Honorable Mention – Flash 405, April 2025: “Quitting”
Fiction
It’s still here, you know.
Perched on the high sill in the bathroom—I see it when I’m showering.
You thought I’d kill it. I’m sure that’s what you thought, and why you left it behind, to remind me what I did. But I haven’t killed it. Not yet.
Orchids are notoriously hard to care for, you told me, with that smug tone you’d sometimes get. I tried to brush it off at first—you must talk that way to everyone, I assured myself. But you didn’t. Not with your friends at the theater or the guys in your ironic bowling league. Not your hipster sister who stayed with us for a week. No. You reserved the tone for me.
I shrugged as you paid more attention to the orchid’s narrow stalks and delicate white blossoms. That’s funny, they grow everywhere in the jungle without some asshole misting them.
You took my snark in stride but I think you saw it then, same as I did, everything that was going to happen next. How I’d start coming home late, drunk or worse. How I’d argue with you over everything—the way you poured milk into your cereal or left your car keys on the kitchen table or stacked groceries in the refrigerator. How sometimes I wouldn’t come home at all.
They’re epiphytes, you said, and turned to me with a grin. Crotch-dwellers. They grow in the pits of trees.
I never asked you to leave. I thought you’d confront me and finally give me the chance to say, “I don’t like the way you talk to me like you think I’m stupid,” but you wouldn’t even allow me that satisfaction. One day you were gone, your side of the closet a graveyard of coathangers.
But the orchid remains. Phalaenopsis amabilis. I looked that up one afternoon, on my phone, sitting on your side of the bed, then gazed out the window at your overgrown garden. I can’t separate the beloved plants that need pruning from the weeds that need pulling. Maybe you couldn’t either.
Judge’s Comments:
Your relationship is on its last leg, but your sunk costs are high, so you hesitate. Should you really call it quits? And then, just like that, the other side does it for you. Dang! They’ve snagged that last smidgen of agency. Now it’s on you to pick up the pieces, your grievances won’t have an audience. Or will they?
This piece is written like a letter to a former companion—the kind of letter that will likely never reach its addressee. If I’m honest, it had me at “It’s still here, you know.”
Charlie Rogers (he/him) is a gay writer, former photographer, and aspiring hermit who lives in New York City, writing the same story over and over, ignoring birds and their portents. He is originally from Beacon, New York, and studied literature at Cornell University for some reason. His work has appeared in BULL and Uncharted and is forthcoming in Ellery Queen. Website: charlierogerswrites.com
Photos by Berlian Khatulistiwa and Susan Wilkinson