The Site of Big Shoulders: Fiction: Almost Painless by James Ogle

Almost Painless - Story by James Ogle

Almost Painless - Illustration by Kimball Paul

She has always been an early riser, but the latest news has struck a blow and since her last doctor’s visit she hasn’t had a restful night’s sleep. She has stopped going out of the house, even for her regular Friday morning beauty appointment, and though she will never admit it, she has become the kind of person she has always pitied – a shut in. Her husband the Reverend is already out of bed working, though he has probably not yet put in his dentures, dropped each evening into a clear glass of effervescent Polident. She can hear the tap, tap, tapping coming from his typewriter in the office.

Last Christmas she gave him a Hewlett Packard desktop computer with a seventeen inch plasma display to make his work easier. She even purchased a scanner so he could organize his filing cabinet of sermons digitally. She thought he would appreciate learning something new, that it would make his working hours more productive, more satisfying. And although he uses the computer to send e-mails to colleagues and family, he still hunts and pecks his sermons with stiff index fingers on the old IBM Selectric, the same typewriter he used to get through the seminary. She can remember him staying up late nights, pecking out assignments, biblical translations from the original Hebrew and Greek.

They had moved to Michigan ten years ago after his retirement from Redeemer Lutheran in Johnsonville, North Carolina, but he has kept busy substituting for the Synod. They had both been born and raised in a small copper mining town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where they had met, fallen in love and gotten married before he enlisted in the army and dragged her overseas to far off places like Germany and Japan. He had simply wanted to serve his country. It was never meant to become a career. It was after his first retirement from the service that he decided to go back to school and she followed him all over again. She had once listed on a sheet of paper, the places they had lived, the number of times they had packed and unpacked. The number she came up with was twenty-seven.

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

Having grown up in the North, she should have grown used to the cold, but living in the South had thinned her blood and her tolerance for the winter is short. It is ironic that the only move of her choosing had been their final one, the move back home to Michigan to live by their daughter.

Her immigrant Italian family had longevity in their bloodlines. Her paternal grandfather and grandmother had lived well into their nineties as had her parents. She had an aunt on her mother’s side that lived to be ninety-eight. She hadn’t wanted to be far from family in the event she became a widow. She could almost hear her husband now, quoting from the book of Ecclesiastes: Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

They had moved into a new ranch condominium development two blocks away from their daughter and her husband. The development sends someone in the summer to mow the lawn and someone in the winter to plow the snow. They hired a maid to clean the inside. She doesn’t do as thorough a job as Bella would like, but with a bad back, two knee replacement surgeries and the weight she has accumulated over the years despite constant dieting, she doesn’t have the energy.