Meg Pokrass

1/ 

It’s movie night at her place: Planet of the Apes. I’m not excited.

Elena has outdone herself: lasagne with low fat cheese for my hubby and me. I’m on a diet and Elena thinks about other people that way, shopping for low fat cheese so I’ll feel less guilty. It smells like garlic in her kitchen, home-like in a way my house never does. 

2/

Why don’t I like Planet of the Apes? I hate it. I should have brought popcorn. Popcorn can really help.

Elena’s mean little Juliette runs up to greet us. A dark silky-haired goddess who bites. We don’t ever pet her. My husband says, “Juliette looks wonderful. Did you take her to Perfect Paws?”

I imagine him dancing with Juliette, letting himself be mauled.

3/

Hubby and I—we are “happy” this week. I’m holding his hand, milking his fingers, but I think about my ex, how sweet he was in the middle of the night, the way he’d tuck me under his wing. 

This hubby, the current, is pretending to be in love with me so that I’ll stop moping. I cried and told him I would leave. Now he pretends. 

4/ 

When I can’t sleep and he’s away, Elena opens the door, smiling her garlicky grin. Somehow she reminds me of Danny Kaye in that Hans Christian Andersen movie. I can’t remember the title, but it’s full of swans and Copenhagen. Elena’s smile is the world of ancient movies, the ones my mother loved. 

5/

“That Danny Kaye,” Mom would say. “I wish men were really like that.”

I enter Elena’s house with no movies on queue. I sit next to her and smell garlic on her apron, her breath, her life. Juliette bites my finger, blood beads up like spilled wine. I forgive her for being a dangerous animal. 

Alone, we don’t need low fat cheese. I pretend my husband approves of me being over here without him, since he’s not in love with me anyway. “You look like a female Hans Christian Andersen,” I say, kissing Elena’s Scandinavian lips.

My mother too is long dead. My mother would have loved Elena, but not my hubby. I think about Ma’s smile, her laugh, her conviction that a woman should never even try to find a life like this one.

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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.