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The reports of my creation were greatly exaggerated. Everyone believed that Prometheus carefully crafted me from clay, that Athena breathed life into my newly-formed body. Yet, birth, whether it be of an idea or a being, has always been messy. The stories of my making neglected to mention Prometheus' calloused hands or Athena’s morning breath. They certainly didn’t include my half-finished predecessors, their faces frozen in pain, partial bodies contorted. These failed drafts stared at me from the corners of the room as I was brought into the world, giving me a glimpse of my possible future. Who stood to gain from embellishments surrounding my birth? Who benefited from positive PR? The very Gods who cursed me into existence – the Creators. After my construction, they abandoned me, and I found a worse fate than any I could’ve imagined: eternity. I walked this earth for millennia, desperate to return to the dirt. No rain could melt me down, no heat could burn me to ash. I was unwillingly man, held captive within a fleshy prison. When Prometheus first gave humans fire, I preferred to stay in the dark. From the shadows, I watched humans evolve as I was forced to remain. But at the foot of Mount Olympus, I appreciated the gift for the first time as I stood over a small fire. I poked the flames at my feet with a branch, watching it dance, alive and free. Like a painter with a brush, I threw the lit stick to the ground and smiled as the blaze began. It spilled into the dry forest of olive trees, each fallen leaf and rotting log acting as tinder for my growing masterpiece. “This is for you,” I whispered, letting the wind carry my words to the Gods. I watched the destruction unfold - the creation, finally a Creator. Sky Sprayberry is a DC-based fiction writer. Yes, that’s her real name, and yes, she’s actually the plucky heroine with a catchy moniker. Move over, Lois Lane. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in The Molotov Cocktail, The Dillydoun Review, littledeathlit, and Rejection Letters. Say hi on Twitter @writtenbysky

blake's opinions over his digestif (strega) they were sitting around after dinner his daughter told him that none of the girls in her class liked her she said they said we don't want to be friends with you like they had all conspired around it it was the same thing that happened to him back in 1997 he told his daughter to hang in there it gets better they don't know what they're talking about "they don't know themselves." "they are upset about their own failures!" she shrugged her shoulders she said okay dad she was tough as nails she had mettle, at seven she could teach him a thing or two he realized in the men's room i am looking down there is fresh ice in the urinal 15 seconds elapse i am staring into a mirror now the sink is on it is an abyss this is it the men's room door opens it is time we scream into a private stall latch, hook fumbling, bic fuse glowing rock red-eyed release score junkies in hushed light November 15, 2009 tonight my son is laying on my wife in the living room it's tender he asks where do you go when you die she says heaven he says I'm going to hold your hand when you die mommy so we can go to the same place you see, we are not lone pebbles the tree fighting inside craziness madness murder tits out dick out a storm death threats wine shrieks and drywall holes neighbors blinking their lights like they'll call the cops and after the fight i step over the broken plates and the busted-out fish tank the one that was overturned in a different fight last week i step over the fish bodies i go to the bottom of the stairs my old lady is up there, ranting packing, breaking, cursing, pitching a fit yelling divorce at the tops of her lungs yelling lawyer this and that yelling "you'll see" bitching about affidavits and pictures of bruising broken phones, broken lives all that bullshit thank christ we don't have kids thank christ we're getting divorced i go over to the window at the back of the kitchen i raise the sash and light up a square i look up into the trees out back and search the sky for answers but i don’t find any instead i see a man up in one of the white pines naked under a moon beam he sees me see him and leaps down and runs down the alley so i go to the fridge and grab a coors light i take a long drag off it then i go back to the window and finish the beer then i go back to the fridge for another beer then i go out to the garage and retrieve the stepladder i climb up and get his clothes out of the tree a tee shirt and tommy hilfiger jeans no wallet/no id just his clothes and his size 10 shoes on the ground an old pair of k swisses a little bit of trampled down grass i pick up the artifacts and i go back inside scruffing along the burnt vapors of domestic hell clinging to the scattered ether i can still hear her up there thundering in her whisky tenor the stomps and rumblings of a broken woman but cooling off, i know her it's all my fault i grab a fresh bottle of screw-top white and two plastic cups i ascend the stairs to the horns of hell she's calmed down i can tell she's ready to make up she wants wine i pour out two cups worth we sit on the bed she half-packed a bag she gets up and throws it into a corner we both gulp wine it is thursday, 8:20 tomorrow i'll put the stranger's clothes in our recycling bin they'll help suppress the crash of bottles on pick-up day on fridays our recycling bin releases a vineyard of empties this is our life i still can't spell massachusettes walking through the wan light of dawn field sun crack cloud streak, mugged coffee, fighting autumnal flashbangs tossed by Nature (hell's pixies, dig) imposing of long cello sobs into mind matter (presence) scents of life, soil sacks and such uprooted moss glimmerings, illusory flicker memories that scratch with each step this is the field that once was there are dead dirt piles living here worm screams underfoot, tread heavy, muck, dying six-feet downers plowed, walked upon, earthed you know me Adam Johnson lives in Minnesota. His forthcoming poetry collection, What Are You Doing Out Here Alone, Away From Everyone? will be released through HASH Press in December, 2021.

