Featured Prose Writer vol 6, i.2
Nora Wagner
“I Ran Into Your New Girlfriend at the Grocery Store”
I know, from the items in her shopping cart, that she’ll prepare your favorite dinner tonight: Moroccan-spiced chicken with dates and shallots. I know she must cook for you a lot, because her cart is pretty empty, the fridge and pantry at home likely very full. I know she’s buying the wrong dates, Mazafatis instead of Medjools, and the whole meal will be off, no maple flavor, no amber color. I know the shallot bulbs are too small, papery skin coming off in purple, eczema-like patches. I know you’ll hog all the dark meat. Leave her with the pale, flossy strands.
I know you’ll need to watch porn to get hard later tonight. I know she’ll lie next to you, kissing your neck, pretending she’s a part of your relationship with the people on the screen. I know you’ll rush to the shower immediately after, because sex makes you feel dirty, and she might: a) lie still, trace the ceiling tapestry’s mandala pattern with her eyes, b) begin folding the clothes puddled around your room, c) touch herself, so that she actually finishes.
I know her name is Beverly, Bev for short. I know she graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. There are videos of her performances posted on YouTube, where she commandeers her cello bow like an elegant see-saw. I know she must not play that much anymore, because loud noises give you headaches. I know you think “music without lyrics is like a woman without boobs.” I know she was first chair. Do you know that’s a big deal?
I know there was some shady overlap between me and her, don’t pretend there wasn’t. I knew you weren’t fully finished with Gabrielle when you asked me out at a friend’s dinner party. I still said yes, flattered you’d break the rules for me, not knowing this was your rule: planting seeds before the earlier harvest has been fully picked.
I know she sees me putting items on the checkout conveyor belt, three shoppers behind in line. I know there’s a flash of recognition. I know she’s stalked my socials, like I have hers, like I did with your string of exes. All of us linked together, Brussels sprouts on a stalk. I know she is inspecting my haul: bread-and-butter pickles, a crusty sourdough loaf, two salmon fillets, a bottle of red. I know she is wondering: are these the purchases of someone in a new relationship? Someone who is over you?
Should I make eye contact?
I know she’d like to know all the things I know about you.
Artist’s Statement
Memory shows up in my writing often, usually in impure forms: tainted, warped, eroded. I’m interested in memory both as a deliberate action (what memories we cling onto) and as an unconscious, even unwanted, process (what memories cling onto us). The afterlife, or aftertaste, of a relationship is what I explore here, with the anaphora replicating obsessive re-thinking.
Bio
Nora Esme Wagner is a junior at Wellesley College. She lives in San Francisco, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Smokelong, Wigleaf, JMWW, Milk Candy Review, Flash Frog, and elsewhere. Her stories have been selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel and the Co-Editor-in-Chief for The Wellesley Review.
