Sarah Tried to Keep Up, Sarah Never Had a Locker With Proper Friends on Either Side, Sarah Has Not Placed on Her Vehicle the Decal
By Brendan Todt
Sarah tried to keep up: with a friend she ran with, with the Premier League table when a man she liked kept using the word football in a way that confused her. She tried to keep up with modern American poetry. With the Dean’s List. With the Pulitzer Prizes. She tried to keep up with the plays of Shakespeare, which always seemed to be changing. She tried to keep up with her mother, who spoke about many new yarn types and needle lengths and patterns from shoppes, her mother who spoke of only one man now, whose name was Joshua and lived across the river.
She tried to keep up with the vernacular dialects of her incoming students. Her outgoing students. She tried to keep up with the calories that went into and out of her body. The men who went into and out of her body. She tried to keep up with the most recent stamps released by the U.S. Postal Service, which she sent affixed to letters she wrote to the men she liked best. She tried to keep up with the changing borders of countries, the changing borders of her own body, the changing borders of her own creative work, which seemed always to be on the verge of bloody revolution.
She tried to keep up with the produce in-season at the grocery store. With the plants and their weeds in the boxes outside. With the birds she saw, who did not have names like Joshua. With the Bible, which seemed always to be changing. She tried to keep up with the names and birthdays of neighbors. Of friends. Of colleagues. She tried to keep up with her own past, which seemed always to be changing: the important dates, the original sins, the victories and the bloody revolutions, the failed first congresses.
***
Sarah never had a locker with proper friends on either side. Sometimes, her neighbors learned her combination and snuck in and took or left her things. This was before Sarah had learned to open up her own body herself. She had not yet read the famous books of dirty poems, but she had read the limericks written and left by her neighbors for her and looked up the words in paper dictionaries—then the only kind—which, she learned, did not yet know everything.
Sometimes Sarah used these words in her own speech. In her own poems. Sometimes used Sarah these words in theses she wrote for classes she invented which were taught by women—grown women—who had dictionaries that had all the definitions to all the words that Sarah had not but most needed.
Then Sarah heard uttered by her mother one of these words which in dictionaries did not exist. The way her mother in Sarah’s life did not exist—as a real, grown woman—until Sarah heard her say this word—this word which did not exist—in private, to her mother’s friend, a woman, a real woman, who also knew and had used the word, a word which did not exist, a word which was like a secret, which was like a body, a word which could be kept, and kept close, and kept closed, and then opened.
***
Sarah has not placed on her vehicle the decal printed by the dozens to commemorate the early death of the close friend about whom she already thinks every day. In a drawer in her kitchen sits the decal, along with many things, along with a knife which makes Sarah think of her dead friend—because of the oddly efficient way he could dismantle a watermelon.
At all the summer parties this friend brought the watermelon, cut up and toted in huge plastic containers, until he was asked to bring the whole melon to each party and demonstrate, which he did, the way in which he broke it down, with a knife he loved, a fisherman’s knife, which he bent around the rind of the melon, which the friend had such precise and nearly casual control of that no one ever thought he might once cut himself, let alone one day die, as young and firm and beautiful as he was, as they all were, as bright as they were on the outside, as thick-skinned, as ripe, and as equally bright and delicate and delicious on their insides, too.
THE END
Author Bio: Brendan Todt lives and writes in Sioux City, Iowa. He has been working on a series of short fiction that follows a character named Sarah. “Sarah Draws Little Moustaches” was a finalist in the Smokelong Quarterly Award for Flash fiction. Other Sarah stories have appeared in Necessary Fiction, Moon City Review, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere.