It was a year since Clementine had given Luke the boot. He was always crooning “Oh my darling, oh my darling,” air banjo on his knee, but he never cooked a meal, never put a dollar towards rent. So, she’d rolled his duct-taped suitcase out the door, taken back his key.

Her roomie, Anna, though, kept whining she missed having a man in the house and she didn’t mind his lazy ass, so when they hosted a potluck and Luke sauntered in uninvited, carrying a caramel-brown roast chicken ringed with delicate potatoes and carrots, Clementine side-eyed Anna. All the same, she’d licked her soy-ginger-coated fingers clean, one by one, and Luke had raised an eyebrow, strummed those strings.

A few weeks later, Clementine slumped into the kitchen, thwacked that brass key down onto the counter, where Anna sat munching on a slice of cold cheese pizza. “But he really seemed like a changed man,” she said.

Anna mimed Luke carrying the platter. “Must have been that Trojan Chicken.”

Kathryn Silver-Hajo

writes short fiction, long fiction, and poetry. Her stories and poems appear or are forthcoming in Cleaver Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, Ellipsis Zine, Unbroken Journal, Six Sentences, The Drabble, The Ekphrastic Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal.

Read more of the author’s work at her website:
https://www.kathrynsilverhajo.com/

Follow her on Twitter: [at]KSilverHajo