Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash
by Kip Knott
My ex-wife’s on the phone telling me that she found my secret diary buried beneath some old towels in the linen closet. After six years, I had nothing new to write about, so I had tucked it, I thought, well out of sight and mind.
“Why is it that everything you wrote back then was about all the dead things you’d find in the woods or roadkill on our street whenever you took your evening walks?” she demands. “You don’t mention me at all.”
In an instant, every day of our seven years together plays out in my mind like one of those time-lapse films of a decomposing fox carcass—the body deathly still on a bed of moss at the beginning, then writhing with decay as parasites frantically consume it in the middle, and then denuded and shrouded with dead leaves at the end.
“What else could I write about,” I answer, “when I couldn’t write about love?”
Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Ohio. His writing has recently appeared in Best Microfiction 2024 and The Wigleaf Top 50. His new book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press.
