SOUVENIR — MARY LYNN REED
/I'm standing in a shop, looking at T-shirts and knick-knacks and things I don't need to buy, and beside me is a kid half my age, looking at the same T-shirts and knick-knacks and things she doesn't need to buy, and I know this kid because we have the same DNA and twenty-five years ago she was me, and at the same moment we pick up the same T-shirt and I think what the hell and she thinks, I don't have the twenty bucks to spend, but one of us is going home with that T-shirt and maybe it's me and maybe it's not me and I can't get my mind all the way around the facts of this situation and then my fingers find the corner of the table and I see someone else, a tall woman with short blond hair and a sway to her hips that she works and works all the way around that table, and this woman is definitely not me but she looks at me, a long time she looks me right in the eye, and then she winks, as if she's done it a million times and this is just one more, one like all the others we've shared through all the lifetimes we've lived and then she picks the T-shirt up and spreads it across the back of the kid half my age and says, This is You, Baby. This is So You. And I reach for my wallet and I buy that goddamned T-shirt and I try my best not to cry all the way home, looking over at the empty seat beside me, trying to remember exactly the way the tall woman's blue eyes met mine, how it felt before the wink, after the wink, right at the exact moment that wink which was just one in a sea of so many winks, split me right in two and left me in that store, holding a T-shirt across my body, whispering someone's name who wasn't even there.
Mary Lynn Reed's fiction has appeared in Mississippi Review, Colorado Review, The MacGuffin, Smokelong Quarterly, The Nottingham Review, and Whistling Shade, among other places. One of her stories was recently nominated for Best Small Fictions 2017. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Maryland.
