Lost Balloon

Teri gave Amy the worst advice.
If you want Joel to notice you, crash your car in front of his house.
Now, a Dodge cruises slowly down St. Ann’s Avenue.

***

I take a black car uptown. I sit on an examination table and listen to the best fertility doctor in Manhattan say crazy things like the tests are normal and you should be able to get pregnant.

***

1988 just looks like bad luck. Double eights, twin infinities standing back to back like fat little snowmen. 1988 is also when we got into the dark arts, ordering supplies from the back pages of comic books, next to ads for x-ray glasses and black soap, where the print is small and smudged, stuff like horoscope scrolls and love wheels, fortune dice and curse books. We stuff Snoopy envelopes with babysitting money, sending it off to small town PO boxes, waiting 6 to 8 weeks for a response. I whisper these addresses out loud, at night, in the dark, before I fall asleep. Pueblo, Colorado is my favorite incantation. It feels like a smooth grey stone on my tongue. I am 17 years old and I have never left Bloomington. While we wait, here is what we do: visit graveyards. Pour salt circles. Fall asleep with our radios on, tuned to ghost stations.

***

One test involves injecting my stomach with dye and crawling into a machine that looks like a convection oven. This experience had been described by someone in my online support group as “a pain worse than childbirth.” I replied this was a cruel analogy to use with a group of infertile women who had no idea what childbirth felt like and would’ve given anything to experience it. I received 275 likes and a gold coin.

***

Amy circles the block in her dad’s car, a green Dodge sedan that seats 9. I can’t do this, she says, panicking. Winners make bold moves, Teri says. Goddamn Teri! When Amy hits that pole, the windows and mirrors shatter, spraying the sidewalk in front of Joel’s house with tiny blades and suddenly he emerges into the fog wearing a slouchy trenchcoat. His hair is spiked. The rain mists his face like a special effect. He lives inside a music video and we wilt in his presence. Teri jumps out of the car and lies on top of the broken glass on the sidewalk and asks Joel to take pictures with her new Canon. He does. Then he starts messing with her hair and arranging the glass shards around her face and Amy gets out and leans against her car and just stares at them. After a while we all leave, except for Teri who stays with Joel. Amy drives to this empty lot behind the school and we sit in the backseat with the doors open eating Little Debbies because they’re 99 cents a box and Amy’s crying saying her dad’s going to kill her and she destroyed his car for nothing and she’s going to curse Teri tonight at midnight. What kinda curse, I ask. Acne, she says, pulling out her little spiral curse book, the new expanded edition with the baby blue cover. I have the pink one, it’s older. She goes to the index and runs her finger down the list. Acne. Agitation. Barren. Boils. Cancer. Colitis. Death. Gas. Hirsute. Hives. We all agree that Acne sounds perfect. Then we do some fortunes.

 ***

I go to another specialist, Dr. Faron. I like her right away. She has blue glasses and a bunch of tattoos under her lab coat. When she holds my hand and says we’re going to sort this whole thing out I actually start crying, which I’ve never done in a doctor’s office, not once during all these years. I cry for a long time. She brings me Kleenex and water. Then she asks me the strangest question. Did you, or anyone you know, purchase a “curse book” from the back of Archie’s Pals ’N’ Gals in 1988? When I say yes, she nods and writes me a prescription. Eight pills, twice daily, for two weeks.

***

Brushing glass off the dash, Amy throws her fortune-telling dice and gets world travel. Tracey gets rich. Didi gets famous. I get…many children. This fortune is a horrible trick and Amy knows it. She knows I would die before ending up like my mother. She knows I’m leaving the day after graduation. And she sure as hell knows I’m never having kids because I’ve only said it about ten million times. I try to explain all of this but everyone’s laughing and finally I get out of the car and walk home in the rain. Amy yells you know those fortunes are bullshit but I just keep walking, singing a song that goes fuck you Amy fuck you.

***

Almost midnight and the kitchen phone rings. It’s Amy, apologizing and offering to do a special curse, just for me. The one that makes it so you never have kids, she says. I say sure, why not, and then she throws in a second one. “A bonus,” she calls it. A curse so I never forget her. This makes me laugh. I wasn’t going to forget her, even if I wanted to.

 ***

The day after graduation, I leave, just like I said I would. I travel the world. Barcelona, Mexico City, London, Paris. I adopt a new name. I cut off all my hair. I even lose my Midwestern accent. But pregnancy’s a funny thing. The dreams are so real, and they’re always the same: I’m back in Bloomington, riding in Amy’s green Dodge. We’re usually having what feels like an important conversation, too, one of those long, intense sessions that seems like it holds the key to life or the secret of the universe or something. When I wake up, I can’t remember a single word.

