by Kathryn Kulpa
When she was thirteen years old Emma fell in love with a dead man. Lost her heart to his shaggy melancholy staring from her mother’s old vinyl albums. She was too young for him, but one day, if she lived long enough, she would be older than he’d ever been—like a girl in a movie she’d seen, a ghost girl trying to find the right age to come back as. Life was a carnival ride that never stopped spinning; the trick was to step off at just the right moment, but Emma liked impossible tricks. The Ferris wheel stopped at the top, pink moon balanced in the salmon sky, Emma’s legs in black and white tights swinging, swinging. The fortune-telling fish in her palm trembled, ready to leap.
Kathryn Kulpa is flash editor at Cleaver magazine. She has never eaten a gooseberry, but she bakes a mean apple-cranberry pie.
