All you can hope for is that this is the worst meal you’ll ever face: broccoli buried in cold soba noodles scooped with your lower lip from a take-out carton while sitting in a car hounded by a blizzard facing the interstate in North Dakota. You have to blow on both wrists to stay warm although the engine is running, and the heater’s on full blast. You wear the pair of blue jeans and suede jacket he forgot when he packed and left with his ex, and your mother is boycotting all your texts. Somewhere else it is Christmas Eve.
Shoshauna Shy: My flash fiction and poetry has appeared recently in Thrice Fiction, Fiction Southeast, Prairie Wolf Poetry Review, 100 Word Story, Rhino, and Sou’wester. (And also in A Quiet Courage.)
A Quiet Courage 