Photo by Adam Sherez on Unsplash
by Charlotte Hamrick
You rub fish oil in your hair, on your elbows and toes as the cat licks & licks an exfoliating massage, dead skin flakes fall, dusty motes, pink rising like balloons.
Yoga clad Barbies wrinkle their noses in Trader Joe’s as you consider which organic vegetables will yield to the constraints of Social Security. Will the solution be beets or spinach, or eggs from free-range chickens, echoes of self-satisfied clucks dancing round your head.
Almond milk, oat milk, or hemp milk? Cows are out of fashion, too many farts.
The solution will make your stomach a stem cell factory with plenty of bathroom breaks & relaxation rooms for procreation while the cat gives you side eye & sniffs that fish was the solution all along.
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Charlotte Hamrick’s fiction has appeared in a number of literary magazines and is anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2022 and 2023.
