Featured Fiction: Sherrie Flick
An Introduction by John Fulton:
Sherrie Flick’s wonderful story “Lost in Time” introduces us to a middle-aged couple, Matty and Trudy, who are surviving the pandemic, sick of working from home, strung out on too much Zoom, and ready for an adventure, which will come on this night in the form of a date. As many readers will remember, going out during the pandemic was exactly that: an adventure, a momentous event. But a small death in the house (I won’t say more than this as it would ruin the surprise) shadows them. They find themselves in an old-fashioned video arcade, which Flick summons brilliantly: “The place had a neon sign out front and a list of pinball games where the marquee for the films used to be.” And here the couple really does become lost in time, drenched in nostalgia, grieving for their younger selves, and longing to return to youths defined by booze, punk-rock bands, postmodern literature seminars, and subsistence jobs. Flick presents this longing with a vividness that makes both her characters and the reader ache for youth even as we, along with Matty and Trudy, must finally live in the present. And yet Trudy, the central character of this story, does find a way to summon a version of her wild, unwieldy, and unrelenting young self and bring her back to the present. But I’ll stop here and let the reader discover just how Flick and her character perform this magic.
Lost in Time
“You know, though—that’s fish. They either die the first day or live for a decade,” Matty said as he swiftly scooped Patti Smith out of the aquarium. Matty and Trudy had planned to go on a date-date that night because they never went anywhere and they needed to announce these kinds of plans because now they both worked from home and actually saw each other way too much, but mostly in the quasi-real work environment of their two-bedroom condo.
The fish, which had squiggled in its plastic bag yesterday and zoomed around the aquarium that morning like a rocket ship, gave no resistance in the net. Squishy dead. Gone. Matty had named her Patti Smith, and although a person had to work to get close to a fish (it wasn’t like a puppy or a kitten), they’d both really liked Patti from the get-go, her little neon stripe, her diligent swimming.
Matty, a practical guy, thumped the net on the toilet seat and watched the fish plop into the bowl. “Bye-bye,” he said, then flushed, and washed his hands.
Trudy wished Matty had more empathy when dealing with this kind of thing. Matty thought Trudy cried too easily, and that was true, too. She cried during the opening credits of movies and she cried when a little kid picked up a crunchy leaf off the sidewalk and handed it to their mom. She also cried, apparently, when a fish named after one of her favorite singers died. Slow, soft weeping, barely noticeable to those who didn’t know her well. Trudy hadn’t always been like this: Her emotions leaking out all over the place. Over the last few years the world had shut down and opened up, and then revised itself to be unrecognizable, while also sort of staying the same.
Matty smacked his thick hands together, dried them on a towel, and said, “Okay, let’s do it!”
“Do what?” Trudy said, moving to the couch, grabbing a big yellow throw pillow for her lap. “Go out after Patti Smith just died?”
“Look at Kurt Cobain and Bob Mould,” Matty said. “They’re both in there, still swimming around. They’ve been around forever. C’mon, you don’t even care about the aquarium, Trudy. Let’s go get some wings and play pinball.”
That was the plan. Kind of a retro-mid-90s, mid-week date night. They’d cut loose for an entire night, no bitching about work. They could talk about bands and books and TV shows they liked. They’d leave their phones on the kitchen counter. They’d laughed at themselves, be both cynical and ironic. Maybe they’d even buy a pack of cigarettes and smoke, huddled outside on the sidewalk.
Trudy pushed at the pillow; its puffy insides gave way, bounced back, gave way, bounced back. She teared up a little. “I don’t know, Matty. I don’t think I can do it tonight.”
Matty set his coat on a bar stool, moved behind the kitchen island and held his tumbler under the button for water. It made a quick hissing sound and the glass filled. Trudy knew he drank water to distract himself from saying something that would upset her. He filled a second glass. “We really need to get out of this house, Trudy,” he said. “I mean, we can’t work here full time and then spend our free time here. It isn’t healthy. The walls are closing in. I need some surprises in my life. I’m bored. Bored,” Matty said, looking at the ceiling, his hands wedged into his curly, always chaotic hair.
Trudy put up a hand like a stop sign. “No, we don’t get to talk about your boredom this evening. I did not cause a global pandemic. I did not invent Zoom. I cannot talk this through again. Can. Not. No.” She squeezed the pillow one more time and then walked to get her coat from the closet, found her most stylish shoes in their bedroom. She zipped and tied up. Grabbed the keys and walked out the door without a word. She stood in the hallway until Matty joined her.
“Jesus,” he said. He closed the door and made sure the handle latched.
They put on masks because it was still a building policy, got into the elevator, rode two floors down, pushed at the front doors, and walked into the cold damp night, tucking the masks back into their jacket pockets.
They’d heard about this new place with duck pin bowling and pinball machines, so they walked in that direction. The place had once been a movie theater. “Excellent, who goes to movies anymore anyway?” Matty said when he found out about the transformation. But Trudy loved going to movies. In her twenties, she attended matinees, double features, art house films, and blockbusters. It didn’t matter. Settling into the cushy seat, digging through her popcorn bag. She loved watching movies by herself, but this was before she’d met Matty. So, she said, “Yeah, fuck movies.”
