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You Know Better but I Know You by Liz Matthews

August 16, 2022
Reading Time: 2 Minutes

Spring 2022 Flash Fiction Contest – Honorable Mention

You taught me how to make myself pass out in your bedroom while your mother baked brownies for us in the kitchen. You taught me how to hold in the smoke before I exhaled. You double-pierced my ear. Blood and ice dripped while I sat on your toilet. Your older sister showed us how to make a tequila sunrise with orange juice and grenadine. I loved watching that vanishing point on the glass. It’s like drinking art, you said. I pretended to feel the way you did, but I felt nothing at first. I wanted to be dizzy, to have the feeling we had after rolling down your backyard hill and landing in a leaf pile.

I wasn’t trying to impress you, and I wasn’t afraid. That’s why we were friends. We both wanted more.

Sometimes he’s there in the memory, with that gap between his two front teeth, wearing his Steal Your Face t-shirt.

I drank more, my nose plugged. I opened my throat and finished it all and moaned on the bathroom floor, later, while you let him finger you on the couch for the first time.

You rode the banister downstairs and swerved off before the end, cut open your skin above your eyebrow, your skull showing. You don’t have enough scars, you said later.

You weren’t worried about God, no, or death or dying, or even getting hurt.

Show me a scar I don’t know about, he said when he had me alone.

Mine were on the inside. I didn’t want to open them up—I didn’t need talismans like you. Mine were nocturnal and bled only in the middle of the night.

Years later, when I had my first baby, you called me crying from far away and said isn’t it amazing?

We lost touch but I still wonder about you. When I see a fox scampering across my road, are you the lifeless form in its mouth? You could be the weed sprouting from the stone wall. You could be the dogwood tree on the final days of its bloom or the hedgehog who is hiding under our porch or that woman over there, walking towards me, her head tilted in a way that looks familiar, her lips parted. Even though she keeps walking, even though this isn’t her home, it could be. ◆


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Fiction

Matthews, Liz
Liz Matthews teaches fiction and flash fiction workshops at Westport Writers’ Workshop. She received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Storgy, Milk Candy Review, The Tishman Review, and Big Fiction Little Truths among other places. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and two children.

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