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“Bitty’s Last Request” was a finalist in our recently concluded 71st Short Fiction Contest, and is published with the consent of the author.

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photo J. & L. Caswall Smith

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Bitty’s Last Request

by Jill Bronfman

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Bitty’s Last Husband

…..After a while, it became difficult to count Bitty’s husbands. For one, she called any man she spent more than a night with her fiance. And then there were quite a few temporary husbands, ones she did marry in Reno or Monte Carlo on a whim, and had her father’s lawyer annul rapidly afterwards. They weren’t uniformly handsome, or rich, or even nice, but they always had a special look on their faces when Bitty lightly touched their arm to remind them that they were in fact hers. The look was something in between the shock you get from running around on the carpet and an ice cream headache.

…..         Bitty showed up at my apartment alone one time, and when I opened the door I waited a while because I thoroughly expected a man to join her on the doorstep. Is he parking, I asked.

…..     Who, she asked. No one, she said. I took a cab.

…..     Do you mean an Uber? Was it yellow? I was hungover and looking for someone to take it out on.

…..      Can I have a glass of water? Bitty had a small suitcase, baby blue and with a handle and no wheels like from before vaccines.

…..

I’m not that kind of dancer

…..     When I told Bitty that I had been dancing, she clasped her hands together over her heart and closed her eyes. I couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or not. She was silent for a moment, and looked like she was praying. Thanking God for answered prayers or praying for me to stop this foolishness.

…..        Not that kind of dancing.

…..       It’s all that kind of dancing, she said. You’re using your body to get what you want.

…..      It’s an ecstatic dance. We don’t do it for money. In fact, I pay them. I smiled. I knew she would explode when she heard that.

…..    You pay who?

…..          You know, the admission fee is like thirty dollars. It covers the music, the venue, the juices. It’s a whole scene. You should come with me on Saturday. I have something that you could wear.

…..   I started rummaging in my closet.

…..      Bitty drank some Rooibos tea while sitting on my bedspread, a Batik covering I bought in Bali last summer. She hated my backpacking adventures, but she liked that I texted her every other night and sent photos of the beautiful people I met along the way. She wasn’t as interested in food as I was, but that was another whole story.

…..       I pulled out a headdress of white feathers and long sinuous strings that fell around your face when you wore it. It made me look like a bird in flight when I danced. It would suit Bitty who was already so birdlike.

…..      I placed it on her head. Twirl, I said.

…..        Bitty twirled.

…..

Bitty Unbound

…..      Bitty was twenty once, I suppose, although I only knew her when she was quite old. So she tells me, and she tells me more than I wanted to know about her life when she was twenty.

…..      She was a dancer, I knew that, lighter than a paper bag and welcome in most establishments. She liked to dance in the evenings, but not too late, giving her time to get to the subway and scoot home before respectable women would notice her absence.

…..      She lived in a boarding house on the upper east side, or so she said, but the house was so close to Harlem it could reach out for a handshake. She’d have to head north for the clubs the next night, and the night after that. She worked every night except Sundays.

…..      On Sundays she went to Church, morning and evenings. She wore a proper lady ensemble, with the white kid gloves and the poofy pink hat. The morning service was longer, with a sermon by the handsome, married preacher Preacher David. In the evenings, it was more of a quick stop like hello to my favorite local deity other than Preacher David. Hello and please and thank you. Please let me meet a good man, Bitty asked up at the empty pulpit. Please let me meet a man like Preacher David, wholesome and good to me. I meant good for me, she corrected herself. The Lord didn’t love the greedy and Bitty felt herself to be greedy as anyone, maybe the greediest person she knew. She wanted to be loved, and rich, and successful, and everything. So she offered thanks as well, although she was stingy with the thanks. She didn’t feel that she was the stingiest person she knew, that designation would fall to her landlord, Miss Hanks, who measured heat in the winter like she had to generate that heat from her own body. Miss Hanks had plenty of body to do so, but she wouldn’t like it much. So Bitty said thank you for that, for the place to live at Miss Hank’s place, the small room with a bed and a dresser and washbasin and the bathroom down the hall.

