at being poor. She even had to work hard just to come off as being poor since she has that look of the inheritors of wealth, that look of privilege that comes from owning things that aren't made of plastic. On the day after he left, one month after I put my toothbrush in the bathroom, five days after I stopped washing my clothes, I began going through those things left behind: a half-empty jug of 2% milk, his second-favorite cereal, his extra toothbrushes, unopened, a gum wrapper situated on the edge of the coffee table. And totes. Totes of things that he forgot were in my closet, a space he didn't bother to go into. One month after he left, she got her first picture of Carlos. How she fretted over the sore on his lip, how she cooed at his dimples, his fluffy hair, his toothy grin, and everything else that is so clichĂŠ about him that it hurts but she loves about him. She loves all of it, every single bit. Later that day, James stopped by, looking for things he had forgotten. I kept all of it, I said. I said it so fast and with so little air that it came out as nothing. I know, he said, and he said it with such a quiet tone, such tenderness. He took the extra toothbrushes and his second-favorite cereal and threw away the milk, three weeks out of date, and took the gum wrapper and put it in his pocket instead of the garbage to save me from the humiliation of having left it on the coffee table. He was so effortlessly alive and I wasn't and we both knew that now as he walked back out of the door without stumbling over anything, not even his words. It took a few minutes after he was gone to realize that he had still forgotten the photographs of his mother, images of her life that she had entrusted to him left in my closet.
Travis Sharp is from small town Alabama. He has a BA in English and Drama from Athens State University and is a student in the University of Washington's MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics. He is the founding editor of athena's web, an online arts and sciences journal dedicating to encouraging and publishing undergraduate writing.