
WHATEVER by Emma Estridge
She emails me a PDF of instructions. The first is Learn to sit quietly with yourself. I feel that we have already skipped a step.

She emails me a PDF of instructions. The first is Learn to sit quietly with yourself. I feel that we have already skipped a step.

There was a fence, and there were holes in it, and she looked like a lizard sometimes, a shitload of speed coiled inside some slender frame.

I used to say I couldn’t travel because I didn’t have the time, but now I’ve got all the time in the world because the world isn’t using it.

He returned home silent, even more sullen. I asked him about Mrs. Marra once, but he looked at me as if all memories, good or bad, had been erased.

Now that your precious jackfruit is out in the world, latch the angel onto your body and let nature take its course. She held her jackfruit to her breast, to her arms, her neck, rubbed it against herself until she was raw.

On the morning that she died, I don’t think I knew that it was the day that we would stop waiting. We were just going to her bedside, as we did. As we had done for days. Suspended in that grief fog, gritty and spinning.

He fondles a piece of charcoal and looks at me before touching the paper. The line makes a limp imitation of a spine. A nose appears.

At first everyone blamed the smoke on the war, then the steel plant, and, finally, the water. But Ong Hai says it’s not water but grief at the bottom of the sea.

Those twins out of St. Paul are doing some live podcast tour about living without lungs but that’s easy, the no lungs thing.

You’re too busy thinking about the bag that held your common sense, dignity, and your partner’s trust in you, the bag that’s undoubtedly getting further away the longer you sit here.