Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

This was the great shock of America, winters that would cut the face off a person, summers that were as thick and as soggy as bogs.

George had been making references to the gene for a few years now but Peter didn’t know if he meant a real gene, as in a distinct sequence of nucleotides that formed part of a chromosome, or if it was just a notion invented by people who needed to understand themselves.

They’d both learned that a memory is a fact that’s been dyed and trimmed and rinsed so many times that it comes out looking almost unrecognizable to anyone else who was in that room, anyone else who was standing on the grass beneath that telephone pole.

“We repeat what we don’t repair,”

It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, he knew. It was that she loved him so much that it frightened her, loved him so much that she worried she might have to protect herself from it. He tried to let her know that he’d figured that out, finally, that there was no need to explain, but then he realized that she might not know it herself.

He’d been looking at her face for so long that sometimes he forgot to notice it.