Meg Pokrass
1. THE DISPATCHThis is Our City
I materialize in bed. I glimmer and stand out. My blinkers are on and my heart is warm. He is my phantom limb. I become his tiny little curled up set of legs when we mate.
Outside of bed, we're ill-marked, shadowy, indefinite. No sense in wimping around here mope-eyed about it. “We’re the loneliest married couple in the world,” he says. Safer to say, we’re what I have.
* * *
In a dream, I trip over a man in the middle of a trail. Exhausted from snow-blindness, he says. It’s summertime, and I know what he means. I’m tired of ice as well. “But you should see those dumb-ass tourists arriving in tank tops!”
He tells me about his lover, a woman who he met on the stage. An actress or a dancer, completely unreliable. "Her eyes are homes of silent prayer to me," he says. I know about this kind of love, I think, and I wake up with it.
* * *
Our dog is tired from so many hills. The Catholic family across the road say he’s fat, taunt us with the idea we feed him on clotted cream and scones, say he looks like a penguin. "Mr. Penguin!" they laugh, pointing. My husband bristles.
“It’s his breed, he’s a blockhead lab,” he says. “The dog has very large bones.”
* * *
The new neighbor waters her tulips in the front garden, not looking at me, with her skunk-stripe grey stripe, and it makes me wish I were someone older who could still look interesting and beautiful—so that her nice husband would smile at me.
These days I wish our city neighborhood will melt into a lava-bed of friendly, waddling birds, or that we become unjudgmental hippies toward each other. But it seems that I have done something wrong, and for a long time.
Now, wet tourists skitter up the hill with backpacks and hiking shoes and big cameras. After the sun goes down, the kids come out to play. They beeline over to our dog, so we keep him inside.
* * *
You once told me the Marin Headlands were made up of skeletons from dead insects. Exoskeletons. Earthquakes were always looming. Our house was tilting and the stuff below it was packed sand. Realtors in Mercedes, gathering in flocks.
In the end, that wasn’t what did it. The ghost of our dog was not floating above our aging heads or blessing our lives, as we once believed he might. No Labrador-angel protected us, or any angel at all. Though we didn’t dream the exact same dreams, we locked bodies over our many dying pets, my ruined foot, your mom’s sad decline. We fought an overpriced city by eating bulk lentils, waiting for news of a tofu truck’s arrival. “Cheap and fresh,” you said.
And then, there was that cold-as-fuck winter when the tofu truck finally visited our hill. We lined up together with the neighbors, and snow fell. First time in decades. Fresh tofu and snow. This is our city, we said as we stood in line waiting.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYMicrofiction (edited by Jerome Stern)
Pokey figurine
Floating Tales by Jeff Friedman
Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau
Bliss and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield
3. BIOGRAPHYMeg Pokrass is the author of 8 flash fiction collections and 2 flash novellas, including Spinning to Mars (Blue Light Book Award, 2021) and The Loss Detector (Bamboo Dart Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in over 900 literary journals has been anthologized in 3 Norton anthologies: Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton, 2015), New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (W.W. Norton, 2018), and Flash Fiction America (W. W. Norton & Co., 2023). She is the Series Co-Editor of Best Microfiction and Founding Editor of New Flash Fiction Review. Meg lives in Inverness Scotland. Find out more here at www.megpokrass.com