SOPHOMORE SLUMP We only meet these days to say goodbye. We congregate at bars, at restaurants, dark places of velvet murmur, synthetic myrrh. We smoke words like cancers, click whiskey against our teeth, hungry for love intoxication before the rotten worm chest morning. Isn’t Ella brilliant the way she does the scat? Our smiles, our marbled eyes are the saliva on the end of her tongue. At home, our phones are the silent bricks we heave at things. TRUCK The vibration tears through the house, but it's not thunder. The sky is as clear as a plate.
"Probably a truck or something," she says. We stand across from each other, the countertop island in the kitchen separating us. "Sometimes they get lost, and they shake these old streets up."
"Maybe," I answer. "But when did you find out?"
"About it? A few weeks ago." She is wiping dishes dry, the shape of her hand elongated, fetal, inside a glass. "It was quite a surprise to me. I certainly wasn't expecting it."
"What are you going to do?"
"What do you mean? I’m not going to leave him now. I can’t."
The little one, now her firstborn, is on his knees pushing a plastic yellow truck across the floor.
"Whram, whram, whrooom," he stoccatoes before crashing it into the island where we are separated.
"But what about..." My hand comes up involuntarily for her, but she is too far away, on the other side of the counter.
"What am I supposed to do? Just go off and…?” She pulls her toweled hand out of a wineglass. My hand falls on my keys, which lie, a jangled defeat, on the counter. "You should get going--he’ll be home soon. I've got to get dinner ready."
She sets the glass down too close to the edge, and when her son hits the island again with the truck, it falls like a shot.
"Jesus. Kyle!" She yells at him, but it's all our fault. Outside, the sky is as clear as a plate. Jen Michalski lives in Baltimore, Maryland. She graduated from St. Mary's College of Maryland with a BA in English in 1994 and received her MS in Professional Writing from Towson University in 1999. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney's, Failbetter, storysouth, The Summerset Review, Word Riot, Pindeldyboz, The Pedestal, The Potomac, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, Fringe, The Houston Review, Zygote in My Coffee, Split Shot, Swill Magazine, Ink Pot, Unlikely Stories 2.0, Apt, 55 Stories, The Swamp, Fiction Warehouse, Lily, Gold Dust Magazine, Thieves Jargon, Litvision, SubtleTea, 13th Warrior Review, The Harrow, Conte Online, Rokovoko, Bending Spoons, and Scrivener's Pen. Her collection of short stories, Close Encounters, is available from So New Media (www.sonewpublishing.com/). This is her first attempt at respectability.
Last update: 28-10-2007 19:48
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