…..         Bitty stood from the place where she had kneeled by the pulpit and stretched out her long legs. She stood firm. She would be a great dancer, and not just on the tiny club stages, but on Broadway. And she would keep just enough color by baking her own body like a rotisserie chicken on the roof of the tenement to dance in the clubs until then. There weren’t any Jewish dance clubs, and so she did what she had to do.

…..

A dreary day

 

…..   Bitty was fourteen, she said, when the asshole came back to her mother. She never called him her dad, just the asshole. She was probably right, but I’d have to assume because everyone in Bitty’s stories was long dead.

…..     The asshole smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and called every woman, wife and daughters included, Honey. He had not a brain cell devoted to names, at least women’s names, and men he all called by their nicknames. Buddy, Superdupe, Rodger, and Rico.

…..       Ah, I said, there was a Rodger. That’s a name! I was twenty-two that night when Bitty came back to me with her baby blue suitcase and I was looking for reasons for everything.

…..         His name wasn’t Rodger, Honey.

….. That’s right, my given name was Honey. Bitty was my grandmother, and she raised me. That explains a lot, I know. It also raises any number of other questions that I’m not prepared to answer. Not because I am squeamish about the subject, but because I genuinely don’t know the answers to the questions people asked.

…..    Where was my mother, people often asked.

…..    Where was my father, the cleverer ten percent or so asked.

…..    Bitty had trained me to say, from a very young age, that my father was at work. And my mother was at the store and would return shortly. Bitty was often home during these fairy tale stories, ranging from somewhat to completely incapacitated. She worked nights, and during the day I was mostly on my own. Sandwiches. Cold cokes from the fridge. Lots, oh more than lots, of television.

…..      But Bitty knew that she was a good parent to me. She knew because she had seen more than her share of bad parenting, and she knew that she was none of that. Almost none of that.

…..

Bitty’s Last Stand

…..   I’m dying, she told me. She was ninety-two at the time.

…..Well, yeah, I said, nodding encouragingly.

…..Oh, right, you’d probably want to know how, and more importantly, why.

…..She was silent for a while, looking at my mantelpiece, which was already filled with several misshapen pottery jars that held various parts of various relatives. There was no room on the shelf for Bitty.

….. Because of my leg, she told me.

…..  I got up to get some tea. This was going to be a Bitty story. Long, pointless, possibly injurious. I made us both another Rooibos tea, because neither of us needed the caffeine this late in the day. It was nearly dinner time, regardless of whether you were a roadtrip-to-the diner American girl like me or a world traveler Eurotrash wannabee like my grandmother.

…..  Oh, Bitty, I said, I’m sorry, what’s the deal with the leg.

…..  She stretched on one leg, then the other. Examined both. Flexed her long toes and pointed them on the diagonal. Told me many times that they used to be her fortune. I was quite the dancer, she told me. She preferred to tell me this old story over whatever was going on with her now.

…..     We sipped the tea. Bitty paged through one of the photo albums on my coffee table. Photos by Georgia O’Keefe of skulls and flowers, all pointing towards the same end.

…..  Cancer, she said. Bone or bone-ish. The x-rays see all these shadows, but the doctors won’t give me a real diagnosis until they biopsy the marrow and who wants that. I’m ninety-two and I can walk and talk. Do you know how many people lived into their nineties when I was I child? Like one lady, and we thought that she was lying. Said that she remembered covered wagons and Indians.

…..      Indigenous people, I said.

…..     Them, she said.

…..     So will you skip the testing? The treatment? I mean, you could have more time. Your avatar is doing well online. You could score another husband or a movie deal.

…..        Or both, Bitty said. Directors can be husbands. Husbands can be directors.