DJ Wolfinsohn’s first published work was a riot grrrl ‘zine. Her fiction and poetry can be found in Gone Lawn, HAD, Variant Lit, Hog River Press, Vestal Review, and on her website, debbywolfinsohn.com. Her ‘zine can be found in the rock ‘n roll hall of fame in Cleveland, where it is part of the permanent collection. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her family.

It’s her job to keep vigil of the small pad of paper next to the overpriced pens, to make sure there is enough space for doodling, signatures, and the occasional confession. Her job until she finds a better job, a real job, but she’s been out of work for too long, and now marketing copy is written by robots and she has never been strong at bookkeeping, even her own.

Some customers draw squiggles or three-dimensional boxes. She finds spirals and infinity signs. An elderly man boasts that he can draw a perfectly straight arrow. Occasionally a profanity.

Eat me. Bite me, written with a garden party gel pen.

Three weeks before her husband killed himself, a stranger at the grocery store told her that she was blessed. Her toddler sat in the shopping cart with a smile and a wave for everyone. Her baby slept against her chest in the carrier—his soft cheek glued to her skin with his drool. After the meals and groceries stopped crowding her front steps and freezer, she was responsible for feeding her children again. They never cared for the lasagna or Shepard’s pie—meals convenient for freezing but unsuitable for toddler and baby taste buds.

Sometimes she wonders about her bad luck. Maybe it was the test paper she stole off the History teacher’s desk in 8^th grade, and how she lied about it when they questioned her. Not me, she said. Someone else.

I have lice, someone writes in green cursive.

Let me get a different pen, the pediatrician said when she was fourteen, leaving her topless and cold on the examining table, wondering why.

Don’t tell her, in opaque ink.

When her son’s fever doesn’t drop by Monday, she decides he’s just about old enough to stay home alone. He can call her at work in case of an emergency. The $85 she’ll make during these six hours will fill the gas tank and pay for the children’s Motrin if she can find any on her way home.

At the end of the shift, she tears off the sheet and smiles when she sees her name. She looks around. She’s never met another one. Is this customer also named after the dad she never met?

Maybe it’s because she’s never been caught stealing one of the Positive Pens ($15.95) – the gray one that nobody every buys, with the mantra: Today is a Good Day. 

A smooshed stink bug lies besides the pens, and she uses a blank page to scoop and discard the carcass.

I love you. I love you. I love you, written with the iridescent fur pom pen.

This time she pulls the paper off carefully. Before she leaves, she folds her love message, careful not to crease the edges, and drops it inside her coat pocket next to her heart.

Liz Matthews holds a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a Master of Arts in English Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. Liz is the the Program Director of the Westport Writers’ Workshop, a nonprofit literary organization based in Westport, Connecticut where she also teaches creative writing workshops. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Milk Candy Review, The Tishman Review, The Rumpus, and Brevity among other places.

My husband and I have not spoken for many years.

We’re not estranged or anything. We live together—happily I might add—but at a certain point silence just became easier than talking.

I could never have imagined this silence when we were first together. Back then it seemed like we could talk for a millennium and never run out of things to say. We used to drive way out past the outskirts of our little college town, talking, talking. I would have listened to him describe every blade of grass. That town was the first place I ever lived where you had to use the high beams at night. One night when I was behind the wheel, Bill—my husband, Bill—laughed as he explained to me that you have to turn lights on and off for other cars. Maybe that’s why talking felt so much easier when we were young. We had so much to learn, so much to teach each other. So much to argue about. So much to resolve.

Yesterday, while I was brushing out my hair in the bathroom, I heard a crash come from the kitchen. When I went downstairs, Bill was kneeling over a broken white porcelain serving tray. I couldn’t recall ever using that tray, even though I knew we had had it forever. Why did he have the serving tray out? Where had we stored it, where had it even come from?

I looked down at Bill looking up at me. I swept my hands around in front of me. Everything all right?

Bill’s shoulders moved just barely up and down. His upward-looking eyes seemed pleading. I dropped it. I don’t know how it happened.

I knelt down across from him and picked up a piece of porcelain. The edge was sharp. My finger bled.

I went to the sink to wash out the cut while Bill swept up the mess and threw it in the trash. The water rushed. The broken pieces went chunk chunk chunk. My finger stung under the cool water. I racked my brain: Who had given us that serving tray? Who would be fool enough to give us a thing like that? And why had we kept it, all these many years—through moves across the country, births and deaths—just to break it now, untouched, pristine, and never used?

