Winning
by Sherrie Flick
Stuart preferred fedoras. The kind with a tiny feather, flared like a charm into the band, a hint of red. He favored three-piece suits and dress shoes, although he once wore Bermuda shorts and a white, men’s undershirt to a pool party.
That day he felt naked, his pale legs running out of the shorts into clean, white canvas sneakers, laced up like corsets for his feet. He clutched a glass of iced tea, stood at the far reaches of the fenced-in yard. Stuart declined the passed food, but did sneak a piece of cold ham. He ate with his hand shielding his mouth like a little umbrella.
Stuart liked to walk to the grocery store. Two blocks down the street from his home, turn left. It was a small family-run place that favored Italian selections: sauce, olives, pasta. Little tins of anchovies stacked into a tower. He walked to the store twice a week to shop for dinner provisions, which he cooked for himself and his wife Suzy and sometimes their dachshund Pepe.
Stuart let his face release an air of amusement as he walked. He was amused that he lived in this lesser midwestern city instead of New York or L.A. Amused that he’d settled here, bought a house, married, and purchased a dog with a pedigree. Somewhere along the way he realized he’d fallen and made it, simultaneously.
Stuart was thrilled he had a small store to walk to from his semi-suburban home with hedges lining the side of the property, which he tried to manage and then hired someone to trim. The store had a stack of baskets inside a front door that swished open as his dress shoes swished in. The store carried a fine assortment of vegetables and Stuart often wondered who, besides himself, bought radicchio or broccoli rabe. He sort of wanted to meet these people, but was above asking.
Stuart’s personal claim to fame came (with a quick burst of joy) when he misnamed a vegetable the naïve checkout clerk asked him to identify, thus getting the pricey item—artichokes—for the cost of a cucumber. The puzzled, kind, but slightly agitated young person, intimidated by Stuart’s permanent smirk and also his weirdly timeless outfit, what with the hat and sometimes a long umbrella on days it wasn’t raining, just wanted the interaction over with.
Stuart lied and lied and lied. Radicchio became iceberg lettuce, a pomegranate an apple. Sometimes he made up names like cutiebangbang for a kiwi, and the clerk put in a new code just for him, for it, the kiwi. Stuart saved his receipts, counted up his profits.
Stuart knew deep down inside of himself there was a hurt thing, a damaged part that made him do these things. All of them. It often felt like a rainstorm, rumbling, inside of him. He’d been hurt by others. Wronged. He kept this distant pain in a distant cloud inside himself and just let it rain. Out in the day-to-day world he subtlely hurt people or showed them to be stupid in his own eyes, and this made him feel better.
The clerk rang Stuart up, thanked him for his help. Stuart grabbed his paper sack and crinkled it into the nook of his right arm. The doors of the store parted like the Red Sea. Stuart walked the crooked sidewalk to his home.
Sherrie Flick is the author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness (University of Nebraska Press) and two short story collections: Whiskey, Etc. and Thank Your Lucky Stars, both published with Autumn House. Work is forthcoming in Ploughshares, New England Review, and Belt. She is a senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018, and co-editor of Flash Fiction America, W.W. Norton, 2023.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Winning”? The character Stuart walked onto the page fully formed after a friend told me about another friend scamming cashiers at his local grocery store. Characters don’t always pop into existence so easily for me, so I was pretty thrilled with that and with this weird little suburban world that formed around him. I wrote the first draft in one sitting and then let the story itself sit for a little while. I tinkered here and there on a sentence level, as I tend to do, and then it popped into place.
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