Blue Fire When in the morning, the star grass Freezes like frostweed, I feel at home. Save for this brown button-up, which chokes Half my neck. These clothes Are a costume, and though all clothes are (costumes), Some suit me better, & I know, like Plato his Forms, That my costumes elude me in the closets of strangers. Nothing Of mine fits, Nor do I like anything I own. The dog is wrong The food is wrong The furniture suffocates & this house is too small for its fire, which burns Within, & whose flames’ tongues Are too long & too blue For the square feet They’ve been given. Variation on Gwendolyn Brooks First fail. Then fiddle. Read a poem. Decide to mimic. Fail. Do this first. Then fiddle. Take someone else’s idea, try making it your own. Realize you can’t. Let it go. Let years go by. Find what you think is your voice. Find out it isn’t. Find out it both is & isn’t. Return to stealing. This time fail at failing. Steal well. Steal only that which you need. Know it was never an issue. Know you were the issue. Change. Know how to change. Self-Portrait He wants to be a brutal old man, everything Robert Creeley has described in his perfect poem, Self- Portrait, which one would like to be a portrait of one’s self. But it is not. One is not a brutal old man. One is a young man who wants to be a brutal old man. Who wants to be aggressive, & mean spirited. I am a young man who does not want to be young, perhaps because he is not young enough, & so would select death, instead. Or perhaps because he does not feel young, does not feel it is right to be young & therefore happy. Perhaps he can forefeel the dread, the slaughter-room babies must enter one day. Vonnegut spoke of the artist as a canary keeling over in the presence of disease. When I was still unborn, I wrapped a cord around my neck & hoped life would choke me the moment it happened. The son of immigrants, Ulyses Razo is a graduate from the University of Washington, Seattle. He writes poetry, and has written fiction, creative nonfiction, film criticism, and translations of Spanish language prose and poetry. He has also worked with collage and erasure. His work has been published or is forthcoming in: Barzakh Magazine, Outcast Press, MORIA, The Metaworker, Life and Legends, and Months to Years. A librarian, he has lived in London and Seattle, and currently resides in Washington.

How would they know? in the moments before freezing to death warmth overcomes you like a blanket of acceptance like an embrace of forgiveness like a reminder of what life used to be or so say most of the survivors Test for echo voices bounce off hard snow through black trees across grey lakes into white skies we wait for the signal to return to report with a message of any kind it never does Slowakening white is the colour of hibernation (not black) because it is waiting for warmth to arrive with sleepy eyes heavy limbs and a heart full of hope Penny Sarmada is from Ontario. Recent and upcoming: Versification, Sledgehammer, Selcouth Station, Pink Plastic House, Bullshit Lit, Tiny Wren

The hunter is haunted by images of a home he once knew, destroyed — a deconstructed fox hole, a pile of sticks and stones patiently waiting for the howl of a broken, desperate man to revive and rebuild something not as revolting as it once was Somewhere in the distance, an owl or mourning dove practices cutting the space with its melancholy melody, the refrain at once familiar and strange, echoing a time between time, nestled in the crook of calamity I calmly take it all in, content to watch the slow unraveling of a life that isn't mine, one or two worlds apart yet close enough for me to realize how it, too, yearns for another realm, for a chance to burn the old parts, to be revived by the only song desperate enough to crawl back to the very place that had destroyed it I had hoped you were hiding I waited alone in the sterile room for the surgery, too stunned to even consider goodbye. Instead, my legs shivering against the stirrups, I prayed hard for a miracle, for a giant "aha! Just kidding!" moment from the expanding universe that would never be large enough to hold space for you. Pity I received from the ones closest to me, words murmured to soothe, and I was grateful — still, in the cloying silence that crept in months later, I realized: I alone was left to somehow trudge through the thick muck of this loss. They expected me to swim and not sink, and I did, all the while hoping the currents would pull me under. How could anyone else truly know what it's like when your very own body becomes a thief who turns hateful against you, prolific cells with cold fury driving your demise, to snatch up the very thing you wanted more than life itself? Lamentations These days, I am bound by a tightness in my throat only offset by forced deep breaths that inflate my sense of belonging, at least for a moment. These days, I feel at once overabundant and lacking in time: those delicate matchbox moments that swirl in a never-ending masquerade of murky glasses and coffee mugs to clearly show just how not alone you are. Yet, if I somehow disappeared from the next afternoon matinee, if my wide beaming, familiar face no longer appeared immediately at your front stoop whenever you rung me to tell me you felt lonely, would you realize that I was no longer among the living? See, that’s the funny thing about the grandiosity of life and its chess moves: those who coldly push ahead eventually still end up falling off the board anyway in blessed descent: arms outstretched, bloodshot eyes bulging at the basest seams that swell and threaten to burst in the most gallant manner atop a carousel while peering down at those below who are still most eager to ingest the same candy- coated curses that no longer consume you Melody Wang currently resides in sunny Southern California with her dear husband and wishes it were autumn all year ‘round. She is a reader for Sledgehammer Lit and can be found on Twitter @MelodyOfMusings. Her debut collection of poetry "Night-blooming Cereus" is coming out on December 17, 2021 with Alien Buddha Press.

Handyman Special Handyman Special: it’s just right for someone with a few skills, some time on their hands and some elbow grease. That bowling ball size dent in the drywall just needs a small piece from the box store and a quick patch, hasn’t even spiderwebbed across the wall yet. The discolored carpet just needs to be pulled up and I’m sure a good sanding or a quick patch of some of the boards will get rid of any seepage or lingering smell and if it leaked down into the basement the dirt floor surely covered it up like nothing. The flecks of metal that shine with the light, the ones imbedded in the frames of the windows and doors really add a unique touch, something I think most would agree adds value and if you still want to replace them prying off a trim board or replacing a door is a quick job. The property is secluded and has a private lot; someone could scream for joy and wouldn’t wake the neighbors. I’m sure anyone with a green thumb can get grass to grow over those patches and they are already rectangular, so why not use them as garden beds? The previous owner has left many useful tools: the axe would be great for cutting your own firewood, the shovel is a needed tool for anyone who works outside and a length of rope that sturdy would be good if you got stuck on that long dirt driveway. I’m sure you’ll love the place; people say old houses have personalities, the walls whisper, you just have to listen! Cracking Eggs I once heard the pleats in a chef’s hat represent the number of ways he can cook an egg, 10 pleats for 10 different ways and 100 pleats for 100 ways! Really though, I wonder which way that chef prefers his eggs because that’s really what matters, right? I know some people like sunny side up, but that’s a little messy. Some prefer poached, but that takes too many steps. Some love hard boiled, the cooking is easy enough, but I don’t have the patience for peeling. I wonder what it says about me and my love for scrambled eggs and no milk right in the frying pan. Matt McGuirk teaches and lives with his family in New Hampshire. BOTN 2021 nominee with words in various lit mags and a debut collection with Alien Buddha Press called Daydreams, Obsessions, Realities available on Amazon and linked on his website. Website: http://linktr.ee/McGuirkMatthew Twitter: @McguirkMatthew Instagram: @mcguirk_matthew.

April was wearing a polka-dot scarf at the picnic where she fell in love. She untied the scarf and swirled it in the air to announce her joy to the world but the linen got entangled in a tree, the loose end soaring like a balloon tied to a mailbox. She turned to call her new love for help—an excuse to talk—but found him gazing away, wistfully at another girl. To rescue her scarf, April stood on a plastic chair and yanked at the cloth. A rip left some polka dots quivering on the tree, others flattening like misshapen hearts in her palm. Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian American writer. Born to a middle-class family in India, she later migrated to the USA. Her work has appeared in Reflex Press, Flash Fiction Online, Kahini, and elsewhere. She has been highly commended in National Flash Microfiction Competition, shortlisted in SmokeLong Quarterly Micro Contest, shortlisted in Bath Flash Fiction Festival. She is currently an editor at Janus Literary and a Submissions Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. Her debut flash fiction collection “Morsels of Purple” is available for purchase on Amazon and in local bookstores. More at https://saraspunyfingers.com. Reach her @PunyFingers

Two Returns to Water I’m so tired. I should be writing but instead I scan the room for spiders, the Adderall waxing off as the images wane in. The blue screen of my computer is too bright, highlighting the tips of my fingers, creating bony silhouettes that create bony words. No flesh. No life. Two returns to mark a new point. I can’t get angry in this space. I can’t be fired up, because igniting dry limbs will only turn me to ash. I need to be of water. I need to return to the water. The Fire This is what happens when we resist the destruction. When we build dams and construct reservoirs instead. When we block the flow of life and think we know better than the cycles that made us. The foolish attempts to control our mother when we are still in our infancy. Come, my petulant child. Rest quietly in my embrace and let’s watch the fire burn. The Other Sun I think about you every day as the sun rests on the horizon. Memories float in, uninvited— until they are. Lauren Theresa (she/her) is a queer neurodivergent writer, chthonic poet, botanical sorceress, and Jungian trauma therapist. She lives in NJ with her husband, two daughters, and myriad of plants, and her publications crawl the pages of laurentheresa.com.

magnolia’s cream-mottled cheek marking yet another bygone era plunked into the abyss as sorrow burrows into our roots, unfurling our prisons / our refuge, the delirious journey into what we've come to recognize as our shadow selves' last fragments of a fallen season that last slanted sunset reflected off the lake hinting with its brilliance at what we simply could not admit to ourselves. The expanding distance between us we hide in and seek thereafter Melody Wang currently resides in sunny Southern California with her dear husband and wishes it were autumn all year ‘round. She is a reader for Sledgehammer Lit and can be found on Twitter @MelodyOfMusings. Her debut collection of poetry "Night-blooming Cereus" is coming out on December 17, 2021 with Alien Buddha Press.

She pushes her hip against his. Slender teenage hips, denim-clad and barely there. She can feel a burn beneath the fabric, chafing on her knicker line. She imagines the new ink spreading; bleeding and vivid, leeching and settling into her skin before becoming permanent. Becoming part of her, another new part, a part she can’t erase. Becoming part of them. The last thought makes her smile, makes her lean further and press deeper into the pain. She is trying to angle herself so her throbbing, clingfilm-covered spot is touching his exactly. She is trying to track the identical place that has made them one. Made them whole. It’s hot here under the pier, hidden from the tourists and the brightest part of the day. And as she clings a bit harder, nudges a bit closer, she thinks she feels him shift. Feels him start to pull away. She chooses to ignore it just like she ignores the pull and tingle of her skin. And his slight impatient sigh, as he fumbles for a fag. Instead, she closes her eyes and makes herself retrace their steps along the pier. Drifts back to the neon lights and thudding bass, back to the pierced, bearded man who flashed his surprisingly white teeth and asked, ‘You ready then?’ And then looked away with a wink when she handed over his sister’s ID. It makes her glow to know they’ve done it together, on the same day, in the same space. Same design. Even if was a choice made by money, by time. By him. She shakes that thought away. He has pulled away now, his arm hanging loose on her shoulders, as he blows curls of blue smoke up to the boardwalk above them. She turns away and tries not to breathe. Instead she looks at the rubbish collected by the breakwater. Things washed up, things abandoned and thrown away. Suddenly that thing she read is in her head again; about how pathologists use tattoo ink to identify bodies with missing limbs. How the ink tracks through the skin and pools in the lymph nodes, creating a rainbow that runs through your body forever. And something in her shifts. And she thinks whatever happens now, they are joined. These colours in their flesh. Forever. Tomorrow then, tomorrow she will tell him about the other two inky straight lines. Parallel and blue. Their other creation. And that butterfly stamped on his shoulder. Maybe that will fly away. Rachel Canwell is a reader, writer, teacher and blogger but not necessarily in that order. She is currently working on her first novel and falling in love with flash fiction a little bit more each day. You can find her on Twitter @bookbound2019

Chemical Pregnancies Dear Diary, I was late for my period so I took a home pregnancy test. Could I just be imagining the second line on the test kit because I want it so badly? It’s never as dark as the first line, in fact, it’s light, but it’s there. I saw it. It was real. It was a positive result. Two lines equal pregnant. There were two lines. I was pregnant. The test said so. The same thing happened last month. Have you heard of a chemical pregnancy? It’s apparently a thing that’s happening to me now. Chemical sounds so fake and manufactured, like plastic. Like some sort of pseudo version of pregnancy that doesn’t actually count because it’s not real. When I went to the doctor to confirm, the pregnancy test they gave me was negative. I told the nurse that can’t be right, it must be a mistake because I’m late for my period and I got a positive home test. The nurse said the sperm met the egg but the pair of them could not implant in my uterus. Why would my uterus reject a pregnancy? She told me it sounded to her like my pregnancies are only chemical. A pregnancy that starts, but doesn’t take. A fake. I don’t have what it takes. It’s not the first time, I told her. How many of these do I have to have? How much do I have to go through to get one to take? She said I could go to a fertility specialist and have tests done to find out why it’s happening. She said it’s good that at least I know I can get pregnant. The problem is that I just can’t stay that way. I don’t get to carry it, because it’s only chemical. It’s there and then it’s gone. Why is my body rejecting pregnancy? Didn’t it get the memo? All these years I have spent trying not to get pregnant and now that I want to, I can’t. When I left the doctor, I hoped the nurse was wrong. Yesterday I was pregnant. Yesterday I was finally going to be a mother. Yesterday I was going to have a baby. When I got home, I started to bleed. It feels like my body is failing me. Like I have lost control of everything. Nurse Marge On a last resort phone call, I’m pacing the sidewalk in front of my house in my rural Ohio subdivision. It’s summer, I’m barefoot, and the concrete is as hot as the forgotten cookies burning in my oven. No longer able to be positive and professional, I’m crying into my phone. I have reached a pediatric neurology nurse named Marge. Her starch stern but patient voice makes me picture her in a crisp white nurse cap, holding a clipboard. I can feel her listening to me. Nurse Marge wants the facts and through my sobs, I’m trying to give them to her. No one will give me an appointment for three months but my son needs help now. He’s in trouble now. We can’t live like this for one more day, let alone three more months! The words that tumble out of me next are the words I have not wanted to say out loud because I do not want them to be true. My little boy isn’t eating. He’s not sleeping. He’s miserable. We’re scared. Nurse Marge waits a beat to make sure I’m done. Ok, she says, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll have to call you back. I whisper thank you into the phone and collapse, criss-cross applesauce, onto my front lawn. I stare at my phone balanced on my knee and wonder if she will call back. So many of the schedulers, social workers, and receptionists I have tried have not called back. Being ineligible for pediatric psychiatric help until it is too late for it to actually be helpful seems to be the status quo where I live. I guess no pediatric psychiatrists want to live in the middle of nowhere, Ohio. I guess I can’t blame them. There are no appointments until October, is all anyone I can get through to, will tell me. What I hear - there is no help for your child who is falling apart until he has already fallen beyond repair. I realize that these thoughts are actually coming out of my mouth as audible words while I search the long-neglected grass around me, out of habit, for a four-leaf clover. I have never needed the luck of the Irish the way I do now. It doesn’t occur to me to wonder what I might look like at this moment to my neighbors. I’m desperate like in the dream where all your teeth are inexplicably falling out and you can’t stop it or get them to go back in. And I look like it. I haven’t showered, changed out of the clothes I slept in, or brushed my hair today. I’m wearing hole filled yoga pants and a stained t-shirt, sans bra. My fair Celtic complexion means red blotches from crying cover my face. My phone vibrates on my knee, interrupting my conversation with myself, and I jump up to resume my sidewalk pace. Nurse Marge is not one for small talk. She asks me, can you be in downtown Cleveland tomorrow morning at 8:30? Yes! I can do that. I feel like I have just found my four leaf clover. The impossible is now possible because Nurse Marge has pulled magic Nurse Marge strings for me. This is only the beginning, she warns me. She has felt my climb from desperation to elation and she’s trying to bring me down a rung. They won’t do anything but get background information, but then you’ll be in the system. I know this but I also know that starting now and not three months from now could make all the difference. I can go back in the house now to face the rest of the day, clean myself up, make a plan for getting us to Cleveland bright and early, and start on a new batch of cookies. Nurse Marge told me to call her again if I ever needed anything else. I’ve kept her number in my phone - First Name: Nurse, Last Name: Marge and I did call on her for help again. So many years, ups and downs, appointments and specialists later, I still think about her. She may have thought what she did that day was a small thing that was part of her job, but it changed our lives forever. Beth Mulcahy (she/her), a Gen X-er from Michigan, lives in Ohio with her husband, two kids and loyal Havanese dog sidekick. Beth works for a company that provides technology to people without natural speech. She writes poetry, fiction, memoir, and dreams about visiting Scotland. Her work has appeared in various journals and she has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. Check out her latest publications at https://linktr.ee/mulcahea

Lucky Reincarnation or the blue hope of heaven carry no promise. Maybe I will lay in my shell, and drift away slowly or be suddenly ripped from the story on my way to the grocery store a mere two blocks from home. Will I close my eyes or keep them open? It doesn’t matter to the dark that comes either way, with or without express written consent. Maybe the line between my body and mind, that I worked so hard in my mediation practices to erase, will. No need for these feet and hands or the doing and undoing of knots real and perceived. will the long last exhale where the colors and shapes that I recognize as reality will be just that, before they are forgotten completely? But sure as shit, my last electric thought will be how lucky I am to have had this one chance, this one life, with my one beating heart, and you. Postponed All those times you prayed for cancellation. All those paragraphs you read halfway through, life being too short For bad poetry. The forwards, the afterwords skipped in patiently Are all penciled into your day planner. Goddamn the year of the wild lies and the terrified other. Goddamn the bloodline so disappointing you deny them, Like Jesus understood, alone and trembling in the garden, with the truth surrounding you like a sickness. The contents of your china cabinet are in the basement on a card table waiting to be sorted out into the wanted and unnecessary. Those things you purposely kept because “who knows”. That was your tenuous grasp on the unexpected. Your backward way of ‘letting go’ of control. But the changes came in the form of subtraction, not addition. Now those extra things, they need to go. Self-improvement is the order of the day and we are ashamed. You will get to know yourself better in the dirt in the corners of your home. Another update Another reason to cry How in the world? What the FUCK! You don’t know anything or anyone, you can’t. Searching your soul with a magnifying glass For a pinprick of a silver lining. Could you forget where you are? Could you laugh with a stranger? Relish the color of the leaves? Count your blessings? Roll a joint? Through your dirty windshield As you wait for the groceries to be delivered to your trunk You see a red hat. You can’t read it through the swaths of grime But it makes you sick all the same. You image yourself tearing out the throat of the person wearing it with your teeth. But look, here come your groceries. You push the thought aside, put on your mask And pencil that in too. Maybe next year. Canidae Had I noticed the dark gray of the heavily trafficked floor as I stepped off the elevator? Winter inside, winter out. I had left work and headed straight to the hospital. He was waiting for me. I remember his voice choking as he said, “Yeah, yeah…” when I tried to console him over the phone. You have been gone for about an hour, they were letting the family say their goodbyes. They waited for the granddaughters to arrive. They waited for me. I didn’t stop very far into that doorway. I skulked around the edges. That tiny crumb of panic in my condolences. I remember that my son did this after his baby brother was born. He stopped dead coming into the hospital room and had to be ushered in with a stiff hand by his grandmother. Tears hanging on the sills of his eyes. So terrified to disrupt the order, To hear the cries and not understand why. Terrified to feel too deeply. Trying to disappear like a fox and a den. Eyes gleaming and frightened and selfish. A different sort of birth now, but a similar terror. I could see your shell on the bed. You were gone into the ether. Absorbed was your last breath, Into the lungs of your children as they stepped all over each other recounting your last minutes on earth, overly detailed as your children tend to be when telling a story. No one quite had the timeline right Even though only moments had passed. It was fortunate no one was paying attention to the other so they all kept their truth. I drifted, unable to hold my attention still. I inverted my eyes checked my phone. A comically huge clock hung on the wall, showing me time left; times up. More stories about you, some laughter. There is something so funny about someone who thinks it isn’t. The ritual of looking back at where you once were took half an hour. Finally we hoisted our purses and wrapped our necks with scarves. Like yesterday, like tomorrow. I took a deep breath, relieved to be standing So close to the door. Outside the snow fell hard. Our conversation turned blessedly back to the weather as it always does in the place you were born We have to drive home in it. We have to go on living and thinking and doing. We have children to raise and deadlines to meet. And I have a cold den in my heart to return to, before it’s too late.