Plants. Neurobiology journals spilling over coffee tables. Work tables. Beakers with odd contents. One large black & white poster of an austere looking man. Photos of twins and triplets, children and adults, old people. Rotten tangerines in a bowl. I tell him I was an identical twin. The other was lost in utero, I add, as I try to clear a space for him. He watches my hands, the left one curled permanently as if holding a baseball. I was born this way, I tell him. (But this is too much woe, too soon. I should shut the fuck up.) He opens the drawer where I keep the corkscrew. You're okay, he says. It’s as if we have been here before. In this room. With this winsome cat. He says, all this science I don’t understand. But I feel our future unfurling before us. I know exactly how the air will feel on the patio. I remember rain on a clear night. I know the sound the back door will make, the squeak of its hinges, when he finally leaves me.
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Kathy FishKathy Fish’s stories have been published in Slice, Guernica, Indiana Review and elsewhere. She is the author of three collections of short fiction: Together We Can Bury It (The Lit Pub, 2013), Wild Life (Matter Press, 2012), and a chapbook in A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness (Rose Metal Press, 2008). She has recently joined the faculty of the Mile High MFA at Regis University in Denver where she will be teaching flash fiction. |