Excerpt: Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
The following is an excerpt from my newest short fiction:
The mattress was already in the hallway when I decided to leave on a Thursday morning, which technically made me not the asshole because at least I wasn't the one who put it there. That honor belonged to Eugene, my landlord. He looked like a professional WWE wrestler but was actually afraid of all face-to-face confrontation, which explained the way he'd arranged my belongings like a sad garage sale and the passive-aggressive all-caps texts about rent. I could never tell if he was yelling or just typing like one of those Facebook aunts who seemed to use their caps lock more than periods.
I stood in what used to be our kitchen staring at the espresso machine Luz had rescued from what used to be our favorite café on Avenue C. She'd dragged it home like a stray cat, claiming it had "character." Apparently, that had meant it made coffee that tasted like cigarettes and regret. Its chrome surface reflected my face back at me all wrong—nose stretched with eyes too wide, like one of those funhouse mirrors that remind you that you're not as attractive as you think you are.
What I once considered our home was now just a one bedroom, “sunsoaked gem” listed on Trulia for more than double what the rent was the previous year.
I packed Luz’s things in a Chiquita banana box from the bodega around the corner. It felt appropriate since our relationship too closely resembled the fruit I was most allergic to: sweet for about three days before turning brown and spotty. Already inside the box was one denim jacket that still smelled like she'd bathed in Santal 33, two paperbacks with water damage from her habit of reading in the tub (Morrison and Vuong, because of course), and a Ziploc bag full of hotel keycards from trips I wasn't invited on. I tossed the yellowing manuscript in last. It wasn't so much unfinished as it was barely started, unless you counted the doodles in the margins as "content."
Luz’s abandoned words were titled Everything is Temporary, Especially You, which I thought was a bit on the nose. She had a thing for obvious labels. She once wrote a short story called "The Woman Who Couldn't Love" and then got mad when I guessed the ending. We had broken up only three months before. The night ended in a spectacular implosion that involved her throwing my favorite mug against the wall and me calling her a "talentless narcissist with commitment issues." Not my finest moment, but in my defense, the news that she had been sleeping with her thesis advisor while telling me she was "too busy to hang out" was still pretty fresh.
Our explosive end made this whole delivery service situation feel like an out of body experience, like being asked to cater your own divorce party before the paperwork was fully processed. I’d hardly had any time to keep up with my laundry let alone grieve the ending of our relationship. And now she was dead.
Check back for the full story, soon to be published on Substack.
