"SHIPPING OUT "
by Jordan E. Rosenfeld
D.C. thanked the agent at Fun Time Travel, snorting to herself. The travel agent didn’t look as if fun were a concept she could understand.
William would be at home now, sitting on whatever piece of furniture he wouldn’t have relinquished to Anne and the movers. Someone would be trying to cajole it out from under him, and there would inevitably be sobbing and protests and glaring at Anne. And Anne, with her purposeful strides and her combat boots, her nipples generally peeking through a flimsy t-shirt, wouldn’t even look in his direction.
D.C. sniffed the air pungent with spring. The first days of April smelled like change.
“What do the initials stand for?” The glassy-eyed travel agent had asked.
No, she would wind up saying by rote: she wasn’t named after Washington’s District or some kind of airplane.
“I have no name, I was born with initials.” She would lie, tired of justifying why she gave up Dixie Celine.
D.C. held the itinerary in her hand and thought of Anne the way one dreams about tomorrow's coffee before falling asleep. Anne who was not graceful nor feminine—but alive baby, alive—whose name seemed stapled to her like an old flier on a telephone pole.
D.C. thought about those nipples poking through a ratty peach colored t-shirt. Anne frequently wore out in public what other people saved for painting their houses in. D.C. tried not to think about William, about whatever precious item he was probably clutching in his
hands now that they’d gotten the couch or the ottoman or even the bed for god’s sakes out from under him. She imagined him stroking the ceramic dolphin from their honeymoon in Hawaii, or maybe just a teacup, from the set they found in London. She imagined that there would come a moment, so far from this one that it was like dreaming it, in which William would forgive her for falling in love with his sister.
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Jordan E. Rosenfeld is the host of "Word by Word", a literary program on NPR-affiliate KRCB radio. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The St. Petersburg Times, Edifice Wrecked, Salome Magazine, the Summerset Review, Pindeldyboz, Word Riot, Haypenny, InkPot, Skyline Magazine, Moxie magazine, JANE Magazine and more is forthcoming at Storyhouse, NFG, SmokeLong Quarterly, Literary Mama and Espresso Fiction. She is the editor of Zebulon Nights: An Anthology of LiveWire Readers (Word Riot Press, 2003).
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ART by Vanessa Hall-Patch
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