COUP DE FOUDRE — KATHERINE GLEASON
/At the Virginia Woolf conference I sat with Jess and doodled and during a break you appeared all smiles and hugs and yet we hadn’t met before, no not yet but I had seen you, seen you on stage, dancing in a torn black dress and at that moment everything stopped and at the same time rushed ahead. A wooshing in my ears, the flight of many tiny wings. What season was it? At the conference you were sleeveless your milkmaid arms glowing in the overhead lights. Could it have been November? In the spring at the bar I admired your new haircut and flinched when women dropped at our table to say hello but the whole time your eyes were on me, wrapping warm, and when you kissed me, I was sealed swaddled branded forever in your orbit a happy moon. We finally went back to your place—what time was it?—and stayed sunrise to sunset and sunrise again. Those days were cappuccino foam bouncing along the street together we shopped we ate we snapped photos on the back of someone else’s motorcycle. You moved to the big city, gravity shifted months of gnawing and chats on the phone and your voice faded your spirit off seeking. What year was it? I returned home to a letter from you, your loopy handwriting warm in my grasp. Dear K., Know that I love you but I cannot love your sin. You are not a lesbian; you are merely someone who chooses to practice that lifestyle. Sin you ask yes sin it is all around us and we must fight it, fight it off and grow toward the light.
Katherine Gleason’s short stories have appeared in journals such as Alimentum, River Styx, Southeast Review, Derelict Lit, Gone Lawn, Juked, Jellyfish Review, Mississippi Review, and Monkeybicyle. She won first prize in the 2007 River Styx/Schlafly Beer Micro-Fiction Contest, garnered an honorable mention from Glimmer Train, and has published a number of nonfiction books, including Anatomy of Steampunk: The Fashion of Victorian Futurism.