…..       Or producers.

…..       Bitty nodded. That’s right. Jimmy was a producer. Not as handsome as an actor, or even a director, but he knew where the money was and how it should be spent.

…..         Bitty pulled out a velvet box. Open it, she said.

…..      I opened the snaps on the side and lifted the red fuzzy lid. The necklace. She probably wasn’t giving it to me. She loved it too much, more than me in all likelihood. Plus I’d have nowhere to wear it. It wasn’t proper attire for a meter maid.

…..      It’s yours now, Bitty said, closing her eyes.

…..      Maybe she was dying. It had happened before.

…..

Bitty was a Dancer

…..        She rolled her ankles four times in each direction, then kept the rotation going all the way up her body, piece by piece, until it hit her neck. She even rolled her eyes. Eye contact was dangerous as hell, but it often paid off and so she considered her eyes dance weapons.

…..   Bitty kept her distance from the other dancers, who knew what she was but kept it quiet from management. There wasn’t the discrimination of prior years, of past decades, but there was some need, at least from Bitty’s point of view, for laying low. There was one almost friend, though, and her dance name was Charlotte. To Bitty, Charlotte sounded like a legit real-life name, but Charlotte explained that she was a character from a new show called Sex and the City. Bitty was ancient when the show came out, and didn’t catch the appeal. Is it porn, Bitty asked Charlotte. No, well, no, not exactly, Charlotte told her. Almost soft porn. Definitely for women, with plot and very few regrets, but some regrets, like for real women.

…..    Charlotte brushed out her long brown hair, pulled up some sheer stockings, and slipped a summer party dress over her head. She looked like she was going to a garden event in the suburbs. Bitty stood next to her, wearing fishnets and a rhinestone bra and g-string. Really, Bitty said, not a question, just shaking her head.

…..    Really. Charlotte replied, grabbing a clutch purse off of her makeup stand. You’ll see. Charlotte parted the back stage curtain and Bitty watched her strut across the stage. Men and women and everyone in the audience whooped and cheered. And then Charlotte shimmied out of the garden party dress and covered her white bra and panties with her hands. Her mouth stretched into an embarrassed letter O. Take off that bra, Lady C! One man in the front row yelled.

…..      Everyone had their regulars, Bitty thought.

…..

Bitty’s Bad Husband

…..      Not all of Bitty’s husbands were princes. Some of them were downright awful. She’d bail on them, the terrible ones, pretty quickly. There was one that was especially egregious, but he was the hardest to shake. He was a bad, bad, man, but before she could fully extricate herself from the relationship, he became a sad, sad man. The whole Alzheimer’s thing.

…..       It started with the little things, as usual. He left his keys in the refrigerator, got lost in the grocery store, forgot her birthday. The last one, I know, sounds like typical mediocre husband behavior, but before that he was always a big bunch of roses for any occasion or even no occasion sort of man.

…..       Bitty actually enjoyed his weaknesses at first. Before he started to lose it, he had pushed her around a bit, even once giving her a black eye, not from a punch but from one of the shoves when he had pushed past her to leave and she fell against the door. But then he got meeker, asking her for help for all sorts of things, and Bitty felt like she finally had the upper hand in the relationship.

…..     She told him what to do for a year. He did it. Bitty thought that state of affairs was perfect and assumed that it would last forever. She was only in her early forties, but at the time was already tired of dating and this husband, this Bart, was a man in his sixties who seemed to have money for flowers and time off work to court Bitty in the most romantic and generous way. By the time he started declining, he was closing in on seventy. She had to remind him to have sex with her, then remind him what sex was, but then she stopped reminding him, and he seemed fine with that, too.

…..  It was only when she found him standing in the pantry in a puddle that she took action. Divorced him, sent him to live with his oldest son, who had his father in his home for two nights before he put him in a home.

…..  Bitty did not visit him. Well, not while he was alive. Which wasn’t for long.

…..

