by Sarah Kartalia

When the album came out, our parents fed us bagels with cream cheese and that LP for breakfast most days. Like all eight year-olds I remember my stomach becoming queasy then sandbagging over track eight, the one about old lovers meeting by chance on the street.

Yesterday, he was in the café. My nose found him before my eyes; that indelible scent of forest bath. Small talk would have been inappropriate since, honestly, we had been large.

What sticks most after twenty-five years he wondered, his eyes searching, frantically, as if for a missing person.

You reading to me, I replied, then paused. Yes, page after page, travelling around the world together. I didn’t mention the capuccino-colored mohair blanket we had in winter or the crisp linen sheet in summer that smelled like sun. In no way was I going to bring up the robust parenthesis of arm that had been home, that had been sweeter than home.

When I deviated, What are you getting better at as you get older? his answer was handling emergencies and sourdough, sometimes the two topics merge.

A few decades ago, he would have been looking around the café, distracted and twirling sugar packets. Now, he held one low to the table with both hands, conjuring images of my Chinese clients presenting their business cards.

He announced I still read out loud. I could feel his eyes burrowing into my forehead, uncovering semi-controlled chaos.

I looked up from the heap of potential splinters that I had made from snapping my balsa coffee stirrer.

And still to you, he said, his eyes quieting, relieved to notice I was homesick.

Sarah Kartalia’s work has been published in The Forge, Bending Genres, Flash Fiction Magazine, Kerning, Sky Island Journal and Roi Fainéant Press. She has been shortlisted for the Fish Flash Fiction Prize and The Writer’s short story competition and won Inkwell Magazine’s grand prize for short fiction.