Out There

by Kate Folk

was nice to have four mammals under one roof, each of us trusting the others not to kill us while we slept. This was the appeal, I thought, of a family.

Such uncertainty was the nature of existence. We brought things into our lives, and time passed. Things exited our lives. That was about all that ever happened. —

Judgment glimmered through me, a disdain for hippies, people who moved through the world with unwarranted confidence—a prejudice I hadn’t known I harbored.

Everything she does would be done better by one of earth’s numerous men. The Last Woman on Earth agrees with this assessment. She is often sad.

He wishes there was someone left to see his show, which is much better than hers was. He should have had his own talk show sixty years ago. Instead, the Last Woman on Earth had been handed a talk show, not because she deserved it, but simply because she was a woman. The Last Man on Earth dies with resentment in his heart.

The one time we made out, in a Wendy’s restroom, Robbie immediately put his hands under my shirt. His fingers pressed beneath my right ribcage, probing until he could feel the lower edge of my liver. He pulled away, disappointed by my liver’s breadth, and we avoided each other for the next five years.

You think, if only you could find a partner whose desire manifests in a relatively noninvasive way. But of course it’s a foolish hope. The more someone loves you, the more he’ll want to meddle with the most vital parts of you, and vice versa. The only way to not hurt someone is not to love him enough, to remain unmoved by the thought of his organs pulsing beneath a thin layer of skin.

My dream is that we will marry and he will allow me to take his brain from him, year after year, a tiny bit at a time, through shock treatments and partial lobotomies, until he can’t function on his own and I have to care for the drooling husk of his body until it expires. It is only for this that I’d surrender pieces of my literal heart.

Yet when I look at Olivia, my blood seethes. I hate her for how she could ruin my life, without malice, simply by being herself. She could take Bradley from me. She wouldn’t even have to try.

verisimilitude.

equivocating.

cloying

simulacrum

Somnambulist

ostentatiously.