Flash Fiction
- She used to smoke, and drink too much, and stay out late. (One of those cool twenty-something women, I imagine, who ordered whiskey sours and wore off-the-shoulder tops even in winter, who looked at home at a wooden bar.)
- She’s since given that all up. (One day, just like that, at the precise right time, before her coolness began to look pathetic.)
- She teaches piano lessons (by day, and ghostwrites songs she sells to pop stars by night. She doesn’t want glory. She plays because it makes her happy. She loves flicking on the radio and hearing a song she’s written, even if nobody knows. She enjoys having secrets.)
- She was a horse girl. As in, as a girl, she rode horses. This he needed to clarify for me, since the first image that popped in my head was her as an actual horse. (None of the fake sequins for her, though—no, she was classy, all 1950s-rider-chic. And had a cordial, but friendly relationship with her father, who she never called “daddy,” because she wasn’t one of those kinds of horse girls. She loved the animal for its big, wandering eyes, and the feeling of its heaving breath between her legs when it began to run, and the noises it made while eating the carrots and sugar cubes she fed them out of her hands. Though she would never refer to a horse as “it,” only “he” or “she” or “beautiful darling,” which would sound corny if someone else said it but when she did, it sounded spiritual.)
- She’s handy. Fixes a leak under the kitchen sink. Replaces the chain in the toilet. Puts up shelves in the bedroom closet. (And when she works, she doesn’t get distracted. She doesn’t check Twitter between screws because she’s not obsessed with getting attention.)
- She’s the kind of woman a husband wouldn’t leave. I know it. He knows it. She knows it. (Though she doesn’t know about me.)
- She goes to a two-hour yoga class on Thursday nights. She leaves her husband on his own for dinner. She thinks he has a ritual of eating at restaurants alone. (She feels relieved when she turns the key to her car and brings it to life and backs it out of the garage and into the night, just her and the silence of the car, no talk radio, no podcast, no music. She longs for this drive of silence each week, the soothing feeling of knowing the way so well her hand is flicking the turn signal before her mind even registers where she is, every tension she’s been holding onto evaporating more with each quarter mile, her breath building from deep inside her belly, the way the yoga teacher tells her a baby breathes.)
- She doesn’t want children.
- She’s never wanted them. He knew this when he married her. He didn’t care. “Having children” always felt like a vague obligation. “Maybe I would’ve been a good father, with the right person,” he tells me. (She doesn’t feel an indefinable longing, a restlessness, each morning when she wakes. Doesn’t lie to everyone who asks that she’s happy the way things are. Doesn’t pretend she’s read books she’s never read to make herself seem more impressive. Doesn’t keep a guitar lying around because she’s deluding herself that one day, she’ll learn to play. Doesn’t imagine snapping each snap down the front of a child’s yellow raincoat before taking their soft hand and walking them into a world that’s wet, and gray, and theirs. Doesn’t see her life as a landscape with no vanishing point, just a flat line drifting across a piece of printer paper.)
- She likes carnitas tacos. I know this because I sometimes meet him at the butcher shop in the next town over when she sends him out to pick up pork shoulder for dinner. Then we go to the neighboring wine shop, and I help him choose the full-bodied red they’re going to drink together, and I soak in the intoxicating feeling of the butcher and the sommelier thinking we’re together. “We are together,” he says to me when I share this thought as we walk back to the separate cars we’ll drive away in. He grabs my waist and pulls me close. Close enough that I can picture our lips becoming stained red with meat and Merlot. Close enough that I almost believe him. (She almost never believes him.)
Quinn Forlini has had writing published in Catapult, X-R-A-Y Lit, Lunch Ticket, and others. She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and now lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with her husband and son. You can find more of her work at quinnforlini.com.