That night with a Band-Aid on my finger I went down and searched the kitchen like a jewel thief, looking for things to throw away.

Susan Holcomb holds an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and studied for a PhD in physics at Cornell. Her writing has been published in the Southern Indiana Review, The Boston Globe, Epiphany, and elsewhere. Her chapbook WOLFBABY, a collection of flash fiction, won the 2023 Cupboard Pamphlet chapbook contest and will be published this year.

I was the Sheriff.

I saw the kids in my back seat, leaning on each other, and knew that when people found out that I didn’t arrest them, they would say it was because I was soft. Not that I had gone soft – was replaced gone. Because I was a woman.

Gender would come into play again as soon as they discovered that the kids were in love. The girl rested her head on the boy’s chest and her eyes, though fixed on me, had a wide, glassy full-moon quality to them. She looked tired and scared. They both looked scared.

Of course, it would be as if they had forgotten I was a woman when they had elected me Sheriff – and for the past six months that I had been Sheriff, too. There I was a sexless thing…until I made a mistake.

I wasn’t exactly sure it was a mistake. These were good kids. I knew their parents, their teachers; they got A’s. They didn’t ‘liase’ around as the housewives around these parts liked to say. Teenagers eventually did questionable things; it came from the fact that at some point, at that age, you either thought you were or didn’t want to turn into: a popular person, a witch, Juliet, your mother or crucially, your true self. And that was only the half of it – I only knew what it was like to be a girl. The boy was lying back there almost as dead as Romeo. And the way they held hands: they were on the precipice, the cruel world on their heels, with nowhere to go but down, clutching to one another, the last thing they would ever do.

My deputy – he has a face as pretty as the boy’s impossibly long fine eyelashes – calls me ‘Ma’am’. The same thing I called my mother since I was three – especially when I was three. This deputy has been nothing less than expressly polite and efficient and eager to do a good job and I want to trust him like I want a hole in my chest so that my pudding heart can leak out. Not that I would trust him more if he was a woman but still; I feel surrounded by men who want to get me like single women vying for the flying bouquet. The boy was beautiful enough to be a bride and the girl didn’t know the toll of what being a woman was…at least, not yet.

Even I was making this about sex, I hated that. I was the Sheriff. I saw things, not just for what they appeared to be but for what they were, and not just because I was paid to do that, either. Shouldn’t I have been above that?

The boy spoke and I saw myself in his eyes: a dangerous thing incapable of mercy. And yet, in the eyes of the people of this little town, incapable of anything but mercy. Because I was a woman. I could be both and neither.

I told them what I was prepared to do. The girl cried. The boy called me “Ma’am.”

Ena Kaitch started writing proper stories when she was seventeen but has been writing practically every day since she was nine, when she still lived in the country she was born in, South Africa. She never thought she would be a writer but hopes to be worthy of the title one day. “pudding heart” is the first of her stories to be published.

The theme of the class this semester is love, and the kids have been – most of the kids have been – diligently studying philosophy and law and sociology in order to write their research papers, but there’s a story I always have to tell toward the end of the year. It’s a true story, which means the kids tend to buy it, or I tend to trust it more, but I like to trot it out when students start looking for shortcuts, or start trying to do calculus with their grade percentage, or start trying to find the easy way out. The story goes like this.

When I was a boy I hated to brush my teeth. My mother would tell me to brush my teeth and I would walk into the bathroom and walk back out again. You weren’t in there long enough, my mother would say, so I would walk into the bathroom and count to 100, and walk back out again. I didn’t hear the water, my mother would say, so I would walk into the bathroom and turn on the water and count to 100 and turn off the water and walk back out again. The toothbrush isn’t wet, she’d say. So I’d walk into the bathroom and turn on the water and put the toothbrush under the water and count to 100–

“When you were a kid you didn’t brush your teeth?” says one guy in the back. Kaden. I could murder Kaden, not just today but most days. “Shut up, Kaden,” says Tina, and I try not to smile. Tina’s my barometer. Big and beautiful, she sits right up front and has the remarkable ability to allow every emotion she’s ever had to pass completely across her face. If something lands, Tina’s expression lets me know. And if it doesn’t, her scrunched up nose tells me I’ve got to go back, or run ahead, but for god’s sake don’t stay where I am.

Tina gives Kaden the stinkface and turns back around to me and waits for the coupe de grâce. The moral of my toothbrushing story. So, I give it.

After I’m done grading what I’m sure will be Tina’s just fine paper about the five love languages and Kaden’s profoundly incompetent paper about the benefits of polyamory, I’ll have the summer to finish my book. I plan on calling it Prostate Meridian, or something like that, and I won’t bore you with all the details, but suffice to say it’s about a man whose wife has left him for some schmo and he chases them both into Mexico. The guy spends the entire story trying to find his wife and when he does, at the end, it’s obvious that her life has fallen apart. The man she ran away with has left her. She’s broke, she’s homeless, and she’s sick with malaria. Our protagonist finally catches up with her in a hospital in Oaxaca, and when he walks into her room she, with obvious effort, rolls over in her bed, and shows him her back.

I told this story to my now ex-wife and she nodded, which surprised me, but shouldn’t have, I suppose. Anyway, at the very end of the book, in the final pages, as the protagonist takes his quiet wife home to Arkansas or wherever it is they’re from (I haven’t decided), they stop for the night and sit on the beach, and they find themselves talking about love.

“Love,” the man says, “is a decision you make every day to live that day in accordance with someone else. The infinite pieces of that day derive their meaning from that decision, and that meaning is agreed upon, and is therefore identical for both parties involved.”

“Love,” the woman says, “is the fire you can’t put out. It’s the pressure in your chest that keeps you awake. It’s what makes you cry when you’re driving to work. It’s the taste in your mouth when you look at the leaves.”

The man doesn’t say anything for a minute. He looks out at the stars and he listens to the waves and then he turns to his wife and he says, “But they can be the same thing. Don’t you see that if we just work hard every day we can make it the same thing?” “But that’s just it,” the woman says back to him. “It’s not supposed to be work. Or rather,” she says, “it’s work not to do it. What’s really hard work,” she says, “what’s really hard work,” I would have her say, “is to do absolutely nothing at all.”

And then the man would pick up the woman’s hand from where it was lying next to him in the sand. He would reach for it suddenly, as though he were drowning, or were suddenly aware he was drowning and had in fact been drowning for quite some time, and he’d look at that hand, a hand that he knows better than his own, just as much as he knows her eyes better than he knows his own, and he’d raise the hand to his mouth, and as he did so the woman would turn those eyes away, and drop that hand back to the sand.

Cameron MacKenzie’s work has appeared in Plume, Salmagundi, and The Michigan Quarterly Review, among other places. His novel The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career, about the Mexican Revolution, was published in 2018. His collection of short fiction, River Weather, appeared in 2021. His flash fiction collection Theories of Love is forthcoming from Alternating Current Press.

Mrs. Hatch is a slouch-shouldered, boulder-footed ogre. When she writes on the board, chalk shrieks and crumbles. Her voice is deep and moist, sonorous, an abandoned, slime-slick well with something unspeakable at the bottom. If there even is a bottom. Not a well you’d entrust with your precious coin, your secret wish. Dead flies pepper her windowsills.

At recess, Angela and I sit in the forked maple, knees touching, hers immaculate in white tights and mine mottled with scabbing scrapes and Band-Aid residue, whispering what we know about Mrs. Hatch. Her feet are toeless slabs of putrid flesh; her shoes are stuffed with dirt and earthworms. She keeps a human heart in a Baggie inside her purse, gnawing at it in the teacher’s lounge to maintain her (barely) human form. She lumbers through the halls at night, rattling doors, searching for unlocked classrooms with hamsters or guinea pigs, and when she finds one, she chomps off its head, slurps its innards, crunches its tiny, brittle bones between her yellowed teeth. Sometimes she makes do with goldfish. She doesn’t like iguanas: too dry, too green.

Angela supplies the bloodiest details – she has older brothers and knows things – but after recess, I’m the one who creeps back to Mrs. Hatch’s shady lair, while Angela skips across the hall to the other third-grade class. Her classroom is bright and warm, windows open to the smile of spring breezes. A plant twirls in the corner, flowers like bell-skirted fairies cascading over the edge of the pot.

Karen M, who lives on Angela’s street, waits by their classroom door. She doesn’t say hi to me, just grabs Angela’s hand and pulls her inside. They wear the same sparkly nail polish. Both have charm bracelets, tiny talismans tinkling on their wrists: ballet slippers, hearts, crowns. Both bring food from home, packed in rainbow unicorn lunch boxes, while I wait in line with the other free-lunch kids. Both have the long, shiny hair I crave, sometimes in intricate French braids with ribbons. My mom doesn’t have time for that and chops at mine with kitchen shears. Pixie cut, she calls it, but I look more like a lost boy.

Standing outside after school, last as always to be picked up. Mrs. Hatch on duty, prowling by the door. Angela waving, low and quick, as she climbs into Karen M’s mom’s car. Karen M thinks she’s Angela’s best friend but she can’t be because I am, at least this year, even when we’re separated by that hallway between light and dark, even when Angela’s nibbling a still-warm cookie handed over the back seat by Karen M’s mom and I’m out here with Mrs. Hatch and the sinking sun.

Even though everyone seems to know we’re destined for different stories.

Mrs. Hatch rummages in her handbag. Her stomach must be growling. I hope there’s enough heart left.

I’m an iguana. I stare at the street, shivering, willing my mom to appear. Too dry, too green. It’s the next car, I tell myself. Okay, the next one. The one after that. If I hold my breath. If I close my eyes. If I don’t cry. If I stop crying. One of these times I have to be right.

Didi Wood’s stories appear in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere. Her work has been chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for Best Small Fictions. Often she is festooned with cats. More at didiwood.com.

Drugged and dying, Bigby thinks about dreams. How, long ago, maybe two or three beers in, he told his roommate he wanted to be an umpire. He was going to drop out of school. He was going to spend years in places like Topeka or Huntsville, Des Moines if he got lucky, and, one day, he was going to be behind home plate in the World Series. He was going to wait until things got real high-leverage. Full count, runners on, etc. There was going to be a close pitch, and he was going to call it a nothing. He’d make a small noise. Put his arm one-tenth of the way up. He’d flinch, basically, and there wouldn’t be so much to it that it could be clearly labeled a strike. There’d be too much for it to be clearly called a ball. He told his roommate (poetically, he thought) that he was going to be “an absent God out there, and the cameras will catch the frenzy that ensues, the terrified chaos of attempted coping.”

Maybe it goes without saying that he never made it to the World Series. He never even dropped out of school. He did umpire as a side hustle (is that what they’d call it, these nurses with the dark hair and eyes so tired they seem authentically kind?). Weekend tournaments across the river in Davenport, or at that complex in the mud down on the Rock River, and one time he was behind the plate for a U-12 championship in Burlington. Late innings. Fifth or sixth, probably, and it’s tied at seven. Bases loaded. It’s a 2-2 count, and the pitch is outside, but by a margin even Major-League pitchers sometimes get (and without stopping the narrative of his thoughts there’s here a series of images and graphs, lines of all the text he’s read about the philosophy of the strike zone, about borders and particle physics and the many ocular biases, the barriers to definitive categorization), and Bigby goes into action. He has a whole complex array of thoughts, weighing pros and cons and thinking how at 3-2 the hitter might well swing, and so it’s now or never basically, isn’t it? It is. So, he does exactly what told his roommate he’d do.

The batter stares at him. The crowd starts to yell. The pitcher shrugs and then (with a touch of devious brilliance, one could argue) starts walking off the mound, trying to play it off like he heard the call loud and clear, and the base umpire comes jogging in.

“Hey, buddy, you alright?” he says.

But Bigby’s catatonic. Performing frozen. There is language everywhere. The three most common words are fuck, Jesus, and Blue, and the crowd is milling. Fathers are tapping their feet. Some of them are standing. Somebody’s going to run onto the field at any second, and a mother is wondering if maybe the umpire is having a heart attack, and he chooses that moment to turn and bolt away. He darts off like a deer or trout or something, and Bigby, he could always fucking run. He still could, he thinks. He could get up from this place and focus on every step until nothing worked anymore, until physical failure, and how far do you think he could get? He’s heard of people running a hundred miles at a shot. Younger people, though. In much better aerobic shape than he is now, but maybe back then he could have held his own. Darting to the parking lot. Driving away clad in full gear with the face mask and the chest protector, and, in the rear view, a few people giving futile chase. Kids kneeling, gloves on their heads. The base umpire trying to get in between punches and getting himself clocked, though maybe that’s an embellishment. Memory. Maybe it’s the morphine, and Bigby’s never told anybody about that day. He’s never gone back to Burlington, never even looked for notes in the newspaper or been tempted to check the internet. For him, it was enough just to do it, and now he’s watching it all unspool on loop in his mind, and it’s playing to an empty multiplex. The whole place has that cleaned-up butter smell. Dust in the projector. The film is silent, and the non-existent audience is nonetheless alive, and there must be bacteria in there waiting. Witnessing. Moths curl in the corners. Thoraxes rub against the floor. Bigby’s a disembodied eye, and in front of each fat recliner he sees these little collections of molecules. They float in the strobing light, these foggy ghosts, these piecemeal fossils of all our bated breath.

Brett Biebel is the author of three collections of flash fiction,48 Blitz, Winter Dance Party, and Gridlock; and A Mason & Dixon Companion. His work has appeared in many magazines and been selected for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. He lives, writes, and teaches in Illinois.

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.