A living, thinking, breathing being who just happens to fit perfectly into my arms. Someone I want to grow old with. And not just “till-death-do-you-part” old. But old. As in ancient.
Man-in-the-moon old. Mountains melting into the sea, old. Earth spinning off its axis, old.
Starships dodging dark holes, novae bursting into newness. . . . you see what I mean.
Us, swimming like dolphins through the universe, old. That’s how I see us.
This short story first appeared, in a slightly different version, in Drunk Monkeys in October 2013. You can read it online HERE.
Here’s another short story I wrote:
“13 Ways of Looking at Dying, Just Before, And the Moment After”
And here’s a true-life love story:
