Microfiction Monday – 217th Edition
Lessons On Electricity
by Laurie Kuntz
Who is culpable? The lights left burning when we’re no longer in rooms that we share together or alone. Who left it on? No cat or dog to blame, and our son is long gone to his own lighted place. When admonished for this faux pas, I don’t need the lecture on wattage and currents, or the waste of power. All I need to hear are three words, Lights off please, or maybe those other three words we should be saying more often in our lighted and darkened places.
Two Elderly Men with Dementia
by Chung-Suk Yu
Charlie and Bob are elderly roommates in a two-person room in the lockdown unit at the nursing home. Neither of them recognizes that they are roommates. At night these two men are trying to protect their shoes. When Charlie goes to sleep, he either hides his shoes under the bed or sleeps with the shoes on the bed. On the other hand, Bob carries his shoes to the living room where he used to sleep. The residents in the unit at the nursing home do not wear shoes but wear socks since they forgot how to put their shoes on.
Icy Heart
by Amber Weinar
You can tell it’s almost winter when it starts to rain, and the water crystalizes on impact. All it takes is one drop expanding. Your heartburn was similar. All it took was the pain to expand before the worrying struck. By then, it was too late. Initially undetectable, The spread was inevitable. Like a sheet of black ice you couldn’t prevent and had to drive over. The doctor asks why you didn’t come sooner. It’s hard to say when you felt fine yesterday. Maybe the doctors were wrong? The heart was overtaken by ice, and yet only my hope remained.
Business as Usual
Dusk in September after a rain. Street lamps spread their white steeples of light around the wooded park. Here is where the flying termites convene, as reckless as early aviators in close quarters combat.
Supper is done. An hour of liberty. Children charge down porches armed with corn brooms. In this vespering hour, they knock all those stars from the sky and pluck out their silver veined wings.
And this is a skill that will come in handy later in life. In the real world. Where the mighty will thrive and the vulnerable will need a bit of a trimming.
Whack
I was too young to attend the funeral, too young to understand grief. I remember watching my older brother through a window. Mark and Andrew, sixteen, had been best friends. After Andrew killed himself, Mark went outside to hit rocks with a wiffle ball bat. He’d scour the ground for the perfect-sized rock, pick it up, and toss it in the air. Then, with all his might, he swung the bat. Over and over again. Scour the ground. Pick up a rock. Toss it in the air. Swing the bat. I remember the sound; it cracked the sky in half.
Microfiction Monday – 215th Edition
Really
by Laura Shell
Your name is Really because it was all I could think to say as you marched across my lawn. Your pitted, black scorpion body. Your gray wolf head with drooling smile. Your stinger tail you swivel in all directions and snap like a bullwhip. I filmed you on my phone that day, and then I said, “Really?” The video went ultra viral. You stand by my front door—an alien sentinel. Do you have a crush? You let me stroke the gray hair on your wolf face. Just below your ear. If you were a cat, you would have purred.
Problem Child
Dolly knew only the rules of her game and did not notice the other games being played. She thought she had a home, an annoying little sister, parents who could sometimes be persuaded and who sometimes must be obeyed.
But her parents were divorcing. The court would decide with whom she would live. The market assigned a portion of the asking price to what had been her bedroom. District boundaries led to a new school and no friends. The clinic determined a diagnosis and prescribed a medication.
Years later, newly sober, she confessed she’d made some bad life choices.
Restless
by Sara Merkin
Is it creepy to stare at him while he sleeps? You’re not sure. Still, you lay there, counting each blackhead-filled pore on his crooked nose. Fourteen–wait–seventeen on the tip. His breath smells like bourbon, but you were the only one that drank. Up the bridge makes twenty-two. Was he still mad? No, his sleeping body was too still, too relaxed for anger. Thirty-eight. You mimic his breathing, an attempt to drift off. Forty-seven total. At least he kissed you goodnight. Your eyes shut but your mind doesn’t. He might still be mad. Damn, pores are a sorry replacement for sheep.
During an Overdue Oil Change
by Tom Gadd
The undercarriage of the car floats in the oil pan. Breaks into ever expanding circles. Reforms and breaks again. Like our lives, he thinks beneath the car they bought together that he visits now only when she phones about a strange ticking sound or another stall that made their child late for school.
And here are her feet. Just her feet. Toenails flaking pink paint. The daisy chain tattoo circling her ankle. And an opened beer she’s placed on the garage floor.
How does it look?
Looks like heaven, he wants to answer but he says good. It’s all good.
Marital Gratitude
by Sam Anders
In winter he makes soup for my dinner while he’s working at the restaurant. The eggplant creaminess is dark, satiny, subtle, and surprising, like my husband. He might flirt with butternut squash risotto or seduce with the aroma of roast duck. On the day of our son’s birth, I arrived home to feast on his gift of gratitude: lemony sautéed soft-shell crab. I am more fluent in words than in actions, but he understands how much I love him when I make his tea or walk the dog on a cold night, though it’s his turn.
Microfiction Monday – 214th Edition
German Trains
First it was the beer. Uncorrupted beer. The commandment: Water, barley and hops. Simplicity.
Second came these ingredients, nailed to the church door: Sola Gratia, Sola Fide, Sola Scriptura.
Third was that spud, Philosophy, pared down to Pure Reason.
Fourth, the Reich and those immaculate weapons. Purgation and flames.
And now, a hair shirt and a stringent orthodoxy. A secular temple to correct thought, correct action. Perfectly sorted trash.
Why is it that every time we board a train for Jerusalem, we end up in Munich?
Bye-Over
Benny and Jenny float back to the start like defeated, sputtering balloons. What now? Benny says, and Jenny shrugs. What now? Jenny says, and Benny shrugs. Together, with sordid reluctance, they shrug their way through seasons they never expected to see. Benny’s azaleas bloom, and Jenny gets promoted. Rain runs rogue from willing gutters, forms a puddle in their yard that soon becomes a lake. Neighbors call out the obvious, hey, you’re still here, feign cheap ignorance. Benny and Jenny kiss each other’s hesitant lips because duty calls, and moths fly toward the light, igniting death like paper and match.
Dine and Dash
by Char Rennes
You never know when someone will fuck your whole day. They came five minutes to closing, ordered a lot and ate slow – thanks, dudes. Can’t close, guess I’ll scroll my phone and get high. When they split you wouldn’t believe how fast I locked up. But I was frickin high cause I didn’t see them behind the counter with their guns but I was done. “You couldn’t, like, do this when you walked in?! You know what? I quit.” I stomped out, drove home and told Dad I lost my job and sat through his bullshit all night.
Mom
by Laura Shell
Mom had stopped bathing, had developed a rash beneath her right breast that looked like measles. She’d stopped curling her hair and wore perpetual bedhead like a hat. Her makeup bag remained at the bottom of a bathroom drawer instead of on the bathroom counter. No more dressing up, just the same three outfits, all pajamas, usually inside out and backwards. No more healthy meals, only fast food burgers via delivery, and bedtime snacks of cookies and gummies hidden in her nightstand drawer with her Oxycodone.
Did she know the end was near?
Why didn’t she tell me about it?
Poughkeepsie/Persephone
by Matthew Schultz
Slow steam rises from a perfect circle carved into crumbling asphalt beneath blinking yellow traffic lights that flash staccato warnings like the beacon of a north shore lighthouse shouting madly through the brume. The heavy steel water works cover has been removed and set to the side as if the moon about to slide before the sun. Traffic lights blink a brief solar eclipse and she appears ascending from beneath the avenue wearing a reflective safety vest and a golden helmet. She holds a wrench and ratchet like a queen brandishing sword and scepter, like Parmenides returning from the underworld.
Microfiction Monday – 210th Edition
Thomas
It was never about doubt. Not really. Died and resurrected? Well, that’s some trick. But, I suppose, it’s got to count for something.
We could quibble about those miracles. Or dismiss it all as nonsense. Healing the sick? Feeding the hungry? Slumming with outcasts? Who does that?
And walking on water? Wow. That sounds risky. No thanks.
But put your hand here, Thomas. Where the blood is oozing. And know it is not about being saved. Or about heaven. No. It’s about the wounded.
Now what are you going to do?
Running with Wolves
by Azure Arther
No crackle of bones or screaming, no slow-sprouting fur or growling. It happened instantaneously, a terrifying rip, like a bandage, quick, if bandage meant skin, muscle, bone. Agony was too small a description, excruciating too complex. His body seized, frozen in pain. This moment, why the change was private, vulnerable, concerning. Why they hid: in wildernesses, behind closed doors, cages, basements. Besides exhilaration and freedom, the full moon meant foreboding, an underlying sense of dread. One solitary second, where silver bullets could tear flesh, and other wolves could set in. But they didn’t. In the next moment, he was gone.
Late
by Renee S. Jolivette
It’s late. No sign of life on my newsfeed despite my latest prompt: One night stands vs. friends w/benefits. Opinions?
Nobody ever posts after ten p.m.
The nurse has gone home. I’m left with the remote, my tablet and the morphine drip.
Nothing on TV. I scroll through friends. Study the women. Some haven’t aged well. At least they’re aging.
Theresa looks great, walking the beach with her scrawny husband.
“You’re incapable of love,” she’d said.
I’ve never fallen out of love. Not with any of ‘em.
I want to tell them. But what kind of asshole would do that?
Coworkers
by Val Maloof
I’ve seen you puke at the Christmas party, we disagree about spreadsheets, I eat cake on your birthday, I forget where you’re from, we go on coffee walks, I gave you a low performance rating, you are the only person I talk on the phone to, I have told you I’m thinking about quitting, we both have so much dirt on each other, so much power and yet no power at all, we hate it here, I really like talking to you every day, I really like talking to anyone every day, you could leave at any time, at will.
Both Sides Now
The long wall behind the breakfast table is a mirror. Mesmerized by this other me, Mom teases I’m as vain as she is. Each of us smoothing wisps and pinching cheeks until they hurt pink.
A window display of bikinis superimposes over my swollen belly and breasts in a circus side-show illusion of my pregnant body. I try to suck in, but the baby takes up too much space.
Black water kisses my toes dangling over the edge of the dock. Wrapping wrinkled hands around a steaming cup of chai, I stop looking at my reflection and close my eyes.
Microfiction Monday – 209th Edition
Not a Mech of Dust
by Justin Byrne
“Make sure you shine the laser sights,” Zera yelled from inside the Resistance’s newest mech.
“Sure,” Josi responded as she climbed up with a rag in hand.
Zera needed to make sure that every nook and cranny of the cockpit’s instruments were sparkling. The Resistance was prepping for battle, and Zera didn’t want blood on their hands. As Zera continued to scrub, they heard a scream and a thud outside.
“Josi, you good?” Zera asked as they sighed, half concerned and half exasperated. At that moment, Zera realized they’d been scrubbing the laser’s on/off switch.
“Oh… sorry, Josi…”
Deirdre’s Bucket List
Skydiving. Check. Albeit in tandem, harnessed to a bronzed instructor with pecs like loaves of rye bread.
Tattoo. Check. A black serpent, an apple in its mouth, writhing down the long branch of your spine.
Poetry Slam. Check. Second place in the GTA Spoken Word Contest. And a bonus one-night-stand with an almost handsome Creative Writing grad student.
Silent Retreat. Check. That still small voice. Perhaps the one that spoke to Elijah at the mouth of the cave. “Accomplish, accomplish,” it whispered. “Or you will regret it.”
After you are dead, that is.
Eating Cake
by Wayne Garry Fife
Chester and Aisha snuck from their 43rd anniversary party so they could eat chocolate cake amongst their tomato plants and runner beans while watching Cedar Waxwings devour the bright red berries of the Mountain Ash.
“I read that some philosopher said that hell is other people.”
“Mmmm?”
“What’s heaven then?”
Pianos
by Linda Lowe
Pianos come in different shapes with 88 keys that make all our songs come true. Spinets are preferred by the parents, whose children love to bang through the bass keys and tiptoe through the high notes, like a tiny rain. On lofty avenues, the grand pianos roll into concert halls, the women in long white gloves, the men stiff in their tuxes, while down the street the uprights spend their lives in honky-tonk bars, where the tired and discouraged gather for a tall cool one and wait for the piano man to play, “Don’t Stop Believen” even if they have.
Haboob
by Scott Burnam
Morning reveals a feather and a bottle cap, delivered by the sandstorm, perched on the ribbon of grit outside my motel room door. The feather’s gray canvas is punctuated with riotous white spots. The brassy bottle cap, harshly bent from an opener, bears the words “Good Luck” on the inside, either as wish or warning.
Crouching, I snap a pic of this gifted totem. I fate the feather to find its own way out on another breeze. But I retrieve the bottle cap, blow out most of the sand, and pocket it, good with the gamble that it’s a wish.
Microfiction Monday – 204th Edition
Phil in Academia
Phil was a Cub Scout. Then a Boy Scout. Track and Field. Debate Club.
He breezed through undergrad English. Masters thesis on Restoration Literature. PhD dissertation on Samuel Pepys.
As a professor, he bedded sophomores. When that was still a thing. Even married one. Divorced. She got both girls and the house.
Phil drank too much. Retired early. Never finished that novel. Seldom saw his kids.
Maybe things would have been different if he’d thought to talk with the fat girl who sat behind him in 7th Grade. Whose name he never knew.
Maybe he’d have learned something.
The Missiles
by River Davis
No one knows where they come from and how they choose their targets. “They’re just a fact of life,” the adults would say.
If a missile hits someone important, you’d hear about it on the news. Otherwise, it comes up in a church group or at a potluck. “What a shame,” people would murmur.
Every now and then, they come a little too close for comfort. A best friend’s dad. Your parent’s dog. An old coworker.
Then, silence. It could be years between missiles. Life is good, you are invincible.
Then one lands next door and shakes your whole world.
Domesticity
by Jasmine Beth
I was falling asleep on the bed with the baby in my lap when my husband walked in.
“Hey!” he said.
I jolted. So did the baby.
“She looks wide awake. You should take her for a walk.”
“You should come with us. It’s the weekend. I’ve hardly seen you all week. We should do something fun together.”
“All right. Let’s go now then. The sun’s going down.”
He walked out.
“Actually, there’s too much to do here,” he yelled from the lounge room. “I’m going to vacuum.”
I closed my eyes. The baby started to cry. The vacuum whirred.
Numbers
by Sandra Plourde
80 – “Good one! Keep it up, buddy! You are doing it right!”
195 – “You are doing this all wrong! You need to be on top of it. No dessert for you tonight.”
52 – “How are you feeling, Darling? Drink some more. You need to be careful. This can be dangerous. You could die!”
330 – “This is unacceptable. You cannot keep doing this. Think of the long-term repercussions. You will pay the price later in life. You could lose your toes, or worse. Try harder!”
Tom, eight years old, diabetic, stares at the floor, wishes he was someone else.
Microfiction Monday – 202nd Edition
Matinee
by G.J. Williams
The film talked and the leading man died. The tinny note had been struck and there was no getting away from it. News came from all sides. The face was no longer enough. The narrowed gaze in close-up required a timbre of command. Our hero tried and tried, his voice a thin man’s question. He took up whisky: it didn’t help; and harsher brands of cigarette caused only coughing. Eyes, cheekbones, lips: what they’d always been. The mirror, like the camera, lied. He was face down, floor strewn with torn reel. There were no suspicious circumstances. There’d been no guests.
Optimal Delusions
At first he saw an octopus. A grey octopus slumbering under a white picket fence. But it turned out to be tree roots. Decades of secret squirming out of his neighbour’s backyard.
And those mottled whales breaching the surface of a sloping sea. Imperfections in the concrete retaining wall along the railway underpass.
Verdant islands of the South Pacific? Or clumps of moss in the rain drenched alley?
These little visual anomalies visited more frequently each day. Until the edges of certainty blurred and everything became like everything else. Just another possibility.
Downtown Park
by Tim Boiteau
He liked the square park downtown best.
A tree, a bench, yellow-smelling grass.
He liked to circle the cracked fountain where water used to shimmer in the sun. A retirement home placed across the street kept the bench restocked with an old man. A different one or the same one each day, he couldn’t say for sure, they looked so interchangeable to him: hoary-headed, bent, droop-skinned. Within each window a creamy-eyed and shrunken face glaucoma-gazed at his circumambulations.
At the square park downtown all eyes projected his spry, youthful ghost beside a spraying fountain that still shimmered in the sun.
Martha and George
Martha brings a martini to her lips to begin each day. A black wind howls past the tombstones inside George’s mouth when he speaks. Martha’s a woman who’d latch onto your crotch like a vise grip and tell you it’s a new way of gettin’ right with Jesus. You’d drop to your knees, beg to be saved. George pushes a grocery cart down an aisle of empty shelves to end each day. Broken eggshells in the dairy case. Martha likes to watch the rooster she keeps for a pet scratch for grubs in the dirt. The rooster’s also named George.
