they said my great-grandmother taught herself to read by whispering hymns backward into a jar. kept snakes in the stove, sucked pennies clean for luck. the men said she was feeble. the women said, nervous.
i chew the same rhythm into my sleeves. rub the fabric raw until my hands forget the weight of being witnessed. this is how i pray, in repetition, in retreat, in the hum behind electric things.
in my uncle’s trailer there’s a buck head nailed to the fridge and a child’s drawing of a sun with no face. my cousin says i blink wrong, like a deer deciding whether to bolt.
my mother once locked me in a linen closet because i wouldn’t stop spinning. said she couldn’t take it anymore, the noise, the flapping, the bright click of me not being like the rest of them.
when i came out, i spoke in color for three straight days. she burned my drawings in a metal bowl and told god to come collect me if he had the stomach for it.
they call it a spectrum but in this house it’s a curse, a bloodline of girls who look away when spoken to, who name their toys after latin verbs, who learn affection by studying taxidermy.
the living room smells like mildew and lilac. granny’s perfume still haunts the upholstery. they say she went silent for twenty years and came back speaking perfect French. i understand. sometimes you have to leave language just to survive it.
i sit on the porch and stim with a pop tab and a dead wasp. my cousin’s boy says i’m touched by something evil. i tell him so was christ.
Carrie Farrar is a poet and musician whose work explores neurodivergence, memory, and the quiet intersections between survival and grace. Her poems have appeared in Kaleidoscope Magazine, Down in the Dirt, Flare Magazine, and The Art of Autism, among others. Blending lyrical precision with emotional candor, she writes to make sense of a world that often misunderstands difference. Her poem “I Am the Twitch in the Family Line” reflects her recurring themes of inherited pain, resilience, and the beauty of the mind’s odd wiring. She lives in California, where she continues to write toward empathy and light.
You shift on M’s bed to sit cross-legged, a little closer to her. Her hair is creeping into a mullet, the kind that sneaks up on you during the grow-out. Candlelight paints her leg hairs gold. You watch her gesture with her slender, marker-stained fingers, watch the words tumble from her lips and flit before you like a hummingbird.
M. tells you the Greeks have three words for love. Eros, as one loves a lover. Philia, as one loves a friend. Agape, as one loves a God.
Outside the canvas tent, coyotes scream to an impassive moon.
You met M. in a class your junior year of college. You spoke a handful of times, but these conversations aren’t what you remember. What you remember is seeing her across the dance floor at a student band performance around Christmas. They were playing “Sunday Candy,” and you were swaying with your boyfriend, who stood behind you with his arms wrapped around your waist.
Now, you think that she must have been dancing, but you only remember catching her eye, the way she held your gaze, her smile, almost a smirk.
After graduating, you remained connected only by the tenuous, erratic thread of your Facebook feeds. You saw that she moved to Philadelphia. That she shaved her head. Then, she didn’t post for a long time. There are some people that the mind relinquishes easily, like ripe fruit off the vine. There are others that, for reasons inexplicable, cling there long after the harvest.
Six years later, you wind up working on the same vegetable farm in the Pacific Northwest. You get there in June, and she arrives in July. You go there because you have been flying too close to the sun and think you need to spend some time on the ground, bent low with your hands in the earth.
What happened was this: You were 25 when you were diagnosed with lymphoma. When you were 27 and your hair had regrown past your ears, you read Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” and concluded it was your civic duty to pursue your authentic “yes,” to carpe the fuck out of the diem. So you quit your government job and broke up with your boyfriend and booked a flight to Colombia.
You see, you wanted to live on your edge: to scream and dance and fuck and let your heart bleed. To dissolve the boundaries of your reality and stare into the chasm. This way, you wouldn’t ever forget your mortality. This way, you wouldn’t arrive at the end of your life like a sleepwalker stirring at sunset.
You intended to travel for a year. But a few months in, the fear of dying caught up to you. So you went to an Ayahuasca retreat where maggots crawled out of your skin and you burned up in flames and met God and understood what it would be like to die. It would be blissful, a coming home. You left thinking you had transcended your fear of death. But then you fell inexplicably ill with what the doctors thought might be the cancer and you blazed out of the sky.
It wasn’t the cancer. But then, this: You were back in the States with no home and no job and no idea what to do. You had fallen off the edge.
Hence, the farm: room and board and a purpose.
There are seven of you on the farm: four young workers and a family of three. The four of you live separately on the property and cook meals in the main house. You live in a tiny shack near the compost pile and M. lives twenty paces away in a big canvas tent, in a clearing where you will later slaughter a goat and have a dance party on grass still wet with blood.
M. strikes you as intense and sensitive, palpably fragile. She alludes to histories of trauma and neglect and abandonment. She came to the farm to heal, too.
M. speaks earnestly about energy healing and chakras and Spirit—the sorts of things you feel both curious about and skeptical of. You were raised by staunch atheists but in the past few years you have started to wonder if there isn’t more to the “energy of the universe” thing than you thought. You go to Burning Man and do breathwork meditation and dance barefoot in your yard, but you also use LinkedIn and buy things on Amazon and listen to Ezra Klein rather religiously.
M.’s first week, you teach her to prune tomatoes: how to choose one or two promising stems to trellis and prune the rest. At first this feels like butchery, but then you learn it’s more like mercy. Unpruned plants lack airflow and grow vulnerable to disease; they also over-invest energy in their foliage, producing fewer and smaller fruits. You both agree this is good advice for life: Invest energy in a few important things and prune the excess. It’s not something you’ve ever been good at. Commitment to any one thing feels too much like death.
M. prunes slowly, handling the branches like a tentative lover. When she clips a main stem by mistake, she gasps and bows her head before its severed spine like a widow at a gravestone. By evening, she looks like a child after a long day of play: knees muddied, pale face marbled with dirt, sandy hair spooled around sticks. You think that you have never seen somebody look so peaceful.
After work most days, M. changes into a blue one-piece and hurries to her car, a ratty sarong draped over her shoulders. It’s one of the only occasions that she moves with something like impatience: on her way to go swimming. Her wheels churn up gravel as she backs out from under the apple tree and careens down the road toward the lake. When she returns hours later, her skin is dry and rosy, her face serene.
M. feels to you like a river: one moment bubbling with fast-flowing fervor; the next, languishing in brooding eddies. She surrenders to the swell of these currents in a way you rarely do: She ripples her shoulders, shakes her hands, blows air through her lips like a horse. She screams her frustration, dances her joy. When she laughs, she covers her mouth with three fingers while her eyes roll up into her head in pleasure—as if she just ate something delightfully decadent, as if she’s thinking, if only you knew. Some days, she spends the whole day in bed because she’s so sad. You have never been so sad that you couldn’t get out of bed. You have never even considered that this was an option.
One night at dusk, M. runs with a bowl of grain yelling “COOOOME ON,” as you bring the goats back to their pen from the pasture. She is running in front of the herd and you are behind, trying to ensure Trixie doesn’t stop to chomp on the flowers, and you are both squealing, stumbling over the uneven ground and feeling the breath of night on your cheeks. You hate this chore and you usually do it alone, but right now she’s laughing and so are you, and you’re marveling that she’s doing this in flip-flops, which you would never do.
“Cinnamon is my nemesis,” you say as you watch the goats jostling in their pen afterwards, referring to the alpha goat who always bullies the others out of the grain. “Oh! I love her,” M. responds, “I love her the way…that you love something! You know? It doesn’t matter what they do, you just love them.”
You feel slightly ashamed, and you look at Cinnamon again and reconsider. You want to love things like this, too.
Like you, M. is a writer. She writes about swimming in the ocean in winter. She says that while others dive under without hesitation, she wades in slowly, gripping her belly, her breasts. She wonders why she must draw out the entry, why she can’t just throw herself under. She says, “I realize it’s the initial transition into the known unknown. The choosing, leaning into, surrendering to—abyss.”
