Blind dates are like summer breezes. They come and go, disappear without warning, or they knock the hopeful and their beach umbrellas into the waves. Dad said you were the latter, and since you left, he keeps resurrecting the night you met. In one version, July ripples across the dance floor like Fred Astaire, and you were the one dry dancer in the room. You never let the heat bother you, made up your mind that it wouldn’t, and not a single bead of sweat trickled down between your shoulder blades. Cool and patient, you waited for an introduction.

In another version, Dad admired how you kept yourself to yourself, living a life of interiors, an ever-evolving mystery. You never played helpless or hard to get, and you understood the Miss Dents of this world, cheering on John Cheever’s heroine in “The Five-Forty-Eight,” fired by a boss who abused his authority. You relished her gun, her revenge. Put your face in the dirt, Miss Dent ordered, and he did. You knew power could be collected like shells at the shoreline, weather-beaten and sheer but strong. You placed your fears and disappointments in a lock box and tossed the key into the sea, knowing it would sink or the tide would carry it, but it wouldn’t be yours any longer, not the recalcitrant child you couldn’t reform, not the wasted evenings selling shoes, not the mill-working parents who ate their meals in silence.

In the third version, Dad marveled at your imagination. You believed in the trench coat brigade, plotting their Cold War strategies, releasing their biological weapons on unsuspecting citizens. Ever wary of It’s only a test, you knew marriage, like everything else, was about endurance, that you’d survive the Bacillus anthracis you couldn’t see if someone stood beside you. And he did, on that summer night when you met, and for the next fifty years. The rest of us were an afterthought, a chain gang digging ditches in the desert, limping in your wake, while the two of you never left the dance floor—Mom in her black taffeta dress and Dad whispering, She’s simply stunning.

Marybeth Rua-Larsen’s

poems and flash fiction have appeared in 3Elements Literary Review, Crannóg Magazine, Flash Frontier, Lily Poetry Review, and Magma Poetry, among others. She’s won the 2017 Luso-American Fellowship for the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon and was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2019 in Scotland. Her chapbook Nothing In-Between is available from Barefoot Muse Press.

Author’s website: https://www.mrualarsen.com