A little house for Bitty

…..  She bought the house between husbands number two and three, when she was making good money as a stockbroker in the early eighties. It was a small house, and it was in New Jersey rather than Manhattan, but she was house proud.

…..         Bitty started with the curtains, because that’s what her own mother would have done. She actually liked the bright yellow but threadbare curtains that were hanging in the kitchen and dining room, but she believed that it was her duty as the woman of the house not only to hang new curtains, but to actually sew them.

…..      Well, she tried to sew them. Despite years of learning sewing at her mother’s side, and even in school, she failed to get a straight stitch going. She bought a sewing machine at a shop downtown and tried again.

…..       Here was where I stopped her in the story. Sewing, in school, I said, like in elementary school as a craft?

…..       No, in high school, and as a required subject.

…..     Don’t tell me just for girls.

…..     Of course, just for girls. The boys took shop.

…..     Shopping?

…..       Not shopping, woodworking really. They made birdhouses in seventh grade, go-carts in eighth grade.

…..    That stuff is trendy again, Bitty, but they still don’t teach it in schools. Maybe they should. If tech fails us, we’re going to have to make stuff again. Like not on a 3D printer, but from real materials. No one knows how to sew anymore, never mind make curtains.

…..    The sewing machine worked, basically, well enough. I put up boring beige curtains, which I thought looked very sophisticated. I kind of missed the yellow sunflowers on the curtains, on the wallpaper, but the trends were going beige and grey and I wanted to be a modern woman. And so I went all eighties.

…..      But your closet, I said.

…..         Oh, of course dear, there was still so much color there.

…..

Bitty’s Funeral

…..     I want a satin lining, she said, like a mafia wife.

…..    Ok, I said, dismissively, while making a cup of tea, changing my mind about Rooibos and restarting with Earl Grey for the caffeine. Bitty was talking obsessively about her funeral. Not like the actual biological fact of death, but the accouterments.

…..    And do NOT play Let it Be at my funeral, no, my celebration of life. I want some funk and New Orleans jazz. People will be wearing bright colors and dancing. A disco ball over the coffin.

…..  You’re describing a stage show, not a funeral, I finally told her.

…..  Exactly, she said.

…..     Going in now that my tea was decided upon, I asked her, what will the corpse be wearing?

…..       Nothing. She laughed for a full minute.

…..    Eww, I think I said out loud, but I could have just thought it.

…..       Ok, one of my old costumes. Not the rhinestone thong era. The early days, with the stage costumes. I played Cinderella, did you know that? The long blue gown, copied from the movie. And a simple tiara, not a big crown like at the end when she is married and made queen, but the original one from the ball. The old wig is probably quit by now, but if you look in one of the trunks you will definitely find the gown. Or at least the tiara. Those things hold up pretty well.

…..       I sat down on the loud floral couch, and it gave good couch. I wanted to thank Bitty for the hand-me-down furniture, but she never stopped moving and talking.

…..      Bitty was still pacing and planning.

…..    You can invite your father, she said.

…..     Eww, I said this time, for sure out loud.

…..     She took my hand. I love you, she said.

…..     Oh, ok, then that was it. The real endy-end.

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Jill Bronfman writes about the future of humanity. Her novel Thanks for Meeting Me Here was the winner of the 2026 Keepers of the Fire Prize for Fiction from Raven Chronicles Press and was a finalist for the Eyelands Book Award. Among other awards for her fiction, essays, and poetry, Bronfman was one of 12 Aspiring Novelists Selected for the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2025 and she was a Barnes & Noble National Essay Contest Grand Prize Winner. Her poetry chapbook Second Cities will be published in 2026.

 

 

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War. Remembrance. Walls. The High Price of Authoritarianism – by editor/publisher Joe Maita

“Where the Music Wasn’t Allowed,” Jane McCarthy’s winning story in the 71st Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest

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Jerry Jazz Musician…human produced since 1999

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