Characters
- Me: Divorced
- Him: Interested
- Her: Uninterested
Act 1
Over tequila shots in my triangle shaped house
Her: Zzzzzzz
Him: She made a list. People I can sleep with.
Me: That’s insane.
Me: Am I on it?
Waving a lit wand of incense for her altar
Her: How’re the kids?
Me: How’s your marriage?
Her: Fine.
Me: Really?
Her: Fine. Like the clear blue sky.
Act 2
Under a clear blue sky on a blanket, mostly undressed
Him: I’m not going to leave her, you know.
Me: Duly noted.
Stretched out on the hand-woven kilim in my office
Him: I can’t stop thinking about you.
While their kids play in the sand box in my back yard
Him: I don’t care; I would rather die than be without you.
Panting in a hammock in the moonlight
Me: We have to stop.
Him: I love you.
Screaming on my front porch
Her: Fucking cunt! Thieving whore!
Cowering inside my deadbolted front door
Me: silence
Text bubble
Me: R u ok?
Him: silence
Act 3
Clutching my phone in the dark
Me: I hope that you
If you need space then
Please know that I
Near the broccoli rabe at Whole Foods
Her: silence
Me: I’m sorry.
Her: silence
Facebook post of a pristine Thai waterfall
Him: “Ringing in the New Year with my beautiful family.”
Lying face down on the scratchy kilim in my office
Me: sob
At a stop sign, months later
Me: How’s your marriage?
Him: Fine.
Me: I still love you
Epilogue
Eight years later
Checking email late one night in bed, engagement ring sparkling
Him: Can we meet?
Me: ?!#$*)!
What a surpri
Are you stillHow dare
Eight minutes later, fingers hovered over keyboard
Me:
____
Suzanne LaFetra Collier’s writing has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Sun, The San Francisco Chronicle, Smokelong Quarterly, and over a dozen anthologies. She co-directed and produced the award-winning documentary film, FREE: The Power of Performance, which recently aired on PBS. She lives with her family in Berkeley, California, and is at work on a novel set in a Tijuana prison.
Photo by Elizabeth Fackler
3 comments
Amber Anderson says:
May 23, 2019
The tension builds so perfectly in this piece. And the script provides an ideal format for visualizing and filling in the blanks. Thank you for the experimental form!
Denis Wobig says:
Jul 9, 2019
I don’t like a lot of what I read on this site. So much of it seems, to me, forced, pretentious even phony. So when I clicked on your piece my first thought was, oh Christ, now what. A couple of minutes later I thought, wow that was a lot of hard reality in a few lines. It was moving and humorous and the ending was great! Way to go.
Nels P. Highberg says:
Jul 19, 2019
Talk about precision in language! I had to copy-and-paste to see the word count, and it’s not even 300 words. There is power in the concision.