Honorable Mention – Flash 405, June 2026: “Loop”
Nonfiction
I have never had an abortion except for the summer I couldn’t turn the radio on without hearing about one. I drove around Dallas suburbs in hundred-degree summer sunsets where I went to a clinic with Ben Folds on Christmas Day, then I suffered through loss and suicidal ideation with Brian Vander Ark and The Verve. I was no one and I was everyone when I was seventeen. I remember Johnny (Does he still go by the diminutive, John-ny? I hope he does.) Rzeznik assuring me that the priest was furious, my parents had kicked me out, but I’d be safe with him, even though I decided not to keep the baby. Why did I need to be promised, no matter what I did, that I was worth saving? A person someone would want?
I’d been dating my high school boyfriend for two years at that time, though I was never sure we used the same calendar. Don’t worry about me, I screamed in every action I took—those screams came out silent. I demanded nothing. I didn’t yet understand how to use footnotes on a word processor, but I knew how to write myself in as marginalia in the lives of people I loved. I would love him for three more years. I would never have had the audacity to ask him to care about me: he let me love him and I was so young, that was enough.
My favorite abortion was the one I had in Tim McGraw’s “Red Ragtop,” where I spent the whole song begging him to keep loving me even after the procedure. Some nights, I would sneak out to my car at three a.m., plug my Discman into the cassette hookup, and sit in the driveway to sob. I had to go outside because I needed the music as loud as the woman in the song, not afraid to suffer and still allow herself to be loved. Biting my nails past the quick, I’d listen to him shuffle into the surprising ending—that one day, she stopped loving him. Is there anything more pro-choice—to beg a man to stay and then one day, stop loving him? I still cry when the song comes on: now I think of that green-eyed girl and pray she never stopped moving, that she kept finding new reasons to love herself.
Judge’s Comments: This piece had me at the first line. The loops of wanting and loving and needing and rejecting. The soundtrack that repeats under our lives acting as companion and a commentary and a judgment—wonderfully done.
Having returned from a recent trip to L.A., Katie Darby Mullins spends most of her time listening to Everclear, Father John Misty, Lana Del Rey, and late-career Elliott Smith so she can pretend she’s still there.
Photo by Christopher Beikmann