By Jayne Martin
We snuggle deep into your bed pillows, banish your husband from the room because this is our time. You take off your wig, hang it over the bed lamp, your head a road map of scars, bald from chemo. It is the first time you’ve let me see it and I tell you that you are still the prettiest girl in high school. Then, because you would expect no less from me, I ask if I can sign it. You laugh and call me a bitch. You fill the high-tech blue plastic inhaler with medicinal quality weed. No sticks or stems, no fumbling with ZigZags rolling paper like when we were young and sucking back on sloppy doobies. We inhale the sweet smoke, hold it in our lungs, and journey backward to the time of skin tight skirts and dances at the “Y”, first dates, first cars, first marriages. We laugh till we cry, and then we just cry.
Jayne Martin is a 2017 Pushcart nominee, 2016 winner of Vestal Review’s VERA award, and a 2017 & 2018 Best Small Fictions nominee. Her work has appeared in Literary Orphans, Spelk, Crack the Spine, Midwestern Gothic, formercactus, MoonPark Review, Blink-Ink, Blue Fifth Review, Bending Genres, Hippocampus and Connotation Press among others. She lives in California where she drinks copious amounts of fine wine and rides horses, though not at the same time. Find her on Twitter @Jayne_Martin.
MoonPark Review 