Why You Almost

Why You Almost

Because at the office Christmas party she dances like a hoochie-coochie girl in a too-short shirt and a too-tight top that shows off her coconuts which used to be more than okay when you were twenty-one and horny, when you drank cheap beer until you puked, when you swam toward each other in the night like survivors of a shipwreck, when you were drowning and she pulled you up and dried you out and made you into something you didn’t know you could be, and didn’t you used to love it when she dressed slutty, danced for every dude in the bar but really was dancing only for you, which was fine then but isn’t okay now that you’re a guy on the rise, a man who’s going places, and so you turn away and don’t see her when she falls into the dead space by the file cabinet where she sobs and says leave me alone, leave me alone while you gladly turn away to sip an expensive Cab and talk shop with the new woman in Accounts, the CPA/MBA/almost lawyer who wears square glasses and pantsuits so you don’t see your wife go outside, shoeless and coatless and crying, until a guy from Legal points out a window and says wow, look at that, look at your wife, face up and coatless making snow angels and you know you should go to her, get her out of there, but it’s beautiful in a terrible kind of way—the light and the new snow and the woman carving arcs in the snow—and if she wasn’t already your wife, you might be tempted to fall in love with her all over again.

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About the Author

Sarah Freligh is the author of eight books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize, Hereafter, winner of the 2024 Bath Novella-in-Flash Contest, and the recently released collection of short stories Other Emergencies. Her work has been anthologized in New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), and Best Microfiction (2019-22, ‘25). She is the recipient of a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Photo by cottonbro studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-sitting-on-the-floor-3419732/