The place had a neon sign out front and a list of pinball games where the marquee for the films used to be. “Oh, The Munsters,” Matty said. “That’s a good one. I used to totally kick ass on that after a double at Doogie’s.”
The evening felt like an audition for a throwback movie with Trudy poorly reciting lines that she had once known by heart. How could she be a convincing slacker with a savings account and an IRA, nice pots and pans, a chiropractor, houseplants. A giant fish tank, for Christ’s sake.
The place smelled like electronics, that same smell that once wafted out of the arcade in her hometown mall. It made her heart pitter-patter. Trudy loved the grease and the wires behind it all. The mechanics. It was so much better than AI or code. Fuck Zoom, she thought.
They tapped a credit card for tokens. Because it was “date night” they played pinball at the same machine. Trudy wanted to venture off on her own like she used to at the bars. But they found The Munsters and got some extra balls and the lights flashed. They high-fived when they matched, the hammer inside the machine announcing a free game.
Holding the machine like a bucking bronco, trying to score and not tilt while still looking calm and cool, could really reset a person. It felt sexy. Or at least reminded Trudy of a sexier time in her life. She wondered if there was a difference. They played a couple of games on Fish Tales in honor of Patti Smith and got the giant rubber fish to flop around when they scored big. Then they moved on to Attack of Mars, The Addams Family, which featured Thing, the creepy rubber hand that rose up from a box and grabbed the ball and took it back to the pinball dungeon. Twilight Zone and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Guns N’ Roses and The Who’s Tommy blasted music through shitty pinball speakers. It was all there. Along with Galaga and PacMan and Tetris. All of it. They both still had the touch.
They drank pint glasses of a local pale ale at the nearly empty bar and followed each other from machine to machine waiting for the other to take their turn. There was nearly no one to check out in the downtime—a few twenty-somethings were at the far end of the room, but they had the look of the eternally cool. Dressed in all black with skinny jeans hugging their skinny frames, Converse sneakers, leather jackets, and wallet chains sneaking across their hips. They were pretty good at their machine though, Police Force. Free games popped, lights blinked, a siren wailed, bullets rat-tat-tatted. Their expressions never changed below their spikey dyed-black hair. A masked worker walked the floor, disinfectant spray bottle in hand, a wipe in the other, rubbing down the plungers and flipper buttons, sweeping up loose candy wrappers and discarded paper straw wrappers. A tap on the arm, and it was Trudy’s turn again. She pressed start twice and plunged the ball into outer space.
Walking home, Trudy and Matty held hands. Their arms buzzed from two hours of pinball play, and they felt a bit sensory-overloaded, but good, more alive. The weather had turned misty. It slicked up their faces and hair, making them glow in the streetlights. It reminded Trudy of the one gig her band, The Lickers, got to play in London. A complete fluke.
“You didn’t know me in the ’90s,” Trudy said. “I never cried then. Never.”
Matty kicked a stone along the sidewalk ahead of them, doing a big wind-up with his foot. “That doesn’t surprise me. I can tell you’ve softened from something you used to be. Probably best for me to have this version.”
Trudy laughed. “Probably. I was a lot to handle then. I had big dreams. My band always on the verge of making it. At one point I truly believed The Lickers would tour and release albums, and I’d live the 3:00 am life of thrift store dresses, sleeping on friends’ couches, and cocaine, forever. It’s all such a cliché now,” Trudy said. “So embarrassing.” She let go of Matty’s hand, stuffed hers into her coat pockets. Took a deep breath. “Fuck, man. I am old.” Then she laughed and Matty laughed and they decided to stop at a little café that stayed open late and drink good cocktails.
They ordered pommes frites with gravy instead of trying to find wings. Trudy talked about the silky sound quality of vinyl versus CD recordings, forget streaming. The visual superiority of handmade band signs plastered up with wheat paste. Matty talked about how Raymond Carver’s stories changed his life. “That community college class? That professor had no idea. All those silences, all that drinking? I was right there with Carver’s characters, with him,” he said, clasping his hands together above his beer glass. “I decided, what the hell. I’d just keep reading and writing papers until I got a degree. Who knew an English Lit degree would lead me to a seedy, successful job in finance?”
“Selling out,” Trudy said, tipping her cocktail glass against his. “It was bound to happen. Not sustainable, that life. Who knew content would become so marketable? Hey, we tried not to make it.” They both took long sips, basked in the tiny candlelight of their table.
“If I hadn’t decided to take that Post Modernism seminar, I never would have met you, Trudy,” Matty said. “I don’t know what I would have done if I’d never met you.” His dark eyes held even with hers. He brushed her cheek with his hand, cupped the side of her head. Trudy felt like she was looking at him for the first time in years.
When they returned to their condo, masks on, masks off, rubbing their shoes on the hemp welcome mat in the hallway, taking them off so they didn’t get their white carpet dirty, after the keys jangled them inside, their eyes landed on the aquarium on the far wall. Trudy was sure Kurt Cobain and Bob Mould would be belly up, glassy eyed, and gone, but they weren’t. They swam nonchalantly around their little castle and nibbled at the flakes Matty crumbled onto the water’s surface.
