By Michelle Ross
One year I decided I would count the miles I ran. I succeeded for two weeks. Forty-seven miles, if you want to know. As goes with all my attempts to count, I eventually lost track. Unsure how many miles I hadn’t counted, I had to estimate, which meant the counting was over because estimation is not counting. If I’m counting ants, say, and I’m not sure if the ant I see now is the same ant I saw before, my uncertainty undoes my drive to count them. I can’t even begin to count macronutrients like my friend Jane, who weighs and performs a series of calculations before she puts anything into her mouth. I don’t care how exact your food scale is, counting macronutrients is all an estimate. What also happens is I decide my metrics are off. What about the walk breaks I took? Should those be subtracted from my running mileage? There was a time when I kept count of the men I’d slept with. There was a time when everyone I knew did this. I remember one guy boasting that he’d slept with 101 women. He was twenty-two. He clearly didn’t deliberate, as I did, as many women I knew did, about what precisely constituted sex. Counting requires conviction, commitment. It requires myopia. There’s no room for nuance, for changing your mind. At book club recently, someone asked, How many times have you been in love? One woman said five times and listed off her partner and her exes. Another claimed never to have been in love. A third woman said, I don’t know how many times I’m in love right this moment. Everyone else laughed, but it seemed to me the most honest answer anyone had offered. Once, traveling a back road through lush soy fields, the landscape slick and alien as birth, I came upon a lone wooden house. Without the distraction of other houses, that house seemed naked. What I mean is I don’t think I’d ever really seen a house before that. Alone in my car, I felt naked, too. I’d been driving across the country to visit a man I thought I loved, a man whose face I can no longer remember. I can’t remember that house’s face, either, only how it undressed me, peeling away garments I hadn’t even known I was wearing.
Michelle Ross is the author of three story collections: There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the 2016 Moon City Short Fiction Award; Shapeshifting, winner of the 2020 Stillhouse Press Short Fiction Award (2021); and They Kept Running, winner of the 2021 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (2022). Her work is included in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, the Wigleaf Top 50, and the Norton anthology, Flash Fiction America. It received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is an Editor of 100 Word Story.
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