At her suggestion, you start a two-person writing group.
That first night, you walk to her tent with your computer, your heart like the hoofbeats of goats running out to the pasture. The canvas tent is musty and dark and cartoonishly large to contain just her bed and the two of you. She lights candles and you sit on the edge of her bed while she reads you a piece about a female pleasure ritual that she attended. She’s obsessed with rituals, with processing grief and honoring growth and reclaiming power.
Her voice is like straw: wispy and stiff. She clears her throat. Whispers “sorry,”her cheeks pink like sunrise. She starts reading again and her voice strengthens as she recounts grinding her hips, awakening her erotic animal. You close your eyes because you can’t focus on the words with them open. You keep your face still, feel your heart quicken. You don’t want her to ever stop reading because then you will have to say something.
Later that night, she texts you a piece she wrote about grief. Grieving her childhood, her unrealized potential, her young body. In it, there is an old photo of her with her top off. She’s wearing high-waisted tights and nothing else, and she holds her hair as she spins toward the camera. Her breasts are like bright little moons and you can’t take your eyes off them.
Partway through the summer, you and your long-distance boyfriend break up during a weekend away from the farm. “Boyfriend” and “break-up” are both the wrong terms: You were together then apart then together and then you left to go traveling. He’s the kind of person who folds his clothes right after they come out of the dryer and keeps up with bike maintenance. He shaved your head and read you Harry Potter while you were sick. He’s kind and funny and safe and you always felt like something was missing.
You can’t commit, and so you relinquish. It’s soft and sad. A halting pair of shears taken to a bright green stem. You return to the farm on a Sunday and M. is cooking zucchini fritters for community dinner. The kitchen is full of people and crackling oil and laughter and she sees your face and holds her arms out. You fall into them.
“What do you desire?” M. asks you one day at the lake, her amber eyes boring into yours like midday sunbeams. She invited you to come swimming, and you feel as though you’ve been granted entry into a realm that is secret and sacred.
You close your eyes and pause, the way her presence allows. “To feel connected,” you say. “To belong somewhere I feel seen, where I have a purpose.” You open your eyes and look at her, your face a question. “What do you desire?” The words feel thrilling, forbidden. You don’t think you have ever spoken them aloud before. Want, yes, but desire? Want is a child holding out a palm for a Tootsie Roll. Desire is an arching back, a thrumming pulse, heat pooling under the tongue.
She sighs. “To roll around on the ground. To play! I just want to play.” She sinks back and leans on her hands and you have the surprising and overwhelming urge to tackle her to the ground. To show her you can play.
Instead, you listen while she recounts a theater production she once saw where the friends on stage stuffed Oreos into one-another’s mouths and they all had Oreo spit dripping down their chins and she said that was what she wanted life to be like: messy, intimate, covered in Oreo spit. “People here,” she says, “They’re not like this. They’re gray. They choose comfort and practicality over color and self-expression, boundaries over connection. They’re allergic to physical touch.”
You wonder if M. perceives you as gray. You hope she doesn’t, but you picture yourself shoving a handful of Oreos into her mouth and it pains you how out of character it would be. You feel like an artist who has spent twenty-eight years sculpting a masterpiece and now you want to smash it to bits and start over, and in your mind you are pulling your hair, punching through plaster, screaming and throwing tools at the walls. But to M.’s eye you are just sitting there with your hands in your lap, your face cloaked and impassive.
The farm holds a talent show and M. asks to borrow your black pants for her costume. She wears them with a suit coat and a white button-up and paints her face like a French mime, complete with a pencil moustache. She has you record her performance, which is a theatrical interpretation of a French song about a woman in grief. Her commitment to every emotion and movement is so complete that you feel in equal measure embarrassed for and in awe of her.
When it’s your turn, you approach the stage to read a series of haikus you have written about farm life. But simply reading them seems dull in the wake of her performance, so you spontaneously decide to also interpret them with your body. You perform the first one, which is about getting attacked by the rooster, and M. laughs and claps her hands in delight. You feel giddy.
Another coworker announces a surprise lip sync performance of Les Misérables’s “I Dreamed a Dream.” Everyone joins in for several Les Mis tracks, and you close the evening beating your chests with the fervor of the French revolution, and crumpled under the weight of Fantine’s broken dreams.
While harvesting sweet onions one afternoon, M. mentions a friend, a woman she fell for at a music festival. She speaks about this woman’s beauty, about their chemistry on the dance floor and about sudden, overwhelming desire. Your stomach twists with envy.
You tell her about women you’ve had crushes on too, but you say that you’ve always been too scared to act. You don’t look at her as you say this, instead focusing on cleaning an onion. You grasp the outermost stalk and pull it down toward the bulb, carefully sloughing off the withered slime to reveal the gleaming, virgin flesh underneath.
At a backyard party you attend with M., she starts dancing before there is music. When you turn on a speaker, she throws herself on the ground and performs a dramatic floor routine to La Bouche’s “Be My Lover.” She crawls and rolls and arches her back, coating the pair of your pants she has borrowed with grass. Then suddenly you are on the ground with her, and as the bass thumps and the party swirls you feel strangely unselfconscious—not as though no one is watching but rather as though everyone is, and that what they are seeing is you together with M.
On the bike ride home, M. doesn’t have a bike light so you ride behind her, and she is delighted by the shadow projected onto the trees, her figure a hundred times larger than life. When you get back to the farm, she wants to go see the bioluminescence down at the beach. It’s late and you’re exhausted, but you say “Let’s go!” after weighing your want for sleep with your desire to keep spending time with M. She gets a mug of strawberry ice cream and you climb into her car and put on “Fill it up Again” by the Indigo Girls.
At the beach, you strip down to your underwear. You aren’t wearing a bra, and you hesitate for a moment before peeling your halter top off and walking to the water’s edge. Your toes curl as they cross the icy threshold, gripping smooth pebbles and shards of shells.
In the shallows, the bioluminescence is faint, but as you wade out farther you find yourself in a glittering galaxy. You take a deep breath and dive into the darkness, into the light.
It’s the kind of cold that knocks all the breath from your lungs and wrings screams from your marrow. When you surface, you try to take control of your breath. You inhale through your nose and then push slow, shuddering exhales through pursed lips. After a few breaths, you relax into the cold and stroke out into the starry expanse.
“You have to see how cool that looks!” M. squeals. She braces herself and eases into the water, gasping. Swimming, she looks like a glowing sea creature, some mystical being. She swims out past you and dissolves into the night.
Now numb with the cold, you swim back to the shallows. You stand and scan the horizon nervously, seeing nothing.
“Sara?” she says after a couple of minutes, the sound so small in the vastness. “Here,” you say, your voice cracking.
As you swim back to the shore, you notice a figure watching you from the beach. Your breath catches. You imagine a beach-goer discovering your naked bodies in the morning, your skin cold and necks slit with a knife. “There’s someone there,”you hiss.
“Hello?” M. calls out, her voice friendly and fearless.
“Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to be creepy,” says the figure, their speech slightly formal and stilted. It’s a teenage girl, and the relief leaves you dizzy.
“Are you guys dating?” she asks once you have both waded out of the water and stand shivering, coated in salty gooseflesh. You say nothing, and the pause swells like a balloon that might lift into the sky. “No,” M. finally answers, laughing a little. Why the laugh? The balloon pops and splutters. “No,” you repeat quickly.
“Oh,” says the girl.
You ride back to the farm in silence. When M. pulls into the gravel lot, she turns off the engine and you sit there together in the spaciousness. It’s the moment you have had before with so many men, when the engine dies and in the silence the car is charged with the energy of potential. You look at each other. “Oops, the mug,” she says, pointing. The strawberry ice cream. It’s tipped over. You pick it up. Your mind is buzzing and blank but you manage, “We ate enough so it didn’t spill.” The moment, if it is a moment, passes and you both turn away and climb out of the car.
