Month: August 2024

Remove pieces from box and place them flat on the ground.

There are going to be more than you expect.

Assemble from largest to smallest.

Piper set a place at the table for her dad. When I tell her again that he’s not going to show up, she asks again what he said on the phone. And what he said is that he’s probably not going to make it.

But he is probably and almost a lot of things. He always has been. I used to think that meant our lives were going to get better. I wish I had figured out sooner that together, Probably and Almost, become synonyms for Lost Time.

Use this diagram as a guide.

Do not contact us to report the diagram is two-dimensional. We know. Come to your own conclusions about anything that is not clearly visible. Then keep going until you are right.

I make Piper whatever she wants for her birthday dinner. This year she wants Fancy Spaghetti. Fancy Spaghetti is just regular spaghetti with pepperoni and cut-up mozzarella sticks mixed in.

As I cook, I hear her at the Cul-De-Sac Deluxe, making us a pantomime version of the same thing. Every few minutes she wants to know what’s taking so long. She’s done already, so I should be too.

This is best completed by two people but can be done alone.

I bought a confetti cake at the grocery store and put it in the Cul-De-Sac’s oven before I wrapped the whole thing in wrapping paper. This meant she had to open her present first, but she was fine with that. We’ve learned to not get hung up on doing things in a certain order.

This will take longer than you expect.

I lit the candles and sang Happy Birthday. I tried to sing with the enthusiasm of two parents, with the enthusiasm of a room full of friends. I tried to sing so it didn’t sound like we’ve had to move twice in one year.

Piper forced a smile and stared at the table until I was done.

You will still be putting this together long after all the pieces are gone.

This is intentional and along with our contemporary design, and commitment to quality, is a part of the charm of the KidTown family of products.

The cake was too stale to ignore. We took turns dumping our pieces in the trash and cutting ourselves another. Every time we passed each other, we felt closer, and with each new piece, we thought that maybe this time it will be different.

We do this over and over, year after year, passing each other, pretending the next time will be better, until it’s not about the cake anymore. Until it’s not about her dad or where we live or what is and is not ok to keep hidden from each other.

It’s about not stopping until we can throw something away without feeling guilty.

It’s about both of us knowing that we’re not alone.

Nathan Willis (@nathan1280) is a writer from Ohio. His stories have appeared in Split Lip, Pithead Chapel, Passages North, Necessary Fiction, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He can be found online at nathan-willis.com.

After the first inhalation of you, after our date at the top of the Hyatt, the Compass Room it was called, like a sign like a magnet like some kind of direction, where we drank milk in martini glasses and the servers thought it cute because we were only sixteen, after we spun around the city, breathed in the 360 degree view, the Phoenix sunset like the cover of a magazine, after the lights flicked on the houses below with their white picket fences, the promise of them, after the white dress white veil white vows white honeymoon where we took the train as Paris flashed by and I wanted to be the kind of newlyweds who stayed in bed for days, limbs tangled under rumpled French sheets, laughing “pas de service de ménage” when French maids came to clean, but it wasn’t like that at all, not at all and I wondered if something was wrong with me, after we came home and bought the house with a brown slump-block fence, after the nights when you rocked our daughters in the delivery room when I lost so much blood, sang “Sweet Baby James” at two a.m, changed diapers, taught them how to ride a Schwinn, to play soccer, to cook salmon with the perfect amount of garlic and lemon, after they said Dad is a better cook than Mom and they were right, after the trips to Disneyland when they asked to ride Space Mountain with you, only you, after you called them Daddy’s girls and they called you Superman, after you played “Kryptonite” by Three Doors Down on repeat in your black Silverado and fancied yourself Clark Kent, after I didn’t listen closely to the lyrics, after you went on midnight drives alone—you said the desert made you claustrophobic, after you came home smelling like something more than fresh air, after you blasted “It Wasn’t Me,” by Shaggy on repeat later, after I didn’t listen closely to the lyrics, after the midnight phone call, after I listened to the lyrics, after what was white became black became some shade of grey, after you didn’t beg me to stay, after I wouldn’t have stayed if you had, after you got the truck I got the dogs we shared the kids, after I tried to block the lyrics for them, after I failed, after the final threads of your cape unraveled, after we cried, after the years the years the years the years, after that week in hospice when the lyrics fell away, when we sat at your bedside when we held your hands, when we cried, after your ashes were scattered in the Pacific because you said being on the water was the only place you felt free.

After, we’re on the train again, two kids clutching Eurail passes, still-shiny rings on still-smooth hands, me just twenty-four and you a year younger. I remember how you teased that I’d always be older— and the truth of it takes my breath away—you, forever fifty-three, me adding years to the distance between us. I alone, now, remember the train, speeding cross-country that July when we gazed through sun-speckled windows, sunflower fields and Paris rushing by. We toasted our future with a bottle of Viognier in our own private cabin and later that night I was woken by a whoosh as the door opened. I saw the dark-haired man with my wallet and you just behind him, reaching grabbing retrieving shoving, throwing him off the train at the very next stop. Saying don’t ever come back, don’t come near my wife or I’ll kill you, and I swear I can still see your cape, the ghost of it.

Kelli Short Borges writes from her home in Phoenix, Arizona, where her family has lived for six generations. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Peatsmoke, Fictive Dream, Cleaver, Your Impossible Voice, and Moon City Review, among many other journals. Kelli’s stories have won contests and been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions. Recently, her work was chosen for Best Microfiction 2024. She is currently working on her first novel.