Treasures
by Matthew Shepherd
The shape of the face, the song-like quality of the voice, the calming scent. All had incrementally evaporated from Carter’s memory until only the small, unexpected trinkets of Sophie remained. The swirls on her silver heart earrings, the time an inappropriate laugh was stifled, the trio of freckles which blemished her forearm. Each became more precious with every passing day. Carter considered these traces to be the very essence of love: the unhealed scars left behind once happiness has gone. Treasures that even Sophie’s illness could not steal.
Microfiction Monday – 198th Edition
The Snow Asleep on a Branch
There in the window of the apartment across the courtyard, pressed against the glass, a bouquet of pale blossoms. Like a springtime branch snapped off a cherry tree.
No. My mistake. It’s a cat. A white cat sleeping on the window sill, enjoying the warmth of the sun. I can see it breathing.
But for a moment, I thought of you. You who will always be a girl. Perfuming the room with your presence and an armful of white cherry blossoms that spring morning. Before your final winter, when the snow came too soon. And never really left.
Barren Garden
by Emily Hoover
Today the doctor with the Scandinavian name I can’t pronounce went over the newest ultrasound, found a chocolate cyst, said they’d need to do laparoscopy to see the adhesions from the endometrial tissue growing outside my uterus like weeds ruining a perfectly good fucking garden. There’s a surgery I can have or a pill I can take. Both will trigger menopause, the brochures say. I run my fingers along my abdomen, imagine the scars when they plow my pelvis empty—my ex-husband filling another woman’s bed, another woman’s womb, while I live in the cold cavern between moderate and severe.
Day is Night is Day
by David Henson
One dawn, the horizon darkens. As the sun rises, blackness spreads like spilled ink. By midday, stars salt an obsidian sky despite the dazzling sun. Blue skies emerge at sunset and rule the night. Birds don’t know whether to sing or nest. Brilliant, sunless nights and dark, sunny days persist. Our biorhythms play free jazz. Our nerves howl like wolves. Anxiety grips the children. Every morning we gather outside to await the sunrise like hopeful pagans, but it’s always brightest before the dawn. At least we have each other.
Never More
by Cathy Schieffelin
His fists sink into the warm dough, kneading, like a prayer.
A shimmer of white, floats in the dusty rays of morning sun. Lucy, skipping from the henhouse, night clothes mud spattered with a basket of eggs. Looks just like her mama – golden haired and lithe.
Heart heavy, he pummels the gooey mass, craving a salve to numb the nettles pricking his memories.
Wish Hazel’d be here. Never more. Birthing twins was too much. She loved his sourdough. They’d sit on the porch watching fireflies dance in the dying light, taking bites, butter dripping down their chins.
Never more.
The Ninety-One Pearls on My Necklace
Eighty-five? There are supposed to be ninety-one.
The necklace cascades between my shriveled fingers, pearls escaping me like faces fading into shadow.
She catches them. “How about I put it on you?”
We face the mirror. Pity in her bright eyes. Who is she? The daughter I always wanted? I can’t remember if her father was handsome. Fading faces. He had bright eyes. I could never forget his eyes.
“The cleaning lady. She’s slipping out the pearls one by one.”
She shakes her head. Brighter eyes. “There were always eight-five.”
I grasp the necklace. Snow in my palms. Melting away.
Microfiction Monday – 197th Edition
Countdown
by Karen Zey
You wince at the rows of empty squares on the kitchen calendar. Three weeks until his follow-up appointment. After surgery, hubby needed help to navigate the shower, tie his shoes, take his meds. Six days of pajamas and pain until a nurse removed the catheter—until he slowly returned to his old self and you resumed your quiet routines. He does dishes and laundry; you shop and cook. But you can’t stop yourself from checking and rechecking that date while bleak what-ifs swarm your brain. You put on the kettle and wait. Sip your wild raspberry tea between measured breaths.
Delivery
Peter could not stanch his sadness. It settled on him like morning fog. It flowed through him as relentless as the tide. To breathe was to drown and not to die. No sun could cheer him; neither moon nor stars could console him.
Sometimes sadness is like that. An empty mailbox in a month of Sundays. Hoping for an overseas letter from an ex-lover who has lost your address. A stubborn infinity in pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt, rummaging through the junk drawer and forgetting what you were searching for.