M.’s ecstasies are cut with her melancholies. She grows anxious and moody. She mourns being wronged by old lovers and gets caught in spirals of victimhood. She was supposed to be an artist, she says, and she resents never having the support from her family to pursue it. She feels judged and misunderstood. She feels tortured by the evils and apathies of the world. She feels perpetually abandoned. She feels that years of her life have been lost, that she is 28 with no career to speak of, just disparate clues leading in different directions. She feels that the strength of her passions and desires is unmatched by the people around her. She wants to move to New York, where people know creativity, or to France, where they know pleasure.
You can’t relate to much of this, and you think that this is the point: She doesn’t believe anyone can. But you are particularly unsuited to the task. You have never felt abandoned; you feel loved by your family; you tend toward optimism and forgive easily; you have had your share of hardship, but you have also been lucky. You don’t doubt the extent of her suffering, but you also don’t know how to hold her bitterness.
Near the end of the summer, M. goes on a vision quest in the mountains and fasts for four days. When she arrives home, feathers are strewn across the floor of her tent, likely the work of a cat. An intact bird heart sits in the middle. It’s still red and wet and alive-looking, and you think you have never seen a heart laid bare like that. She squeals and recoils so you pick it up with a paper towel, feeling the blood moisten your finger pads. You carry it out of the tent and throw it into the compost pile.
Later, you look up “why does cat not eat bird heart?”
The internet says that some do. It depends on the cat, and on the heart. You suppose this makes sense: Not every cat is prepared to take on every heart.
Come fall, M. finishes her term on the farm and moves into a nearby apartment. You have said nothing to her about how you feel. You convince yourself that you are better as friends. You indulge your desire only in dreams.
One evening, she comes over because she wants you to show her a breathwork meditation. It’s October and freezing but she’s wearing a flowered, royal blue dress that swishes against her thighs and scoops low on her chest. Her fingernails are sparkly and her hair is drawn into a half ponytail that sprouts from her head like a broccoli. You’re wearing long underwear and an oversized red knit turtleneck.
You roll out two yoga mats and lie down side by side on the wood floor. You turn on your speaker and start the meditation. The audio guides you through rhythmic breathing and breath-holds, and you breathe together as the familiar buzzing energy builds in your body. At the end, the energy climaxes and explodes into bliss, like a full-body orgasm. After, you roll on your side to look at her.
“How was that for you?” you ask.
“Good,” she says.
Her face is strange, charged with something you can’t decipher. It has the quality of a foggy, rain-soaked window, transparent but impossible to see through clearly. She isn’t crying but you think she might, that perhaps she didn’t like the meditation or that some trauma has resurfaced, and you are already qualifying, saying, “This isn’t my favorite one, I forget that it goes a little too fast…” you trail off. She doesn’t respond.
Then she says, “Don’t be mad,” and she leans in close, opens her mouth and devours you.
Her lips on yours are eager and hot and your mind is blank except for the word yes, and your tongue finds hersand your hands seem to work on their own, finding her waist, her hair, her chest, as you draw her closer, inhale her.
You have never been with a lover so soft. Everything is circles and curves. She kisses all over you slowly, exploring your neck, your ribs, your wrists. She kneels and takes your foot gently against her shoulder, puts your big toe in her mouth.
Tasting her, you’re reminded of iron and moonlight. You find that being with her feels like play, like you’re two cubs rolling through the grass. After, she texts you: “Words are eluding me.”
Then,
“ok they’re coming now
You’re beautiful
You’re beautiful
You’re beautiful”
After you sleep with M., your infatuation inexplicably melts into a kind of peace.
She says that for her, your physical intimacy is like another layer of friendship. Though your ego bruises, you’re also relieved. Maybe because you knew that to date M. would be to conflate chemistry and compatibility. Because you would have resented chasing her kite string, would have resented always being the one on the ground.
You see M. a couple more times, but shortly thereafter you move away and gradually fall out of touch. But you still read her blog, where she writes about surrendering to ocean depths and about a girl becoming fire. She writes about her ex. She writes about her boss, a man who she falls in love with but can never tell. You scour her blog for clues of you, but you find none. You suppose that no one writes about the ones who chase the kite, who lend the pants, who shave the sickly heads.
Still, you think that you loved M. a little like a friend, and a lover, and a god. But something else was truer: You loved her in the way of breathwork and solo traveling and Burning Man. She made you feel alive.
She was an edge, where the world yawned below and you felt like if you leapt you might just fly.
But you’re learning that the edge is often rendered equally in light and shadow. You’re learning that the fullness of a shape emerges not only from its edges, but from the spaciousness contained within—from the nothing that is also everything. Not just when the sun trumpets over mountaintops or blazes like pink fire atop oceanic glitter, but when it hangs languid at midday. When time unfurls like a green tomato yellowing: unhurried, unremarkable, unwasted.
SaraSherburne (she/her) is a Pacific Northwest native who loves to write, DJ, and plan elaborate themed gatherings. Her writing has been published by Intrepid Times, Thrive Global, and Food Tank. She currently studies at the Yale School of the Environment and eats a lot of New Haven pizza.
It feels time to share the pandemic story no one asked for.
Other single women learned to bake sourdough. Some learned French. Some learned to make perfect little ice cubes with flowers frozen inside so they could host dinner parties for no one. But not me. I was busy becoming the most feral version of myself: a woman alone in her apartment ordering massive quantities of crab.
At first, I tried to resist. Tried to cling to the kind of polish I had worn like armor in an office of men, the performance of composure that kept me from seeming too much, too strange, too hungry. I remember my boss, Greg, saying on a Zoom call at the beginning of lockdown, “I hope all you single people are using this time to pick up a new skill. Maybe a language or an instrument.”
No, Greg, I’m not. All at once, I let go of the unspoken expectation to be the lady of the office and plunged headfirst into the delicate, delicious language of crab. Every Friday night after work, while the majority of our all-male team shut their laptops and wandered back down the hall to their families, I shut mine and entered a battlefield of my own making. I pulled the blinds closed. Removed my bra. Removed my pants. Stood alone in a tank top and underpants microwaving butter until it exploded all over the microwave like some divine, salty baptism.
Maybe if there’d been other women at work, I would have joined the office-sanctioned arts-and-crafts Slack channel or the pandemic French club. Maybe I’d have learned to conjugate verbs instead of deconstruct crustaceans. With other women, I might have shared the strange, silent weight of being alone, trading jokes or small comforts in a group instead of inventing my own rituals in the dark. I am so glad that I didn’t. I learned to wield scissors like a surgeon. I learned to eat crab like it was survival. Like I was Tom Hanks in Castaway, celebrating his first hot meal of roasted crab in his cave, Wilson by his side. I had spent years making myself small at work—well-fed on meetings and deadlines, but starving for something that was only mine. I realized then that no one else was going to nurture that version of me back to life.
I bought special crab scissors. Having grown up in an Asian household, I already knew the power of kitchen scissors for meat, but I had leveled up. I could slice clean through a thick crab shell like I was defusing a bomb. My hands smelled permanently like ocean brine and melted butter. I didn’t care.
I tried it all. Boxes arrived from Alaska, from Maine, from Maryland. I developed a loyalty to my crustaceans of choice. Dungeness for sweetness. King for drama. Soft shell for nights when I felt delicate and raw.
The pandemic was long. There were many lonely nights. There was always more crab.
This was not a hobby. This was a spiritual awakening. I was the kind of lonely you have to be to change. Each shell I splintered was another layer of polish breaking off, the shiny performance that once made me safe in a room full of men. But the safety was theirs, never mine. What I had left was hunger.
