By Craig Loomis
He ripped his favorite shirt today. He didn’t mean to but for some reason the once reliable buttons refused to unbutton kindly and when he gave them what he thought was nothing more than a mild tug, it ripped from collar to sleeve. When he held it up to the window, the light, seeing if it were as bad as it sounded, he saw that it was. Thinking that was that, he grimaced and tossed it in the garbage container, but then, as he started to step away, heading back to the closet in search of a substitute-favorite shirt—at least for the time being—he suddenly changed his mind and returned to the garbage container, lifting the broken shirt up by his fingertips. He didn’t know what he had in mind, except that it was still his favorite shirt, mangled or not. Although fixing it was out of the question, he couldn’t help but smooth it flat on the bed to see. . . to see, . . just to see.
Ever since he could remember it had been his favorite long-sleeved blue-green shirt that had never once needed ironing, that fit him just right around the shoulders, that could go for days, even weeks, without a washing. Still, favorite or not, she had been relentless: “You still wearing that old thing? You’ve got dozens of shirts that are just as good, if not better. Just last Christmas I bought you that bright red cotton special that you’ve worn, what? once? How about that? And what’s so wrong with what your Aunt Sally bought you on Father’s Day? A crisp white short-sleeved that you could button up all the way…” and so on.
Meanwhile, he left his favorite shirt just like that on the bed, ragged and torn, wondering if anyone would really care, let alone notice, if he wore it just like that; after all, who cares about someone else’s shirt? Who?
Half-heartedly, he stepped to the closet and flipped through the many other shirts hanging up: some kind of collarless, zebra-like affair, a short-sleeved beachy orange, something all black (he had never worn black, ever). His half-hearted attempt over, he returned to the bed, bending down to get a closer look-see, thinking, in some sort of fantastically way that if he looked long and hard enough he’d find a solution, a magical fix. But it wasn’t long before it all went the other direction: the closer he looked, squinted, turned his head this way and that, the more terrible the tear. “No way,” he whispered. That’s when he moved it from the bed to the laundry room downstairs, thinking, he needed just a little more time to consider.
In the end, and two days later, he turned to the 18-year-old who was, like always, on her way out the door, asking, “By the way, didn’t happen to see a blue shirt that I left in the laundry room, did you? It was just there the other day.”
She hesitated, one hand on the doorknob, looking up at the ceiling to remember, “Oh yeah. I sure did. All torn and ratty, right? That blue one you’re always wearing?”
She waited for him to nod, at the very least, but he didn’t.
Hand still on the doorknob, the door now open. “The cat did it again,” she continued.
“Again?”
“She did it again, missed the litter box. Second or third time this week. I thought she’d grown out of that?”
He waited, rubbing his hands together. “And?”
“And, I needed to clean up her mess and so there was that old torn shirt of yours. Mess cleaned.”
He wanted to say more, ask more but by then she was out the door. For the rest of the day and part of the night he was angry, but then, by the next day, once his anger had become weaker, lacking any meaningful direction, he gave it up and eventually returned to his closet. After much looking and relooking, he eventually found a worn, gray shirt with its pocket stitching coming undone. It was nothing like his long-sleeved favorite but there was something about it that reminded him of his college days, and he tried it on and walked around the bedroom. He looked in the mirror, sat on the bed, went to the window. Back to the mirror. Nodding. Turning this way and that. And so began the making of a new favorite shirt—at least for the time being.
* * *
For twenty years (2004-2024) Craig Loomis taught English (literature and writing) at the American University of Kuwait in Kuwait City. He has had his short fiction published in such literary journals as The Iowa Review, The Colorado Review, The Prague Revue, The Prairie Schooner, Fiction International, Critical Pass Review, Mid-American Review, The Owen Wister Review, Cumberland River Review, Consequence Magazine, SAND, and others.