Photo by Antoine J. on Unsplash
by Katie Coleman
Nineteen-year-old Olivia steals knowledge from sandstone libraries and sneers at engineering students wearing starched jeans with trainers so new they squeak. In her boyfriend’s dorm, he sprays Lynx deodorant, enjoying the scent of Leather and Cookies as he pulls on dark suede boots, and practises chord progressions beneath a poster of Dylan. It’s later when he enters the debating gallery, that he spins flights of rhetoric, and a new part of Olivia’s brain activates—her vision tightens, as she tunes in, hearing how his voice has gained depth. During a celebratory kiss outside Pizza Pilgrims, he presses her for an answer: “Should I be a philosopher or a rockstar?” The question’s loaded—Olivia knows that telling the truth will leave her dog-eared, damaged, but a lie will break her spine. So she curls her fingers and whispers, “A poet,” the word shakes like a tambourine, and they stand there, suspended in the silence that follows.
Katie Coleman is a British writer living in Thailand. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, Your Impossible Voice, Milk Candy Review, Ghost Parachute, SoFloPoJo, Bending Genres, Ilanot Review, Roi Fainéant Press, Paragraph Planet, and more.