And still—so many stories from lockdown center around parenting struggles, and I believe every one. But single solitude was its own kind of strange, silent ache. No one saw it. No one talked about it. People made it sound like we were the lucky ones, spared the weight of homeschooling and partnerships and noise. But I was invisible. And that invisibility cracked something. I wasn’t eating crab in underpants because it was decadent. I was doing it because it was the closest thing I could find to celebration, to comfort, to proof that I could still treat myself like someone worth feeding.
At the time, I was working full-time with men who clung to the office until the bitter end. In California, where lockdown was serious, university departments had already been urged to go remote, but mine refused until the governor’s official stay-at-home order left them no choice. The men scoffed at the threat, surfed off Campus Point Beach between meetings, and emailed impassioned essays about “returning to in-person collaboration.”
I remember sitting in our silent office the day before we were finally sent home, looking around and wondering why no one else felt like we were on the edge of something. They wanted to go back to what felt like a deeply male version of domestication—out of the house, back with their buddies at work. But I was already gone. Already halfway to the sea.
It all culminated the following summer when I went to Maine for a writing retreat. The final dinner was lobster. The supposed prize of the sea. I sat next to a kosher professor who nibbled politely on broccoli. Another woman beside me tried lobster for the first time. Wide-eyed. Hesitant.
“It’s fine,” I told her, cracking my claws like I was some kind of grizzled, all-knowing seaperson, Quint from Jaws reborn. “But honestly? Crab is better.”
They looked at me like I’d said something scandalous. And maybe I had.
The next day, I ordered a lobster roll from a local favorite. And for old times’ sake, I got a crab roll too. No contest.
Was it wrong to spend my pandemic lockdown sampling the crustaceans of the sea instead of bettering myself? I did not learn French. I did not take up embroidery. I did not write the next great American novel. Instead, I was a woman working hard. Hustling for crab.
Once, in a weekly phone call with Greg, I licked a bit of crab off the end of a butter knife. The delighted slurping noise I made shocked us both. I thought I was caught until Greg urged me not to cry, reminded me we would be back in the office soon. “Totally,” I fake sniffled.
And then I hung up, stripped back down to my crab-eating uniform, sharpened my scissors, and got back to the real work.
Now, a few years post-pandemic, I walk past ice-packed snow crab in crowded grocery store seafood sections and feel something close to a heart tug. Lockdown was, for me, a return to whatever the hell I was supposed to be but had buried so deep down I’d forgotten—feral, free, eating crab while watching YouTube. No longer the girl at work in heeled booties and an array of buttoned-up jackets. Finally, I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. As alone as a person could be, I was unashamedly myself. Just feeding the creature who needed feeding.
Juliet Way-Henthorne‘s work has been featured in Hobart and AAWW’s The Margins and is forthcoming with Slant’d and Pine Hills Review. Juliet serves as Senior Creative Nonfiction Editor for jmww and works with Hunger Mountain Review as a Social Media Coordinator.
The young man at the next table is evangelizing to another young man. He is arguing we might live in a simulation. Something about light not behaving intuitively. He’s on to Lazarus and The Screwtape Letters now.
And I didn’t bring my headphones.
Outside, I watch boys hang loose as marionettes on a dying earth beneath a dying sun. And I worry about war and fundamentalism. I’m sick of dialectic dialogue.
The young man has moved on to talking about Fight Club (which is something you’re not supposed to talk about), misquoting the book and film, talking about a purposeless struggle.
And I marvel at a belief system cobbled together hodge-podge from religious texts and pop culture. Probably not so unlike my own.
Of course you are here. I don’t have my headphones to block you out.
Well, you aren’t here-here (I mean, could you imagine?), but you’re here the way I don’t notice my legs until they ache, or my stomach until I am hungry, or my heart until it’s breaking.
You are hiding in every poem I write and every story I tell, every journal entry and not far from every thought. (God, now he’s talking about love and his divorce and I feel pangs of sympathy and guilt.)
He says to the other young man: Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this.
But the questions are all rhetorical, simply there to further his points.
I sip the weakest tea I’ve ever had and it hurts my stomach as bad as the sympathy and guilt, but the barista said she’d try better if I wanted a refill and I’m trying not to be rude.
And of course you are here.
Textured tile covers the face of the coffee bar and it looks inside out the longer you stare at it, like an idea, like a simulation of a coffee bar.
And there is a father playing Go Fish with his daughter trying to ignore the young man talking now about the difference between the sexes and how dating is really like sales if you think about it.
And of course you are here.
Matthew Roy (he/him) lives in the American Midwest. He’s moved from a small town to a big city, from a rambling farmhouse to a small apartment, and from a major corporation to an up-and-comer. He’s writing more. He’s making changes. He’s querying his first novel and banging away at his second. His work has appeared in Eternal Haunted Summer, Haven Spec, IllumenMagazine, PenumbricSpeculativeFiction Mag, The Quarter(ly) Journal, Space & Time Magazine, The Sprawl Mag, star*line, Twenty-two Twenty-eight, untethered magazine, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, among others.
In the spirit of jumping into uncertainty and making something new together, we invite you to pick two random numbers between one and eight (or spin our wheel twice) and form a new micro story.
I ready the house and myself for when they wake. I am the center of a seesaw and I keep the balance. I cook, clean, plan, arrange, manage, and listen. I hope my labor is efficient enough that it will be forgotten, that my family will be unburdened by daily domestic stresses. I hold the middle. I hold still.
Stillness can be a kind of death.
I tell myself joy cannot exist without misery. True joy, like faith, like love, is proven by its disappearance. A heart must be carved by suffering to be filled with the full power of joy.
I know this with my brain. It has been some time since I’ve felt such passions with my body.
Everyone’s midlife must feel this way, warm rushing waters frozen over time. Everyone’s marriage must feel this way.
Outside, the daffodils arrive and open, trumpets of sun. An April nor’easter hits New England and the flowers are pummeled by snow.
April 2024
My husband sleeps downstairs. We tell the children it is because he snores.
I sleep in the closet. I am following an instinct of my body that I do not understand, an instinct for less: less light, less space, less me.
I find a therapist who I hope will convince me to stay in my marriage. We spend our sessions discussing my husband’s manic and depressive swings. I do not tell her about the panic attacks or that I am sleeping in the closet.
On the floor, I reach out and touch the walls on either side of me.
My body tells me everything I have known is ending. My brain tells me it is all my fault.
I suffer panic attacks and hide in the bathroom until they abandon me. I quiet my voice by stuffing towels inside my mouth. A violence cracks my heart and there is a thunderous splintering down my arms. A frozen pond becoming undone.
Still, that April is the warmest on record. The tulips arrive early alongside the rabbits. I build a makeshift fence with buckets and empty birdhouses, but the vermin still eat the stalks to the ground.
April 2025
I am a separated woman—separated from my marriage.
It is Monday after midnight. March has just given way to April Fools. I ready myself for bed inside the nesting apartment I pseudo-share with my husband. He and I switch each night, one of us in the house with our children and the other in this studio apartment. He is here and not here, his life being lived in the alternating space of mine.
I’ve spent a year thawing, discovering a new self warmed by words and friends and bodies. Desire has been made strange by its absence of love. He, too, has soothed himself with bodies. Even now, we tell each other some truths.
I fill the apartment with seeds: marigolds, peas, cypress vine, squash. Some sprout after a few days and some take longer. Some never sprout. The sunflowers stand up first and I place them by the window with the shade open. Mornings, I am awoken by a stab of sun.
