The autumn sun shined sideways. Eucalyptus leaves tittered, maracas in the breeze. I sat on the park’s concrete wall, ten days after and ten feet away from my swing-dance partner’s collapse onto the pavement, his heart stopping, his skull cracking like a Jewish wedding goblet underfoot. I’d come to mourn our sixteen years, our thousands of swingouts. A lone couple arrived and started dancing, the woman hugely pregnant. Was it time already to favor the future, placing my personal loss between the extinction of trilobytes and the birth of Amasia? I cradled my memories instead, knowing they, too, would depart.
Writings by Lisa K. Buchanan appear in The Citron Review and elsewhere. Notable, BAE 2023. Current favorite book: Typhoid Mary by Anthony Bourdain. www.lisakbuchanan.com Bluesky: @lisakbuchanan.bsky.social Facebook: @lisakbuchananwriter