her stomach, as if her nostalgia could eat her from the inside. She still knew by feel exactly how far back his seats went, because of their many failed attempts to have sex there. And the smell, a not all together unpleasant scent of old French fries and grassy cleats, gave her the desire to both cry and touch herself. It wasn’t that she missed him, but the force of habit made her think about things she felt belonged to another person. They sped past the sites of their many dates. The grocery store where they found the ladder to the roof and got drunk off boxes of wine. The gas station where they first kissed and Josh had left her in the convenience store so he could go break up with his current girlfriend and stop feeling guilty. The track field behind the high school where they’d trekked on a snow day from her house, mittened hand in mittened hand, to go sledding on the lids of the school’s garbage cans. There was an uncanniness to these places, a familiarity that was no longer real. Monica remembered why she hardly ever left the house since moving home. Josh left Monica parked in the car while he ran the equipment into the clubhouse by the baseball fields. Afterward, he asked if she wanted to stop for lunch but she said she’d rather go home. On the way back, she rolled down his window and stuck her head out into the breeze to try to remind herself who she was. Monica Gentry, who went to Washington University, who majored in Philosophy, who moved to New York to become and a writer, or an artist, or important in some way. Who hadn’t failed, exactly, but who’d run out of money and needed to go home. Other friends of hers, friends from families with the cash to fund them, friends who never talked about their hometowns or their parents when it wasn’t to complain, friends who Monica had never resented until after they’d left college, were still there. They texted her now and then, but the messages had grown less frequent as the months went on, and the momentum that Monica had always associated with Who She Was, she had to admit, was slowing. Not just slowing. Screeching to a halt, she believed was the phrase. “You didn’t used to be so sad,” Josh said as they got close to her neighborhood.
SIXFOLD FICTION SUMMER 2018
Alice Martin
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