That April night, there is a strange scent to the room. I slide into the bed and rub my legs between the sheets. The smell arrives from the pillow. Sweet. Fecund. Vaporous. It is perfume. I turn on the light. I remove the comforter. Lipstick on white sheets. It is a shade more brown than red. It shows me the map of my husband’s most intimate pleasure. Color stains the middle and I imagine rouged lips on engorged flesh. Sweat and secretions soak into fabric, the fabric I have wrapped around my own skin. I try to exhale the perfume from my lungs. I am shocked—not that my husband has a lover, but that he has left the evidence for me to inhabit, a bed made up with dirty sheets.
The air tolls Over, Over, Over.
I throw the sheets into the trash. I spend two days crying. Fury and sadness and jealousy quake through me as if these emotions have never before existed. But good erupts through the cracks. There is love and hope and an appreciation for the bellow in my core, a constant message rising through the violent squall. You are not who you were and Let what must come, come.
Stillness, like control, is a grand illusion. I have learned not to trust a sheet of ice. It is truer to be sacrificed to the hungry waters.
Love and pain stand on opposite ends of a lever. They teeter totter back and forth, up and down, higher and higher until they are launched into the grand churn, that torrent of delights and sorrows and the hot in-betweens, where everything is felt and nothing is clear.
And finally, I know what it is to be alive.
Danielle Monroe is a writer, reader, mother and lover of all things RuPaul Drag Race. She is a proud Michigander who now calls Boston home. You can learn more about her at her website DanielleHMonroe.com
I asked you about the novel you were reading and realized too late I was flirting, despite wearing an oversized nautical sweater and a fanny pack designed to carry a child around my postpartum fat.
You were playing Pavement but didn’t know the band, and I forgave that, looking in your pretty face as you said witchy playlist, feeling that sense of undeniable possibility, and underneath, the scintillating savor of my own internalized shame.
It’s what we all dream of, right? Witchiness, which means taking ourselves to the forest to dance naked away from laundry and picking up countless old socks and half-full Coke cans— in other words, away from men.
I’m sorry for my fantasies of a wife, girlfriend, women, when I outlive my husband, sorry for breaking the illusion when he came in with his beard and his requests, his sense the world was made for him, and asked to use your restroom, to which you said no.
Harriet Weaver is a Los Angeles–based writer with an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and a BA from Yale University, where she studied with Harold Bloom. She was recently published in the Los Angeles Review of Books journal PubLab and has poetry forthcoming from Roanoke Review. In her previous career as actor and producer, Harriet studied under Wynn Handman and brought shows to Broadway with Blue Spruce Productions. She was an instructor of poetry and composition at UC Irvine. She grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and Wexford, Pennsylvania, and lives in LA with her husband and toddler.
The first time you saw him, you thought, No one should be that perfect. It was impossible. No one’s lips were that color naturally.
After the first time, you saw him everywhere: walking down the sidewalk on brilliant autumn afternoons; in the drugstore near closing time; smoking a cigarette each morning before his 8 a.m. shift wearing a denim jacket and indigo-wash Levi’s, black hair gelled into a pompadour, eyes rimmed with lashes so thick he appeared to be wearing eyeliner.
It is love at first—and second, third, seventeenth, forty-seventh, ninety-second—sight.
How do you seduce a man (or is he a boy, as a coworker suggests) that you pass on the street, with no one and nothing to make an introduction? How do you hold his gaze each time you pass, smile that smile like a secret shared? How do you say I want to know? How do you sit down on the curb beside him one cloudless November afternoon and ask, not to bum a light, but how often he gets a fifteen-minute, that is, is his presence in front of your store on purpose or is his boss generous with breaks?
The answer is more simple than you first suspect. Loneliness.
The first time you see her, she’s with him, wearing cherry red lipstick and a purple velvet trench coat belted at her Betty Boop waist.
Later, weeks later, during a late night alone with too many glasses of whiskey, you’ll find a picture of her online, time stamped from that same miraculous day—she’s straddling a borrowed bike along the campus on the hill, her plaid mini-skirt hiked up around her thighs, combat boots pumping the pedals, her hand thrust out with middle finger up, nail painted shiny black, and if you weren’t as old as you are—old enough to have lived through, in real time, the era she’s putting on—you’d think her novel, the very image of rebellion.
But you remember the underwear advertisements, everyone bored or high or hungry or too cool to smile, captured in black-and-white film. The consumed challenging the desire of the consumer. You remember striped thigh-highs and the Army Navy store that has long since been replaced by a noodle shop. You are old enough to have seen the indulgent apathy of youth rise and fall and rise again, to have perfected that stare, to know the urge behind it and the places it will meddle. To know, mostly, that it’s a facade.
You don’t expect him to ask for your number, but he does. You pat your pockets for a piece of paper, a pen, but he’s already got his phone out, fingers perched over the screen. You say, Sara, no H, and recite the ten-digit string. Cool, he says, I should get back in, and you nod and say, Me too, though it doesn’t really matter that you’re out here because you’re the manager and you doubt anyone has even noticed you’ve been gone anyway.
It takes him two days to text:
hey sara without an h, are you free at all on friday?
It’s a Wednesday, exactly 102 days since the bright, humid afternoon you last saw your ex-partner and signed the papers to finalize the sale of the house you used to own together. Exactly 71 days since you last heard from the man you’d been having an affair with, though his spirit still hangs around the damp apartment you’ve settled into, pressing against you at inopportune moments.
I work Fridays, you text back. Till 9—a drink after?
There’s a pause, long enough for you to wonder if that was the wrong answer, too needy or something, long enough for you to get up and start washing the sink full of dishes. Your phone pings as you stack another coffee mug.
9’s good. But heads up, I’m 20.
You hold your phone and laugh. It has been at least forever since you last felt this buoyant or lusty or absurd. You want to grab the feeling. You want to grab it and hold it and never let it go.
A bite to eat then?
Sure that’s great
Meet me outside the shop at 9:15. It takes me a few to close up.
Dare I tell you how old I am?
Go for it
I’ll be 34 next month. I’m laughing as I type this.
That’s awesome
See you Friday.
Unless we run into one another sooner
Looking forward to it
That’s how easy it is; you’d almost forgotten.
His figure, outlined by streetlights, waits just a few yards off as you lock the door and pull the handle three times, wrapping a shift the way you always do. He waits for you to walk over, but betrays no nervousness when you say Hi. He says, Where do you want to go?
You say, I’m craving pizza. Though you haven’t eaten a slice of pizza since college days; dairy doesn’t always agree with you.
He says, Sam’s then.
You head up the street to a pizza place you’ve never stepped foot into, though it’s been in the same spot for most of the ten years you’ve lived in town. Before that it was Bart’s Ice Cream. The counter is manned by bored college kids and there’s a live trio covering Cher’s “Life After Love,” and he asks what’s so funny. Oh, this song, you say. But you leave out the part that it was popular the year you graduated high school, that you danced to it at your prom. He would have been in diapers. I like it, he says, bobbing his head.
The pizza is decent, but his eyes are brilliant, almost black and as sparkly as the night sky in a national park. He stares at you as though you are the most gorgeous thing to ever materialize before him. Or maybe he’s just good at eye contact. Eventually it occurs to you that he’s waiting for you to suggest what happens next. You can’t take him to a bar but it seems obvious enough that the night is far from over.
Do you want to go back to my place? you ask. I have bourbon.
Sure, he says. You live by yourself?
I do, I say. But it’s not fancy.
He shrugs. When you get outside, he asks, Mind if I smoke?
Mmm, not at all, you say. I used to—I still miss it.
You want one? He holds out the pack of American Spirits. Blue.
No, thank you. I’ll enjoy your exhales.
He laughs and sparks the light.
Your apartment is, to put it kindly, a fall from grace: an itty one-bedroom with water-damaged walls and grimy windows, tacked on to a concrete slab behind an 1800s farmhouse. Most of your furniture is in storage and the hot water works only sporadically.
