In Love
Jon and Isabel were in love. They
fantasized while gazing into computer screens at work, imagined the forthcoming
weekends as larger than life tableaux across which their love was painted in
pictorial detail: crab bisque by weak light at Sparle’s, humid kisses on the
taxi’s cracked vinyl seat, legs and fingers clenched under the paisley sheets.
They even imagined what they’d feel if they broke up—long, restless nights, the
pain in their hearts so sharp they almost cried out—then the debut of a new
love in the other’s life, someone they would simultaneously hate and
admire.
There was much time and effort
devoted to these daydreams: would his new woman wear Prada? Would she pick up
the check, independent and aggressive, traits she sensed he admired but that she
lacked? He wondered if her new guy would have a full head of hair. Would he
gladly take her to the opera, not complain about the thin plot, the cavernous
halls through which the booming voices echoed like the demons of death
themselves?
But
they were in love, so their pounding hearts were softened by visions: him
refusing his new woman’s predatory overtures in the bed under which her blue
leather Pradas, size 10, were propped at odd, unflattering angles; her noting
the suspicious weave of her new boyfriend’s salt and pepper hair, the dotted
incision all along the hairline.
On
weekends they sat, staring into the pale sky or the coffee cup, envisioning the
wretched fate of the new lover, the interloper, the one they had always known
was waiting in the wings.
Dorene O'Brien
Dorene O’Brien is a
Detroit-based writer whose stories have won the Red Rock Review Mark
Twain Award for Short Fiction, the Chicago Tribune Nelson
Algren Award, the New Millennium Writings Fiction Prize, and
the international Bridport Prize. She is also an NEA, a Vermont Studio Center
and a Pfeiffer-Hemingway creative writing fellow. Her work has been nominated
for three Pushcart prizes, has been published in special Kindle editions, and
has appeared in the Baltimore Review, Madison Review, Best of
Carve Magazine, Short Story Review, Southern Humanities
Review, Detroit Noir,
Montreal Review, Passages North, and others. Voices
of the Lost and Found, her first fiction collection, was a finalist for the
Drake Emerging Writer Award and won the USA Best Book Award for Short Fiction.
Her fiction chapbook, Ovenbirds and Other
Stories, won the Wordrunner Chapbook Prize in 2018. Her second full-length
collection, What It Might Feel Like to
Hope, released in 2019, was named first runner-up in the Mary Roberts
Rinehart Fiction Prize and won a 2019 gold medal in the Independent Publishers
Book Awards (IPPY). She is currently writing a literary/Sci-Fi hybrid novel.
Tags:
Short Fiction