Meg Pokrass is the author of six flash fiction collections, an award-winning collection of prose poetry, two novellas-in-flash and a forthcoming collection of microfiction, Spinning to Mars, recipient of the Blue Light Book Award in 2020. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Washington Square Review, Wigleaf, Waxwing and McSweeney’s. She is the Series Founder and Co-Editor of Best Microfiction.
Rosie Garland writes long and short fiction, poetry and sings with post-punk band The March Violets. Her work appears in The Guardian, Under the Radar, Spelk, Interpreter’s House, New Flash Fiction Review, The Rialto, Ellipsis, Butcher’s Dog, Mslexia, The North and elsewhere. New poetry collection ‘What Girls do the Dark’ (Nine Arches Press) is out now. Her latest novel The Night Brother was described by The Times as “a delight…with shades of Angela Carter.” In 2019, Val McDermid named her one of the UK’s most compelling LGBT writers.
Alaska is so close to magnetic north it skews the compass
Today I went out and thought of you and then came back into the house, fingers already numb. I opened the curtains and made some coffee. It’s late in your day, but knowing you, that’s exactly what you’re doing right now too.
I see you in a warm scented café, wondering what coffee drink to order, because everything, you think, sounds too good. You’re still you in your afternoon and I’m still me in my morning, even if our coffees are 7 hours apart. It will stay that way until you fly to me and we live the same day, but it’s not going to happen any time soon. It’s fine.
I work in a bank and I sit at a desk and talk about the weird fake carrot juice at Safeway with my secretary, Carol. It’s unfortunate, Carol says, but it’s crazy here, in the snow, and too damn cold.
So, I freeze and feel stupid, and think of you smiling and telling me love is a burning spark even in Alaska, a million miles away in the frozen tundra. When it gets quiet enough inside my head, I can reach out my hand and there you are, with your coffee in my bed and I know this is not an ordinary day. The days are never regular with you in them.
Hundreds of miles above Alaska, swifts drift into a trance: brain half shut, half open. With bird alchemy, their automatic navigator makes course corrections: adjusts for height, distance travelled, distance yet to go. Suspended out of the reach of thermals, they coast the troposphere, wings stiff as airplane models dangled from the bedroom ceiling of a homebound child. When hungry, they wake in the same position and descend to feed, snipping insects from the lower part of heaven.
Today was warm enough to go outside and stay there for a few minutes. I ate a donut, icy jelly in the center, which is the cheapest and easiest thing to eat on the go. I will never eat salad again, I think, at twelve dollars for a head of iceberg. I imagined walking next to you on an ordinary day in your ordinary city. Do you remember the dog we met near the bridge? The Saint Bernard puppy called Blossom we swore would change our lives?
I think about this when I’m frozen raw and worrying about my neighbor. She keeps inviting me to come for a beer and to see her new dog. She says I’d like her fireplace, it’s wide enough to fit a sofa. In the evening, I smell scorched furnishing through the wall, and that worries me too.
How lonely are you, I wonder, in your fine apartment with electric heating you only need to switch on two months in a year. As a fool, I reply, as alone as you have always been in this world. It was never different. You could always make me cross my fingers and make a wish. Like a pied piper you lured me away to somewhere you were not and here I am, wondering how to get home.
You can access more of Meg’s writing via her website, http://www.megpokrass.com/, and more of Rosie Garland’s work is accessible through her own website, http://www.rosiegarland.com/.