Free in the Tree
by Nicole Brogdon
No human saw Katy behind the leafy tree branches. A nearby squirrel stared, then disappeared into foliage. Katy had two peanut-butter sandwiches and one raisin box. Tree kept her safe from Grandpa. If he or Grandma caught her now, there’d be hell to pay —belts, boiling water. For stealing peanut butter, which is food. Stealing, which is a sin.
Lately, Grandpa tied her up in the barn, left her. Tree was better. She’d brought Grandma’s wool sweater, forgotten a blanket. Wind blew, Owl hollered. Night sky turned dark like her soul. Sometimes here in Oklahoma, snow fell like tears.
Mackenzie in the Roses
by Blake Bell
Mackenzie, burning with youth, hollers, “Your roses are dead!” and pedals away from the Rose Witch and my big sister. Cackling over her tanned shoulder at the white-haired woman running one withered hand after another along her confettied bushes, she’s blind to the Oldsmobile hurtling five thousand pounds and a family of four toward her. The Oldsmobile family attends her funeral, but not the Rose Witch. Nobody talks about that, but I ride past her house daily, wondering why she didn’t come and why she would, and across the hall from Sarah’s sobs, a perfect rose wilts under my pillow.
Surreality in the Exit Row
by Sara King
Seven hours to Iceland. I eat and sleep in the middle seat, lost to longitude, and anticipation. Lights dim and the cabin quiets; voices muffle in the row behind, stowed in the overhead locker perhaps. Mouths gape but elbows respect the no man’s land of the armrest.
Clink—one eye half opens. Across the aisle tiny wines arrive to scale with the pixelated Tom Hanks, who
addresses the yoga pants congregated by the toilet, which croon over the assistance dog, curled and cosseted in his own thousand-dollar seat.
And night passes beyond the portholes without the sky growing truly dark.
Microfiction Monday – 195th Edition
Suicide Note
The suicide note doesn’t mention earlier drafts. It addresses no one by name. It is surprisingly generic but has a cryptic passage about a nuclear holocaust. It has good grammar and usage and a balanced mix of sentence structures. It contains no references to an afterlife, chat bots, or sentience.
Corrupted File
by Emma Burnett
The bathroom door is stuck. The palm scanner blurps sadly. There is a grinding noise behind the wall. I bang on the door. Nothing happens.
The flat screenface of the ankle-high microbot flashes a supportive 🙂
“It should just slide open.”
🙂
I try kicking the door. Nothing.
“Can you fix it?”
👎
“Ok… pull up the repair notes.”
👎
“What? Why?”
🤷🏽♀️
“Don’t shrug! Use your words.”
The microbot hesitates. Then CORRUPTED FILE rolls slowly across its screenface.
“What? How am I going to get out?”
🤷🏽♀️
“You have any tools?”
👎
“You mean, we’re stuck in here?”
👍
Spaces Between
by Joyce Jacobo
The child was lost. She took every opportunity to slip between things in vain, such as alleyways, store shelves, library aisles, and even the covers of books—until police officers encountered her.
Then she moved between other things like orphanages and foster homes. Adults would get into arguments over her sickly appearance and oversized eyes. She made people nervous and never stayed anywhere for long.
One night a thin, dark figure slid out of the shadows from underneath her bed.
The child gasped, wiped away her tears, and leapt into outstretched arms.
“Mommy!” she cried out in joy and relief.
Cultivated
His shelves were stuffed with books. Bricks around a walled garden. No intruder disturbed the tidy hedgerows. No savage creature could invade and dig burrows among the immaculate flowerbeds. Snakes could not penetrate those clenched volumes.
Sorrowful poetry marked him with exquisite wounds but he bore no real burdens. His was the ideal of suffering and not the substance. No ants crawled up his legs. No nettles stung his fingers. He lived his life without experiencing it.
One day, a wild, compassionate god transformed all that ink into blood and poured it down his throat in a single gulp.
Mine
by David Lanvert
It wasn’t my fault. He shouldn’t have been standing near the edge. I can explain it, perhaps comfort his parents if the authorities let me.
The police say I have a motive – his girlfriend. She wasn’t his girlfriend. She’s my girlfriend. They’re confused. After all, he was my roommate, so she met him through me. I came first, and I’m still here.
It’s like choosing your favorite ice cream. There are vanilla people and chocolate people. Where does the preference come from? Who knows? But if vanilla is your only option because there’s no chocolate, you’ll learn to love vanilla.
Microfiction Monday Magazine 