“An aquarium is a commitment,” Matty said to the bubbling water. The date had made him feel like he was somehow haunting himself. There was a time when he didn’t want anything more than to be an intellectual bartender—drinking, going to shows, playing eight ball. He figured he was a lifer, like Dan-Dan and Scott, who’d been at Doogie’s since it opened in the ’80s. Flirting with women, pouring shots, cutting off the people who’d made it onto The List, waking up at 2:00 pm after a closing shift with one of the women he’d flirted with the night before. And then doing it all over again.
Matty’s former self would have killed everything in this tank. Instead, it had pretty aquatic plants and clean gravel and an evenly flowing pump and all the fish in addition to his two favorites, plus a few snails to work on the algae. It was a commitment. And Matty was a competent guy, making good money. A little overweight, a little bored, but stable. Some days he longed for the old days the same way he longed for a cigarette. But he’d gotten nostalgia and nicotine under control ages ago.
He snapped the fish food container closed. Nestled it in its tray. “It’s weird I never saw your band,” Matty said to Trudy now sprawled out on the sectional, feet propped up on the yellow pillow. She popped her head up like an otter.
“The Lickers? Oh, we were obscure and short-lived.”
“Yeah, but I saw a lot of bands back in those days,” he said, joining her. “Quality did not matter.” He laughed, rubbing Trudy’s toes, her arch, the two tender spots on each side of her heel. “I dunno. It would have been cool if I’d seen you and your band then but didn’t know you and then we met and found out years later.”
Trudy’s eyes closed. “Probably better that you didn’t. You would’ve been like, ‘Oh that’s that musician who puked on stage and forgot the lyrics to the third verse and instead just started screaming fuck you at the audience.’”
Trudy felt like she had met Matty in the ’90s though. He was a type. To a T. Bartending slacker, happily living off tips he never claimed and taking a class here and there. Seeing tons of shows because friends put him on the guest list. Smoking weed in the back alley. Sleeping with all the cute girls with black eyeliner and ripped tights.
Trudy could see Matty scowling at her from the audience as she leaned into a song, belted it into the microphone, the synthetic lace material of her baby doll dress cutting into her arms where it didn’t fit right as she flailed on her guitar. The hot stage lights beating down on her, sweat pouring down her back. She stomped her feet in their oversized boots, swept her hair as Judy, their drummer, wailed on the high tops. Becky fucking nailing her bass line, and for once, they hit the full stop just right, and there was Matty: middle center, never dancing, not even to their one good song. Toilet paper shoved in his ears, nodding, nodding like he knew everything.
Matty leaned back into the couch, his feet on the coffee table, his hands holding Trudy’s feet, eyes closed. His breathing slowed as he edged toward sleep. The condo building radiated silence, except for one small noise above them that sounded like a marble dropping and rolling along a wooden floor. Then silence again.
Trudy’s old therapist once asked her where Trudy the Rocker had gone. Trudy just grinned and shrugged. “Trudy the Rocker fell apart. The band fell apart,” she said. “I tucked her away somewhere. Got on with my life.” The therapist asked her if she could take a moment to look inside herself and find that old version of Trudy and check in. “Sure,” Trudy said and sat very still and looked around inside her brain, and there was the old her, standing beside a deep dark chasm, just standing there, waiting.
“Waiting for what?” the therapist asked.
“She’s either gonna jump or be forgiven,” Trudy said. “Who knows.”
Trudy thought maybe they would have sex in the morning, before work. Sex in the morning slowed the day down in a way that drunken midnight sex didn’t. Trudy took a big deep breath. She knew she had to work on her past self to work on this present self. She worried she would never understand anything, that her present self would just end up standing beside her past self with a third whole new her looking at them inside her brain. Both of them standing side by side at the chasm, not saying a word to each other, refusing to sit down.
The aquarium bubbled and the ice dispenser inside the freezer rumbled. Her temporarily abandoned phone softly dinged and pulsed on the kitchen counter.
She quit therapy soon after that, but some nights after Trudy slid under the covers, she conducted an inventory of her day, listed all the things she had accomplished one by one. At the end of the inventory, she checked in on rocker Trudy. It was easy to find her, just a shadowed speck, an outline standing beside the chasm in dim blue evening light.
The therapist had suggested that maybe Trudy’s former self could give it a rest, could try to sit down and relax. And Trudy agreed that would be nice. Sitting beside the chasm. The therapist suggested she could see if the other Trudy had anything to say. And Trudy said, “Maybe.”
Sherrie Flick is the 2025 McGee Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at Davidson College. She received a 2023 Creative Development Grant from the Heinz Endowments and a Writing Pittsburgh fellowship from the Creative Nonfiction Foundation. She served as co-editor for the Norton anthology Flash Fiction America and series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018. Her third story collection, I Have Not Considered Consequences, will publish in April 2025 with Autumn House Press. Her debut essay collection, Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist, published with University of Nebraska Press in September 2024 as part of their American Lives series. Her other works include, Thank Your Lucky Stars: Short Stories, Whiskey, Etc.: Short (Short) Stories, and Reconsidering Happiness: A Novel.