Spring 2022 Flash Fiction Contest – Honorable Mention
Maybe she left her husband and started dating younger men, went out to the worst dive bar in town and wound up doing cocaine with a 25-year-old girl in the genderless bathroom. And maybe she slept with numerous people just to feel something, maybe she slept with two at one time. Maybe a poet fell in love with her when she wasn’t ready, he wrote her a letter and sent her pressed flowers from his garden. Maybe he won’t speak to her now, saying he feels more like a body than a person. Maybe she drinks every night and hates to be alone when all she wanted before was silence, a space of her own. And maybe now she smokes cigarettes, after quitting for nine years. Maybe she sits on her front stoop and reads and smokes and watches all the people living around her. Maybe she knows them all by face but not name, never speaking to them. In the mornings she is out there with her coffee and book, in the evening it’s traded for wine. Maybe she met a man online from another country and let him record her reading her poems, maybe she let him record other things too. Maybe she let him dominate her and tell her to be dirty, to let him pee on her chest. Maybe it took him a while to do it, saying he had a shy bladder. And maybe she liked it, feeling a closeness that sex couldn’t provide. Maybe he had a girlfriend and waited till after they had sex to tell her this information. Maybe she told a guy on their second date that she would date him only. Maybe his face is perfect, and she loves to stare at it. Maybe he told her true love could save them both. Maybe the kids always seem to be gone now, her time suddenly free. Maybe she takes the stuffed teddy bear of her youngest son and lies at night with it, crying herself to sleep. ◆
You might also like