As you swing open the heavy barn door that fronts the place, a strange, romantic, decorative flourish, and hold it ajar with your hip to unlock the normal door behind it, he says, This is such a cool spot. How’d you land it?
You tell him the name of the realtor you used, but leave out that you called her with two weeks’ notice and three cats and nowhere to go; this was her only listing.
He looks around the apartment while you feed the cats and get the whiskey. There’s not much to see: it’s mostly overfilled bookcases and a desk piled with papers, story maps taped to the walls. Books are stacked on the floor by the bedroom door and next to the couch. He points to the iPod docked on a speaker and asks if he can put on music.
Sure, you say. Whatever you want.
You pour two tumblers of whiskey and set the bottle on the tiny coffee table. He chooses Elvis Costello and settles next to you and you hand him a glass and cheers and then the song is over. You don’t have the album, just the song downloaded from who knows where. You get up, click through the iPod wheel.
How about Iron & Wine? you ask. It is the music your ex-partner used to put on when she wanted to have sex. The married man you fell in love with preferred Bon Iver.
Sure, he says, shrugging. Reminds me of middle school.
You raise an eyebrow and he raises one back.
Reminds me of my early 20s, you say, which elicits his perfect laugh. Seriously though, he shouldn’t be this perfect. It’s plainly unfair.
For a while, with the music soft in the background, you just talk and lean into each other. Closer and closer on the couch, limbs entangled. Laughing. God, it feels good to laugh. He is silly, and smart, and charming, and, without warning, nineteen.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You surface from your joy-haze to this fact. Nineteen?
He nods.
Not twenty?
He scrunches up his face and says, Twenty sounds so much better, doesn’t it?
Let me see your ID, you say.
What? Why?
Because I need to know you’re legal.
For a split moment, he appears torn between embarrassment and pride.
You offer, I’ll show you mine, too. To make it fair.
Sure enough, he is 19, photo of his younger self starkly different—not yet inhabiting his bad-boy good looks and devastating smolder.
You pull out your license and hand it to him. The picture is almost a decade old, not updated in the most recent renewal, which you did online to save time.
This doesn’t even look like you, he says. You look way better now.
I know, you say.
Because he’s right. Age becomes you, despite what an endless stream of beauty advertisements otherwise insists. Pain has also become you, something you didn’t know was possible until the last few months: the long nights crying, the inability to stomach a meal, the meditation practice taken up at the behest of a growing stack of Pema Chodron books.
What happened to you? he asks.
Hmmm?
You know, why are you—ah, here, with me?
Oh, you mean alone? My ex left me for another woman.
What a dick. He must’ve been crazy.
She, you say. And I deserved it. I slept with a married man.
So you’re bi?
I hate that word.
He shrugs. Most of my friends are.
Your friends?
Yeah, like friends with benefits?
So, you have open relationships? you ask.
Open, he says. Sure. I do what I want.
Before you have a chance to ask if this is his arrangement or theirs, he asks, Is it okay if I kiss you?
You’ve never been asked this in such a direct way. It makes you giggle, but from his face, you can tell he is perfectly serious. He’s waiting for an answer.
Yes, of course, you say, I’m pretty sure that’s why you’re here.
When you see him next, a quick pass on the sidewalk as you rush into work—your store’s owner is in town—he is with her again, the girl of cherry lips and direct gaze. Today, you are also wearing red lipstick and she stares, too long, before turning away. You wave to him and keep walking.
You find her on social media later that night, a few more clicks through his likes leads you to her screen name: JuicyViXXXen18. A compelling taunt, it seems. Her squares feature menstrual blood and a used tampon filling a toilet bowl, a distorted mirror selfie showcasing a prominent hickey, her seated on a bed with a large orange cat shielding her nakedness. Her comments are brash, provocative; she is public about her sexuality in a way that repulses you, and is undeniably erotic. She is, also, it appears, a doting friend/lover to the electrifying man-boy who just spent a night in your bed, though by the time—4 a.m.—you tumbled in there, lips swollen with kissing, sleep was the only thing on your mind. Your alarm went off at 7 a.m. for a weekend retreat with a friend. He slept beside you, affable and consensual as ever, and in the morning, when you woke him after showering, he asked for only a sip of coffee, complimenting you on your sweater. I love clothes, he said. You have good taste.
You wonder, scrolling down her feed, if you could fall in love with him and worry that the thought means you already have.
Could you be like her? The question itself feels dangerous, rattling around your brain. You’ve never had a friend/lover, and the one time it was propositioned, your rejection of the offer detonated like a grenade tossed amidst your too tidy life. She’s an exhibitionist, naive about how the world works—two luxuries you’ve never been allowed. No, you’ll never be like her.
And yet.
The next time you see him, he shows you his efficiency apartment, bathroom down the hall, and takes you out for Vietnamese food. Over Bahn Mi and spicy noodles, he asks without a hint of irony in his voice if you’re a liberal. His innocent intensity doesn’t surprise you but it is humorous, and uncomfortable. You know, tangentially, at least three other people in the restaurant and they all seem, suddenly, to be listening. The lights are dim, the decorations flimsy paper. The remains of soup swirl in your bowl. Where is that waiter?
Finally, you pull it together and say, I’m a half-gay, half-straight woman living in Northampton, what do you think?
He shrugs. Never know. So that’s a yes?
It is, you say.
Your place or mine? you ask, as soon as the check lands on the table. He grabs it before you can protest.
Yours is nicer, he says.
This is only marginally true, a margin widened by the bottle of Irish whiskey you pour.
It’s a week night and he asks after the second pour if you’d like to head to the bedroom. Sure, you say, because this is what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it? But there’s no heating vent in the bedroom and the walls are thin, the mattress chilly when you slip in beside him.
He is a deliriously good kisser. Eventually the shivering stops and the heat of lips mashing lips and skin gliding over skin drives you to reach for him. What you find is—well, you’re unsure what to make of the soft roll of flesh in your palm. You caress, tentatively, then less so, withdrawing your hand after a few minutes to concentrate on kissing. His skin glistens with a film of sweat, his lips flushed deep red like a throb. After what seems like a long enough time, you ask, Do you have a condom?
I don’t think so, he says. Do you?
It’s been a long time since I slept with a man, you tease, though this isn’t technically true. You fucked a man less than a year ago, no condom, no conversation about a condom, and you didn’t regret it. Your period wasn’t late that month, in fact, it came early, brought on, you assume by the close proximity to a body coursing with testosterone. Your now ex-partner was out of the country, not that she would have noticed. She was good at looking everywhere else.
Um, I could check my wallet.
He returns with his wallet, and pulls a battered foil square from its fold.
How long’s that been in there?
I dunno. High school, maybe.
Isn’t your generation supposed to be all about safe sex?
He flips the condom onto the night table. That’s your generation.
You smile and roll your eyes. Fair. Though I think we’re technically the same generation.
Sure, he says. Technically.
He kisses you and your stomach gives the finger to the demographics and data in your head.
As much as I want to trust that ancient condom right now, I’m about to ovulate, you say. Rain check?
You know when you’re going to ovulate? he asks.
I do, you say. It’s a perk of aging.
I need a cigarette, he says. He yanks on his jeans and shirt, pats down his pockets.
You dress and join him outside. The hunger is gone, and you both have work in the morning. You offer to let him stay the night but he declines and part of you is relieved. He does, however, ask for one more gulp of whiskey before he kisses you goodbye with the promise of next time.
The next time you see him, she stands beside him in a black wool trench coat, belted at her wasp-thin waist. He meets your eyes across the bustling sidewalk but makes no acknowledgement, so you take your coffee and sit on the curb, facing away. The weather has turned, finally, seasonably, cold, and your breath and the coffee steam into the bright day like smoke signals.
