Megan beat up on herself later over the unsaid. It had stuck between her teeth like threads of half-waking dream thoughts. And especially for the sorry she had said (three times), and even felt, damn it. At the time. Whatever offense she must have caused was really how unaware of his sudden movement to the wrong side of what used to be him for all these months. While he had been unnoticeably drawing back from her, freezing fog-mist rising like marsh gas obscuring what was really there in front of her all along. The not-him. She would occasionally shiver from the deep chill, the indentation to her heart. A wane slide she had denied in those rustlings of early unwanted message. Later, frost-turned leaves were dropping too readily around her like a chilled autumn-struck tree. Her mind becoming meager, lonely of wanted touch. Then the winter’s vivid cold finally sat and stared at what she was still clinging to. To what was already apparently undone. For weeks, no, months, she only knew walking around in bruised dreams. All the drifting apart clichés undeniably there she had refused to admit. Then his this isn’t working out. And all she could find herself saying was she was sorry, then crumple stupidly into heartbeat silence. The shrapnel of betrayal everywhere.

Ed Higgins‘ poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals, including Monkeybicycle, Tattoo Highway, Triggerfish Critical Review, Word Riot, and Blue Print Review, among others. He and his wife live on a small organic farm in Yamhill, OR, where they raise a menagerie of animals, including a whippet, a manx barn cat (who doesn’t care for the whippet), two Bourbon Red turkeys (King Strut and Nefra-Turkey), and an alpaca named Machu-Picchu. Ed teaches writing and literature at George Fox University, south of Portland, OR, and he is also Asst. Fiction Editor for Brilliant Flash Fiction, an Irish-based online flash journal.