The Find
At the garage sale I smiled when I saw Emily Dickinson’s selected poems. Didn’t I have this edition at home? Inside it read: To Marie. Friends forever. Love, Alice.
I was Alice—that was my handwriting. Was the woman in the lawn chair, watching over the sale, Marie? I tried imagining the middle-aged woman without the crow’s feet, without the gray hairs, and thought I could discern my high school friend. Why had we stopped talking? What would I say?
I took the book to the woman and handed over a dollar. “Poetry, eh?” the woman remarked. “Never was my thing.”
This short is taken from Carrie Etter’s first pamphlet of short fiction, Hometown, which is out now from V. Press :http://vpresspoetry.blogspot.co.uk/p/bookshop.html. She has published other stories in Flash, New Welsh Review, The Nottingham Review, and other journals, and she keeps a blog devoted to flash fiction and prose poetry at http://suddenprose.blogspot.com.