That night, tired and alone with a bottle of Chardonnay, you click down a rabbit hole of the internet, discovering her abandoned Tumblr, a site teeming with gauzy NSFW photos. Some, you think, are her. The naked thigh with scabbed up razor slashes crusty against the milk of sunless skin; a close-up of lips encircling a lit spliff flaring to life; two naked female bodies pressed together, in profile. Nothing as shocking as her current Instagram, but the fact that you’ve found this old place, that you’re looking at this old version of her, coils like a snake inside you. Does she even remember it exists? Does she care?
You fall asleep with the lights on and dream she visits you, smirking at the empty bottle of white, and you show her the collection of bourbon atop the antique hutch in the corner, she leans forward and kisses you, a volatile and forceful kiss, and when you startle awake you are sweaty and your head is spinning. The cats look on impassively.
He comes the night after next with a fresh pack of condoms, which he tosses on the coffee table. These are expensive, he says.
You shrug, and say, Worth it?
He asks for a drink, and you oblige, and after he gulps the first whiskey, he asks for a second. You wave your hand at the bottle. Help yourself, you say, and he does, twice more. In your impatience to be fucked, to be desired, it doesn’t occur to you that he is steeling himself for what’s to come, that he might be, for all his smooth sweetness, nervous.
Finally, he stands and grabs the condoms and gestures toward the bedroom, You ready?
The bed lacks a headboard and is pushed up against an outside wall. The mattress is glacial. Underwear to underwear, skin prickled over in goosebumps, for the splittest of seconds the thought crosses your mind that it would be okay just to keep kissing, kissing into delirium, and then call it a night, but he bought the condoms, and they’re here, on the table next to the bed, and he’s humping against you in such a way that reminds you of an untrained puppy. You’re used to lovers quick to fire so when you reach below the waistband of his boxers and find a limp guppy you pull back and ask if he’s okay. He strokes himself a little, but goes soft again when you try to roll the condom on.
I hate condoms, he says.
I do too, you say, but here we are. And you spent all that money.
He gives you a sleepy side-eye, somewhere between amused and baleful, and says, If you pump really fast, that should do it, then get on quick.
His suggestion works, and in an outlyingly graceful movement, he flips you onto your back. Pounding, pounding, which is enjoyable for about two seconds, and you think it can’t last long but he keeps pounding, pounding and you bite back a laugh at the seriousness of his expression and also the absurd idea that this could have been, somehow, any different.
Afterward, you share a shifty-eyed cigarette and another glass of whiskey and he tells you he has to work early. He shrugs into his jacket. He’s not doing a James Dean impression, but he may as well be: the pouty lips, the coiffed hair—even now perfect, when your own resembles a bird’s nest or some other untamable mess—the sultry stare. You kiss him long and steady and his grin wobbles as you press Tropic of Capricorn into his hands. Tonight, before the tumble, he said he reads, that he has a copy of The Dharma Bums on his night table, and this has sparked delight in you.
You’ll like it, you say, Miller paved the way for the Beats.
He looks at the book in his hands, looks toward the door, says, Thank you.
You are imagining all the naked conversations you will have in bed about books and writers and cities and ideas as you bolt the barn door behind him and pour yourself the remainder of the whiskey. What does he talk about with her, you wonder as you sip. Does she read? Does she give him books?
Eventually, much later than is healthy for a work night, you leave the two empty tumblers, side by side, on the table and head to bed.
So, how did it go??? your best friend—a mom of one, pregnant with a second—wants to know.
Heavy pelvis, sore head: the light in the apartment diffuse and watery.
Good, you tell her.
Good?!?! she shrieks. That’s it, good?
As good as fucking a 19-year-old can be.
She laughs, says, He is a fox, but there’s a reason sex gets better with age.
I think my pelvis is bruised.
Oh, god, she says. Lucky you.
You send him a series of texts to which he replies with single words, and then an invitation that he accepts but cancels at the last minute.
The apartment seems smaller and dirtier, the darkness of pre-winter solstice like a crouched animal. It starts to snow and never stops.
The days drag on, interminable, a series of drawn tarot cards and self-help chapters, until the day you pull the Strength card, and she, who you’ve now followed through a number of online profiles and posts, each more jarring and alluring than the last, arrives in your store, looking for all the world like a tourist who got off at the wrong stop. With her is another girl, this one blonde and prone to moody stares, whom you recognize from late night romps through the internet wilderness. Despite her skittishness in this strange land, the girl of black nails and intense eye contact flashes a radiant red smile at your greeting. Your heart thuds. Does she know who you are?
You keep to the order of hand-poured soy candles you’re putting together while she scans the jewelry cases. Try not to look up too often, try not to feel whatever magnetic pull her moves exert on your synapses. White cable-knit stockings under a band-aid skirt, shiny Mary Jane heels tap-tap-tapping over the acacia floor. In a low, but not low enough, whisper, she tells her friend that the boy who has weeks since stopped answering your texts will meet them for lunch. You wonder what it is like to be so oblivious to your impact on those around you—if this is indeed oblivion and not guile.
Then, she’s at the counter, her eyes a pair of cut-sapphires ringed in kohl, piercing you. Though it shouldn’t, her youth—the simple nervousness of it—catches you off-guard. For a moment, you feel protective, not of yourself, but of her. The world, and you in it, wants to devour her—wants, as you well know, her beauty for its own. Wants to break her of it.
Hi, you say.
Can you help me? she asks. With a pair of earrings?
Sure, you say. Heart wild dancer in your chest. Key in hand. What are we looking at?
She leads the way to a pair of garnet studs. She points, and as you open the case, she asks, Are they— elegant?
The word hurts, though you couldn’t say exactly why. She watches you reach for the card and lift the posts to the light.
It’s a bezel setting, but it’s hammered, which gives it texture, and the backs are left open. You pop a stud off the card and hold it up. It lets the light through, so the stone glows.
You hand her the earring, fingers brushing ever so slightly over her palm. She lifts it, cautiously, to the light.
Are they for a special event? you ask.
For a friend, she says. It’s her birthday.
The pair is much too nice for a college student’s birthday present, but you nod and say, She’d be crazy if she didn’t love them.
As she follows you back to the register, she says, You smell really good. Is it perfume?
You shake your head and tug a strand of your hair, which is blown out to look like the lion’s mane on the tarot card.
Probably the gloss and spray—I just washed my hair this morning.
She smiles and you imagine she knows everything that happened between you and the boy.
You do have a great mop, she says. You remind me of one of those cats, you know, the shy ones, with all the fur.
A Maine coon, you say.
Exactly, she says. Her smile isn’t perfect, but it’s close.
After your shift, you buy a bottle of cheap Merlot and walk home in the long-dark streets to your cats. You don sweats and crank the heat and put a frozen pot pie in the oven. It’s late and the bottle is nearing empty when you click into her latest Instagram account. There’s a new picture, posted only minutes before—so new no one has yet liked it—of her hands cupping a dead cardinal over a background of dirty snow. The black nail polish on her thumbnails is chipped. There’s no caption.
Without thinking twice—or at all—you tap the heart.
Sara Rauch is the author of What Shines From It: Stories and XO. She lives in Massachusetts with her family.
Me: Black blazer. Striped blouse. Mascara probably running down my face.
You asked if I was OK. I didn’t answer. Too busy staring at my phone, rereading that last message.
Decent guys are hard to come by nowadays. Would love to chat. I never got the chance to thank you.
Promise I’ll talk next time.
Paint-n-Sip Class in Fremont Neighborhood
In a class full of couples, I was the loner sitting behind you, next to an empty station. No sense letting a perfectly good Groupon deal go to waste!
You chose red wine. I chose beer.
Our teacher jokingly reminded us to remember which glass had the booze and which one had the ooze (dirty paint water). Everyone cracked up until I made that mistake.
