That’s what I want to ask her. If we were to meet I would say, “When were we in Delaware?” And she would say, “Last year, about this time.” And I would say, “I don’t think it ever happened. That weekend when we walked the beach and watched the kids surf the small waves by that jetty of rocks. Remember that? And we were on the rocks the size of small cars and there was a little girl climbing across the rocks after her friends. And she was the prettiest, and they were ahead of her and they wouldn’t wait. Remember that?”
Anne would drink her coffee, her blue purse with the orange trim there on the floor. “I like this place,” she would say. “The light is bad, but the coffee is good.” But really she wouldn’t say this because she’d told me so many times before. Before we left Chicago for Philadelphia.
I could feel her beside me pushing her bike and getting pissed and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
“You wouldn’t make a good soldier,” I said, staring off at the swells that curved and curved against the silver horizon.
“No. Not with Anne. Just me.” I was walking around the apartment because that’s what people do when they make awkward phone calls.
“This is where we met,” I would tell her. “I forgot,” I would say.
“Shake Hands Like a Man” by Billy Lombardo
“Gun Control” by Laura Adamczyk
“Diáspora” by Heather Michaels
“Sugar Pop” by Robin Kirk
