Waco, the first World Trade Center bombing, a terrible blizzard on the eastern coast of the USA, sure. But there were good things—Jurassic Park and The X-Files and Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” And Dan. Handsome in a shaggy mullet, the year they met. His goofy grin, which she captured in the photograph that still hung on the wall by the stairs. The first one she ever took of him, before they were married, when hospices and loneliness were as fictitious as crow’s feet and compression socks. She’d tried so many times to return to him there, the year that CERN was born, and PDFs, and Intel Pentium processing.
Their kids insisted the problem was physical science, objective reality, linear time.
She believed it was one of lubrication.
Standing on the bottom step, she brought her face close to his picture frame and kissed him on his darling nose. Then she licked every inch of his window glass and pushed herself through.
M.C. Schmidt's recent short fiction has appeared in Gulf Stream, The Forge, The Pinch Online, Southern Humanities Review, HAD, Mud Season Review, EVENT, and elsewhere. He is the author of Manna America and Simple Songs for the End of the World.
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