Dirt
by Francine Witte
The man on the TV is selling soap. Says it will clean anything. The woman looks at her husband, snoring up the evening. Snoring up her life. She puts it on her list.
At the supermarket, she asks the clerk about the TV soap. He looks the woman up and down and motions her to follow him to the back.
The doors swing closed behind them as he points to a purple curtain. “You sure about this?” he says.
“The man on the TV said this will clean anything. My husband’s clothes,” the woman says.
“I understand,” the clerk pulls back the curtain. “I can see you’re quite unhappy” the clerk says, his head tilted to the side. With this, the woman bursts into tears.
Later that night, the woman mixes the cleaner into a bucket of water. “Be careful not to touch it with your bare hands,” the clerk had warned. She looks around. The lemony bubbles stinging her nose. The cleanness that is about to happen.
Next morning, the clerk shows up. Dressed in a Sunday suit, and holding a bouquet of daisies.
The woman lets him in. She looks young and new somehow. “A miracle,” she says, offering the clerk a seat on the couch. “It lifted stains from the carpet that hadn’t budged for years.”
“Yes,” said the clerk. “It’s very effective.” He looks over at the chair where he guesses the husband might have sat. “It vanishes every bit of dirt it touches.” He straightens his tie and pulls the woman next to him on the couch. “That’s why we say to wear gloves.”
Francine Witte’s latest publications are a full-length poetry collection, Theory of Flesh from Kelsay Books and the Blue Light Press First Prize Winner, Dressed All Wrong for This. Her flash fiction has appeared in numerous journals, anthologized in the most recent New Micro (W.W. Norton) and her novella-in-flash, The Way of the Wind has just been published by Ad Hoc Fiction. She lives in New York City.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Dirt”? I wrote this in a workshop and when I presented it, someone called me Francine Hitchcock, which I thought was so cool.
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