No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. Since 2015.
The night Megha decided that I was the one was the night, I’m certain, when I invited her back to my room—an austere room, halfway up the west side of a high rise, with walls of brick, and laminated floors, and knots of copper plumbing arbitrarily exposed—and she laid eyes upon my mason jars, all eleven of them, lined up neatly on a single wooden shelf above my bed, each containing a single reconstructed cockroach peacefully suspended in a solution of H2O and ethyl alcohol.
They waited tables at the same restaurant. Brent was a year older than Mariah. He was a senior in college, a business major, working for rent and beer money, instead of kids’ clothes, frozen dinners, and daycare payments. They’d met a few months before, when he first got hired. His first day on the job, he stepped in when Mariah screwed up an order and the customer started cussing her out.
We finished work at five. No time for dinner. The weather was bleak and getting bleaker, windshield wipers swatting sleet and sleet still coming, brake lights strung like beads along a northbound red zone—Google Maps rerouting. Thirty minutes turning into forty, forty into forty-five, but this could be our lucky break. We were determined to arrive.
Frustrated, I swiped up on my phone and went back to Instagram. I had to triple-check if it was her account because all I could see was that she had no posts. But it didn’t make any sense, there was just the one with her cat, the earlier one with her baking cookies, the one where she was at the gym with her cousin, the one where she and the same cousin were hanging outside her house, and the one where she and the same cousin were at a garden, with him helping her feed the koi fish. It was all gone.
She blocked me.
He loved blaming the “Damn Protestants” for any misfortune, like when the rotary tiller broke down. Mom says his dislike for them was really about their ban on playing cards.
"...Relationships with other people are just not my forte, I suppose. I do have a relationship with my job. I love my job. I fix computers..."