Photo by Pixabay
by Lisa Thornton
There is a world in which Larenz and Jen continue to curl up on the couch, interlocking fingers; Black and white, Black and white. A world where Jen’s mother doesn’t say to Jen’s father you just have to tell him, and her father doesn’t sit down at their kitchen table, pinch his forehead and write Larenz a letter saying this is all over now. A letter Larenz tells me about twenty years later at the roller-skating rink on my kid’s sixth birthday. Have you seen her? he asks, and I say no, wanting to tell him what I think but what do I know about any of it, really. A world where the Skateland has no walls and the rinks cover all the cornfields and Larenz and Jen skate wherever they want, backwards, forwards, doing the thing where they squat down and grab their right foot, leg extended. A world where Larenz and Jen skate away, fingers laced.
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Lisa Thornton lives in the Midwest near the cornfields. She has work in SmokeLong Quarterly, Tiny Molecules and elsewhere. She is on Twitter @thorntonforreal.
