Either/Or

Time glows red: 3:17. Lying still, curled tight, I try to calm my frenetic mind by focusing on the inaudible breaths of my two young sons asleep down the hall. My husband rolls toward me, onto his back. I have a bad feeling about us, he says. Something’s wrong. I’m not ready to tell him, still unsure, but I blurt: I think I’m a lesbian. He leaps like the bed is writhing with snakes, pulls his jeans on over his bare skin, zippers vulnerability, gets back into bed. Is this life? A series of moments becoming either intimate or alien?

Leslie Prpich is an emerging writer who lives and works in unceded Gitxsan territory in the Skeena valley, northern British Columbia. commatology.com