But how to explain to you the phantoms that motivate a hunger like mine? Once I had a hankering for honey so strong I ate nothing without it for a week. Our honey jar was old, the golden insides turned cold—in some places, crystalized. You told me to just buy another jar, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the effort, the bees, all those trips back and forth to the hive. To not attempt to use it up seemed, to me, a cruelty. The night before you finally admitted there was someone else, I was contentedly working my way through the same old jar. It was late and I was tired and there were no clean knives left to scoop out the dregs, so I used a fork. When you caught me in the dim of the kitchen, I had already excavated down to the bottommost layer, where there was a surprise pocket of soft remains, a place where the crystals hadn’t yet hardened. I was only trying to salvage the last of that smoothness. Still it kept slipping through the tines.
Alyson Mosquera Dutemple’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Salamander, Passages North, Arts & Letters, and Cincinnati Review‘s miCRo series, among others. In 2022, her collection was a runner-up for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Alyson teaches and edits in New Jersey. Find her @swellspoken and at alysondutemple.com.
Header photograph by Jen Ippensen
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson
Vast 