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.
my mother’s family is from the hills of tennessee—or maybe bluegrass kentucky, i never really knew. she always talked about grandma’s house—another thing i didn’t know—and how the family would gather there
so i guess that’s why we’re in some state where the grass flows like water and my voice sounds so out of place. everyone’s eyes are red rimmed and don’t look directly at me, while my mother sits on the far end of a rotted pew bench and smirks at fake pleas to god and prayers to save grandmama’s soul—
skeleton heads and taxidermy line the walls of my cousin’s uncle’s grandpa’s double wide. they pass clear punch in solo cups while we sit with wood panelled walls to our backs.
my mother laughs with coyotes and wraps snakes around her wrists. even her own family is afraid of her predator’s gaze—i puff my chest out with pride: become animal.
some boy who is related to me by blood or skin or spit pokes at a dark mound marring this southern dirt. he tells me it’s dead. i tell him we all are.
i pick up the carcass and eat it— picking my teeth with the bones
Emma Townsend is a two-time children’s book author and published poet. She recently graduated from Purdue University and is now completing her Master’s degree in Library and Information Science. Emma loves poetry that connects with one’s past and typically alludes to her own life experiences in her work.
Texas women love and curse with a fatal bless your heart. Sun-burned plains enclose them, their multi-colored bodies corralled
in branded jeans. Tender cuts on man-sized platters piled high to heaven with heaping sides of disrespect, they live to be consumed and then discarded
like Porsha Ngumezi. Doctors wouldn’t scrape her womb and she bled out, screaming, young and Black. No charity for her, she left this world in Houston
just like Josseli Barnica, who died while Catholic and brown. The green card in her purse meant life but not liberty because heartbeats from a dying fetus mean a one-way
trip to glory. Nevaeh Crain, pretty white girl with a butterfly tattoo in a sundown town, could tell you that, if sepsis hadn’t starved the pink from all her organs.
Meanwhile hypocrites under Hippocratic oath cull women’s bones to pick their teeth in self-congratulation because in Texas, praise Jesus, the right to life abides.
M. M. Adjarian has published her work in TheBaltimore Review, Verdad, South 85, The Missing Slate, Pif Magazine, Gravel, Glint, Grub Street, Crack the Spine, Poetry Flash, and Poetry Quarterly and is currently at work on her first poetry collection and a family memoir titled This Life That Binds. She lives in Austin.
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