Amy Stuber
1. THE DISPATCHMy Friend Sela
My Friend Sela, The Writer, drinks her drink, pulls at one of her thin gold chains, each with a different charm: wishbone, gold S, gold pineapple. She picks up her phone, checks the screen, sets it down, says, “I read your story. It’s so good, girlie. I was totally in it.” She shakes the ice around in her glass. “Okay, hear me out. I’m just wondering if you can write about lesbians, like if you’re allowed. I know you’re bi, but, I mean, when is the last time you fucked a woman?”
Sela laughs, and I laugh because she’s laughing. I blink a few more times than is necessary, look at the window glass, outside of which sits a row of electric cars, tiny and jewel colored, each plugged in and waiting,
Really, I wasn’t having sex with anyone lately. I was, more, watching sex, but that felt bad because the people online looked nothing like the people I might have sex with in real life. Their porn voices reminded me of Bradford Pear blossoms, showy, silly, fragile. They would smell, I was sure, as Bradford Pear blossoms did, like semen on a bedsheet sprayed with CVS body spray.
On the way from drinks to the second bar to meet up with two men from Sela’s work, Sela says, “I didn’t want you to feel weird about the agent thing, so I didn’t mention it initially. I know you’ve been trying at this for fucking ever.” One of her heels gets stuck in a street grate, and I think, This is why block heels are better for the city, Sela. She gets it loose with a small tug, and then says, “Anyway, in your story they were playing bocci, and I was thinking, should it maybe be shuffleboard, something old school but not with a veneer over it, you know?”
I reapply my lipstick. I’d been in the city for five years post-college. I’d outlasted my acne, was two thirds of the way through my IUD, had moved into a slightly better paying editing job at an industry-specific magazine no one has heard of. It’s not that I foresaw some better future on a street with green lawns and birds in the trees. Still, sometimes I heard my mother, long dead and hovering in grayed-out sheets like a toxic angel, chanting: now what.
The second bar has tables that give the illusion of being the kind you’ll have to sit around, cross-legged, on pillows, but really there’s a secret hole under the table where your legs can hang.
Sela sits next to the cuter of the two men and grabs his hand. She downs something with whiskey, and a line of liquid dribbles down her chin. I let it sit there without doing that nice friend thing of reaching over to wipe it away.
The less cute of the two men talks to me about the return of the Tumbler aesthetic and informs me I would look good in the silky hairbows that are back for fall. I do a lot of nodding. Sela wraps her hair around a gold hairpin, and we go to the bathroom to pee and re-dot our faces with highlighter.
“Okay,” she says when we’re both looking at ourselves in the mirror, “One last thing, maybe we need more details about the two main characters, like, we don’t even know how old they are. We don’t know if they have kids, had kids, wanted kids.”
I do not have kids. Will not have kids? The right thing to say is that bringing kids into now-world is a cruelty, but the real thing is I only say I won’t as self-protection because I worry kids will not be something I get to do.
“I guess I didn’t want to give away everything. Sometimes we don’t know everything, you know?” I rub my hands on my cheeks where my blush looks like it’s been applied at a doll factory.
Sela says, “Hey, I’m sorry. I’m the worst. Your story was really good.” She grabs me by the hand and pulls me back to the table, next to which the two men are holding sour beers and talking about solar farms.
Close to midnight, it becomes clear that Sela is going to fuck the cuter of the two men on a balcony because Sela is not someone who ever fucks in bed, and I’m likely to go home and watch Love Island UK. I wave to her, say bye, and walk outside the bar where police have yellow-taped off a rectangle of concrete around a woman in pink scrubs who lies flat and not breathing. My own mother died like this, young and alone and without warning. I inhale in a way that sounds like a hiccup. One of the cops looks up and motions with his hand for me to keep moving. I hear Sela’s voice in my head: But, like, one tiny thing, I wanted the death in the story to be more strange, like a weird wind gust comes and she’s impaled by a tree or something you’d never expect.
At the bottom of two flights of stairs, I wait for the train and think of all the people who have stood in the same or a similar spot and thought jump, don’t jump, jump, don’t jump.
The next morning, I walk through a museum and pause for what I think are acceptable amounts of time in front of important paintings. I get a coffee, watch pigeons argue over a dropped crepe, think about the whole day and its tentacles inflated with the pressure of possibility.
“Death,” I’ll say to Sela when I see her at late brunch, when she leans forward to let her tits hang at the perfect angle, and blinks enough to make me wonder if she’s had her lashes dyed: “Death isn’t always a spectacle, sometimes it just happens.”
2. BUREAU INVENTORYPre-kids, I had a desk and had on/around it things like museum postcards of art I liked, good pens, special rocks. Now, I don't have a desk, so I write on my phone while walking or on my bed or at my dining room table or on my front porch. What's with me varies, I guess depending on the place, but usually:
My phone
Multiple beverages
Salty snacks
Spiral notebook
Pens, nothing special
3. BIOGRAPHYAmy Stuber is a fiction writer from Kansas. She edits flash fiction for Split Lip Magazine. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction America, American Short Fiction, Missouri Review, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, West Branch, New England Review, and elsewhere.
She's on Twitter @amy_stuber_ and online at www.amystuber.com.