Beautiful Realtors

Meg Pokrass

You tell yourself: you’re going to be fine, because of these realtors flitting around like crows. You and the TV are a team, the last outdated objects to go: dusty, obsolete. Outside, there is a sizzle in the air, as if the sky has an urge to do something. What a nice life you and the ex made, buying this house in a difficult city when you loved each other. How the two of you worked the system until the system worked you back. Even during the best of years, you were too common for this living room’s parquet floors, picture window facing the sea. You with moth holes in every sweater. “Someone will snap this up in a second," Candy says. You sigh and pretend you are floating in outer space. Where to next, Major Tom? Does anyone really belong here on Planet Earth? Floating like a dead star in the living room while the beautiful realtors take one last peck through the place you once nested. There is something reality-show sad about their perky, morning-faces. "Such loving details all over this house," Candy says with the world's most fertile smile.

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Meg Pokrass is the author of five flash fiction collections and a book of prose poetry, Cellulose Pajamas, for which she received the Blue Light Book Award. Her work has been widely internationally anthologized, most recently in New Micro (W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015) and The Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019. She serves as Founding Co-Editor of Best Microfiction 2020 and teaches flash fiction online and in person. Find out more at megpokrass.com.