This short story was written by me and originally published in Opium Magazine in 2003.
When all the men were gone, that was when the women realized they were sorry. It had been a long time coming, the women saw in hindsight. One by one, the men had left, the woman recalled. The men had their briefcases at their sides, their suitcases on their leashes, their luggage strapped across the widest parts of their shoulders. "Goodbye!" the men had called out to the women. The women should have known. At first, the women had been happy. Now, they had time to shop at strip malls, and get their nails polished in pink or peach, and talk to each other about each other across the freed up phone lines. They had all the time in the world in a world without men. "Hello!" the women screamed out to each other across the deserted city streets. Inside their homes, the women cooked TV dinners for one, and sat down on toilet seats without checking first, and figured out how to use all the remote controls. Eventually, they even got into the White House, and learned how to kill cows for one another, and changed each other's tires by the sides of the roads. A long time after all the men were gone, when the women had settled down into their lives at last, the women sat there like that for one day, and they were content. The next day, though, the women began to fidget, and several of them scratched their heads, and a couple of them yawned. In the darkness of their closets, and the isolation of their cars, and back behind their mildewing shower curtains, the women whispered to themselves, "Those men, they weren't so bad." And the women began to wonder if the men being gone was not such a good thing, after all. Too late, the women decided, it was.
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