It rained that day, and you were tired and you were never tired, so we hailed a cab back to our Airbnb room. You took everything off and you never nap naked, crawled to stark sleep under a single sheet. Barcelona has a way of getting under your skin. The art, the fish, the wine. It was an old world covered in spiraling rainbows of broken pottery, and ceilings hung with Spanish Jamón. The spirits were everywhere.

After awhile you stirred the way you always did if there was a shift in the room. Why are you crying? you asked, and your voice was soft with sleep. Oh, I’m not crying, I said. You nodded. It’s only everything, I said. I knew you understood how I cried all the time. How I got so filled up with beauty, I had to release a bit of sea to get back to earth.

Lorette C. Luzajic

writes, edits, publishes, and teaches small fictions, from Toronto, Canada. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Trampset, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bending Genres, Unbroken, JMWW, Cleaver, New Flash Fiction Review, Litro, The Dillydoun Review, and others. Her work has been nominated for Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and four times each for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Lorette is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted to literature inspired by visual art. She is also an international visual artist working with collage and mixed media to create urban, abstract, pop, and surreal works. She has collectors in thirty countries so far. Visit her at: www.mixedupmedia.ca

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Two Must-Read Books by The Queen of Ekphrasis, commentary in MacQ-9 (August 2021) by Clare MacQueen, with links to additional resources

⚡ Featured Author: Lorette C. Luzajic at Blue Heron Review, with two of her prose poems (“Disappoint” and “The Piano Man”); plus “Poet as Pilgrim,” a review of Pretty Time Machine by Mary McCarthy (March 2020)

⚡ Fresh Strawberries, an ekphrastic prose poem in KYSO Flash (Issue 11, Spring 2019), nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize