Peterborough, New Hampshire We get lost and it’s my fault. I think I know a shortcut. Mary knows only the long way around. I have an appointment for a man to look into my mouth and tell me my…
“The fuck you take your gloves off again?” you growled, never letting up, the oldest. Brother trip, our third in two years, anywhere there’d be northern lights. We hiked out of the frozen Alaskan woods—the black-dark, wraith rider intimidation…
Zones of your brain affected: frontal, temporal, parietal. The doctor points at them in turn on the scan of your brain. Those traitorous parts, shrivelling out of existence, threatening to take pieces of you with them. I look from…
Is your mom a mail-order bride? I was once asked by a classmate in fourth grade while we sat at our desks making fake nails out of Elmer’s glue squeezed into the hollow of our plastic rulers. No, of…
She says go like this and bares her teeth at me, lips pulled back. All the other girls lean in to see inside my mouth, too close. I smell the leather of their shoes, but I don’t flinch. Jagged,…
Snap Not when your mother makes you go to the dance. You tell her you’re sick. Really sick this time. See? You’ve broken out in hives. Not when she slathers you in calamine lotion & stuffs you into tights…
When Ford made love to Calla, she felt something in him fight. It wasn’t against her ugliness. That matter was settled business, though Calla, in her youth, had held onto the idea that she was a winter-apple sort of…
Dau used to live in the apartment below me. He had skin so dry it fell like leaves on a windy day, so much he pixelated his floor with tiny fog-colored flakes, each thin and flappy as a plastic…
Esther was sixteen the summer that all the bees in her father’s hives died. Those were the days when she was in love with everything. The curtains in her room, billowing with the morning breeze; the spongy hills leading…
He was standing at the corner where we met every morning to walk to work because we were young and carless. I had gotten on a train and moved 2,000 miles for a walkable city. He had always lived…
“Walkable City” is the first time I wrote about this scalding relationship from my late twenties, nearly half a lifetime ago. Some relationships need lots of words in their aftermath; this one did not. I remade my life in its fallout—moving, starting an MFA program in fiction, committing myself to “being a writer.” Eventually I got married and had a kid, and twelve years later, that kid went to sleepaway camp for two weeks. I challenged myself to draft one new piece of flash every day he was away.
The first eleven days, I burned through familiar topics: marriage, motherhood, grief and its aftermath. By day twelve, I was tired and ready for my kid to come home. Out of ideas, I found myself mining this memory about the day John Denver died. In the first draft, I thought the piece was about how muddled the vulnerabilities were in the relationship. We hurt each other easily and often, and I never felt like I was on solid ground, apologizing when I didn’t want to be apologizing, hurting him when I always felt like the one who was really hurt.
But as with nearly all of my work, the meaning emerged in revision. I’ve often joked I’m the only person who has ever disliked living in Portland, Oregon. These lines became the heart of early revisions: “I was not at home here, but also wasn’t homesick. I was not at home at home either.” So much of my writing returns again and again to the same theme of the struggle toward home.
In a moment of writerly kismet, I took “Walkable City” with me to a residency at the wonderful Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. My roommate was the equally wonderful visual artist, Mary Jones, who makes art, quite literally, out of walkable cities. Her conversations about art and home were delivered like a gift that I braided in to finish the piece.
MIRIAM GERSHOW is the author of The Local News: A Novel. Her short stories appear in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. Her flash fiction and nonfiction pieces appear in Pithead Chapel, Heavy Feather Review, and Variant Lit, where “Lines of Communication” won their 1st Annual Pizza Prize. Miriam’s next book, Survival Tips: Stories, will publish with Propeller Books in March 2024. Find her on Twitter at @miriamgershow.
