Her house smelled like dryer sheets and antique wood and her mother’s perfume. There was a porch we walked across. And horseshoes in the yard. A barn with farm equipment not used in nearly a century. Up the stairs, in each dark bedroom, we lifted our clothes and compared. There was a white scar, a little moon, in the middle of her chest, where the skin stretched smooth between her breasts. She said in dreams the scar would glow, and blue light would shine through the fibers of her sweater. In real life, she would always cover it with both hands. She asked about Blood on the Scarecrow, and I said I didn’t like that song. I never asked about the boys who came before me, or the boy who would be already be there when I showed up one day. Sometimes we watched TV and lay in her parents’ California king, and it felt like she was on the other side of the world. Women had given birth in this house with chloroform and twilight sleep. Old men with yellow fever had slept all day in tall rooms with miles and miles of gold and green swaying out the window. And we inched slowly together, to the center of the world with lips and arms so careful, finding out how we fit, our fingers dipping in and out of the bedspread.
Lydia Copeland lives with her husband and son in New Jersey. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Quick Fiction, , FRiGG, elimae, SmokeLong Quarterly, Glimmer Train, NOO and others. Her chapbook, Haircut Stories, is now available from the Achilles Chapbook Series.