For weeks, I could only fall asleep by imagining the revived version of my ex-girlfriend. She’d stop calling me a dyke as a joke and remember my allergy to scented detergents.
On a bright blue afternoon, after seeing a girl devouring a confetti cupcake at the mall, I decided that I had to bring her back. Sara made a cake like that once. I’d licked an orange sprinkle out from under her fingernail.
She was the same but different. Bright apple cheeks. Slow blinks. I hid the scissors and knives just in case, but my sewn stitches overrode her. She didn’t tell me it’d be easy to sleep with other people. She remembered my allergy.
But after a few weeks, something else in her remembered. Her body, her tongue, and her hands made old patterns. She spat out the grilled cheese I made her. She never referred to the apartment as home. For a night, she disappeared and returned in the air of a stranger’s perfume.
I was in a mirror watching the past as she shoved her clothes into a suitcase. Before she left, she cut her dead blond curls off in the bathroom sink. I hadn’t known she’d found the scissors.
Valerie Hughes (she/her) lives in New York, NY. Her work appears in 101 Words, Queerlings, Thread Lit Mag by Chill Subs, and other publications. Currently, she is a member of PocketMFA’s Spring 2024 Cohort for Fiction and is working on a novel. Find her on twitter @_valeriehughes.
Terrific. So much here about loss and heartache and not going back.
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