You were so sweet to bring me water, gently slapping my back until I stopped coughing.
Care to savor a sunset instead of painting one?
I’m always up for spending time outside.
Food Sample Vendor at the Costco off Hwy 99
You gave me an extra chicken nugget after a sample hog cut me off. You even squeezed some BBQ sauce into a cup when no one was looking.
“Something extra,” you said, and I said, “You’re extra.”
You laughed and then I laughed and then we both laughed.
Wanna grab a real meal?
Waiting Room at the Dermatologist Office in Kirkland
We both had a rash on our arms. Yours was braille-like and dark red; mine was more abstract like a Jackson Pollock painting, if he painted in only pink. (I love Jackson Pollock!)
I could tell you were trying not to scratch, doing all these funny movements with your body. I totally get it.
That itch? It’s real.
I wanted to ask what happened, but then you stepped out, and I got called in.
Fancy a story swap?
Bedroom Department at the Kent IKEA
We were gauging the firmness of a king-sized mattress.
You lay down and I followed. Reflex, I suppose.
It was thrilling to lie there next to you, even for a moment, catching a whiff of your woodsy cologne as you shifted positions.
Your finger brushed against mine, and you jolted upright.
Did you feel a spark too?
Reach out (again) and let me know.
I don’t bite.
Self-Checkout at the Mount Vernon Walmart
We were picking up the same single-serve frozen dinners and off-brand 2-in-1 Shampoo Conditioner. When the barcode of my Fettuccine Alfredo box didn’t scan, you scanned yours so I wouldn’t have to wait for the attendant.
“Thank you for coming to my rescue,” I said, and you said, “Anytime.”
Did you really mean anytime?
How about tomorrow?
Any day is good, honestly.
Get in touch.
I’m interested to know what else we have in common.
Outside Target near Alderwood Mall
You were running out the automated doors. I was walking towards them. You glanced back and didn’t see me. When we collided, a bottle of Hennessy slipped out from under your dark blue hoodie and shattered on the ground. We locked eyes, and before I could apologize, you vanished.
Let me make it up to you.
With me, you won’t have to run anymore.
Porta-Potties before the Seattle Half-Marathon
You were in the line next to me. I was feeling anxious. Truth is, I’d only been training for a few days. Hey, better than nothing, right?
You looked so fit in those bright green shorts and matching compression sleeves, a heart rate sensor strapped around your toned chest.
Was your heart pounding as fast as mine?
“Come here often?” I said, and you shot me this curious look before taking off for the open stall as if the race had started.
Still curious?
How about we train together sometime?
I bet you have amazing stamina. 😉
RE: Missed Connections
You posted about me in the Missed Connections. I answered back. Twice, just in case. Did you get my messages?
I am the “cute” (according to my grandma), “tall” (well, tall-ish, depending on who’s next to me) “woman in her mid-30s” (close enough; age is so tricky to pin down!) at “Safeway last weekend”.
You spent a while in the produce section, checking out the ripeness of a cantaloupe.
It’s so hard to judge the sweetness of something from the outside.
Trust me, I know.
Sometimes you just have to take a chance.
Jennifer Lai lives in Washington state. She has work in HAD, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Emerge Literary Journal, New Flash Fiction Review, The Dribble Drabble Review, and elsewhere.
The first time I ask God for a sign, He leaves a dead mouse on the sidewalk.
I see it, curled up next to Mom’s wilting dahlias, on my way to the school bus. At first I think it’s a gray rock. Then, as I get closer, a miniature stuffed animal. But there are flies buzzing all around it. Its perfect, tiny paws are drawn up near its face. It doesn’t smell, at least.
Okay? I say, my hands steepled together, but God has His Do Not Disturb sign up.
I don’t know why God would leave me such a disgusting message. I don’t need rabies, or scurvy, or whatever it is dead mice can give you. And I don’t need a reminder that the flowers Mom and I spent hours planting last summer are already dying. I just need to know if Mom will be okay. And yes, I’ve heard all about His Mysterious Ways, I know He’s not supposed to hand out easy answers, but it’s not like my question affects nations, or important people, or the fate of the world. It’s just my mother. And isn’t God allowed to break the rules when He wants to?
After school, while Dad slices an apple, I ask him if God has ever talked to him. Not just the in-your-heart bullshit, but actual words.
Dad says to watch my language. He explains that God doesn’t talk like that. Not His style.
“Remember that story?” he says, referring to the one single time he, not Mom, made me wear a flowery dress and dragged me to Sunday school. “After the Ark landed on the mountain and all the people and animals came out onto solid ground, God put a rainbow in the sky. It was His way of promising that He would never destroy the world with a flood again.”
“Is that real?” I ask.
“Of course rainbows are real.”
“No, I mean the story.”
Dad doesn’t answer, but he does give me cheese cubes with the apple.
A few days later, God leaves me something else: a deer track in the mud. I wasn’t supposed to cut through the park, and now I wish I hadn’t. What am I supposed to do with a deer track? At least the mouse was a real thing. A deer track is just a hollow. An emptiness.
But then again, who am I to question God? I hold my breath, listening for the snap of a twig. Looking for a flash of tan fur. Maybe this is a good sign, after all. When Mom was healthy, she loved seeing deer wander through our yard, even though she complained that they bit the heads off our zinnias and brought ticks.
But I don’t see a thing. Only trees and more trees. Dad says deer spook easily, but Mom always used to find them. Also snakes, painted turtles, and birds zooming overhead. She taught me the difference between cranes and herons and geese and swans.
“Cranes migrate south for winter,” Mom told me, when I was eight and she was someone who told me things, “but they always come back. They nest in the same spot every time.”
I squint at the deer track and try to figure out what it looks like—a coffee bean, or two tadpoles, or a heart split down the middle.
Does this mean Mom will wake up early tomorrow and make coffee and be waiting at the kitchen table when I come downstairs, smiling like sunshine, her tortoiseshell glasses on, hair piled up in a fluffy bun like a puffball mushroom? Does it mean her heart is broken forever?
God, I plead, be more specific, please.
And maybe He’s finally listening. Because at dinnertime, Mom comes downstairs and makes soup. She walks to the corner store to buy fresh bread, and the three of us share tomato bisque and bread and softened butter. Mom cuts another slice of bread, lays it on my plate, and I think of the story of the fishes and the loaves. When she brushes her hand against the back of my neck, a shiver crisscrosses my whole body.
“You need a trim,” she says softly. “Should we do a haircut tomorrow?”
I don’t say anything—I don’t want to spook her. I don’t want her to pull her hand away.
“See?” Dad says, wiping a spatter of red from his chin. “Look at you, up and at ‘em.”
Mom smiles in a way that makes me think of dead prairie grass.
That night, I hear her crying—not loud, not angry. She sounds like a kitten trapped under a basket. Dad’s voice rumbles through the floorboards, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. I press both fists to my eyelids and try to picture her smiling—the way her eyes used to sparkle—but all I can see is that stupid deer track. I hope the deer is smart enough to stay off the road.
The next morning, Mom stays in bed, the floral comforter drawn over her like a garden. She tells me she won’t be able to cut my hair today. She tells me she’s sorry.
I crawl into bed with her. She pulls me close and lets me stay there, even though I’ll be late to school, even though she probably just wants to sleep. Something taps against the window—a long, pointed beak, or a twig, or an arrow. Maybe this is the sign I’ve been waiting for. Maybe there’s a rainbow stretching across the sky, a promise that He will never again destroy my mother in this particular way, and I only need to look up to believe it.
I close my eyes and burrow under the blankets. I can feel my mother breathing next to me, our bodies rising and falling like the flood.
Lindy Biller is a writer based in Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and the Wigleaf Top 50. Her chapbook, Love at the End of the World, was published by The Masters Review in 2023.
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