by Jenny Stalter

We’d grown old enough that our husbands had died. Old enough for our love to become legal. I can’t remember the last time I took this walk past Jane’s house, two blocks from my own. I’m headed to the park to hit some golf balls. A whole backpack full of them. Like we used to, our husbands snoring at home or away on business. The night air is warm, sturdy as the dark houses standing in rows. I sip on the bottle of rose petal and cherry brandy we made together after her son died twenty years ago. It might be a risk—the fruit and sugar could have oxidized and spoiled—but everything’s a risk. The moon presses down, stretching a string of clouds.

To make the brandy we needed to pit the cherries and crack the pits. Jane put a cherry between her front teeth and pulled me close. We rolled the fruit around our kiss and took turns biting down, splitting open the pit. We spit the cherries into a jar along with sugar, rose petals and dried jasmine flowers. We made bottles and bottles of the stuff. All labeled “Walkin’ After Midnight”. A tribute to all our late nights together. Bags of cherries were left on the counter, and she grabbed a handful and rolled them with her palm under my shirt and squeezed, rubbing the red juice over my breasts, bleeding through the white cotton like a wound. Our mouths stained red like an accident.

The grass at the park is lush and wet as I push the tee into the ground. They cut the water off around midnight. I plant my feet, line my body and swing like she taught me so long ago. The orange street lamps at either end of the park catch the balls as they glide through the air. My swing’s not what it used to be. I’m always hoping Jane will be out here one of these nights, working on her drive, secretly looking for me, but she never is.

After we’d exhausted each other, Jane talked about everything unimportant. There was nothing left that wasn’t connected to loss in some way. It wasn’t a straight line, grief never is, but we found our way to old jokes and easy laughter. I think about the accident. Imagine the meat of her family mangled in steel, trapped in glass. I traced the scar that ran down the length of her back until she cried softly into the pillow. I knew I shouldn’t have. That mark didn’t belong to me. The purple-pink slash, a smooth and shiny symbol of the end of motherhood. The way the small scar above her pelvis marked the beginning of it. Jane’s body contained her son’s life in every way a person could hold another person and I wanted her to carry me, too. I wanted to rip into her and have her in every impossible way.  In the morning Jane was gone.

The trees line the park like an audience as I sit barefoot, letting the blades between my toes. I push them into the wet earth, taking hold in case gravity stops working. I take another pull out of “Walkin’ After Midnight”. It’s sweet fire on my lips. I sing that old song to the trees, the moon. I saw her husband’s obituary three months ago. I heard Jane didn’t cry at the funeral. The masking tape with Jane’s handwriting is peeling up around the edges. I smooth them down and they curl back in protest. 

I pull my backpack over my shoulder as I leave. I reach the end of Jane’s block and notice her white Chrysler we’d christened in the canyon, drinking Mexican beer, my butt cheek prints in the dirt on the hood for a week after, is illuminated. I pray into the unmoving night that the light is coming from Jane’s house. I come closer and find her picture window throwing a blue moving glow. Through that big window I see her clear as day. She’s got her projector out. Old movies of her with her husband and young son on vacation.

Jane is smoking and dancing, a bottle of our cherry brandy in her hand. My Jane withered and beautiful and ghastly and perfect. I Fall to Pieces is playing too loud for this time of night. She always loved Patsy Cline. She liked the lingering, always staying a beat longer in the dark moments, digging her toes in when gravity stopped working. That was our bond, recognized and celebrated. Unflinching in a world of chaos.

Jane, dancing in front of the projector light, her dead family moving over her body, billowing in her cigarette smoke. In a moment, we will spend the rest of our lives together. In a moment I will come in and dance with her. My lips will find hers and I will guide her to bed. Time had done what time does to our bodies, but it will also be kind enough to jump back, find two girls. Hot and hungry and howling for the heavy moon and everything that has died under it. But for now, I set my backpack down, sip our brandy, and watch her dance. 

Jenny Stalter is a writer and former private chef. Her work was selected for Best Small Fictions 2024, and she was a recipient of the 2023 Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellowship. Her fiction appears in Longleaf Review, Moon City Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Cease, Cows, Ghost Parachute, and other publications. She has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Best American Short Stories.