Cassie, her therapist, says it\u2019s important for Rita to let go of the baggage she\u2019s carried around for so long, so this is why they\u2019ve assembled here at the foot of a hill an hour before sunup, before the honk and grind of the day has kicked in and scuffed its early shine. Cassie says it\u2019s best to climb a mountain but there aren\u2019t any within three hundred miles, so a hill will have to do. Cassie hands her a trash bag that\u2019s technically empty but symbolically full of the stuff Rita\u2019s been shoving into it for years: all the wont\u2019s, shouldn\u2019ts, can\u2019ts, couldn\u2019ts, and a bunch of you\u2019ll nevers, all of it into the sack that she ties off at the top, starving the bad thoughts of oxygen until they die. Bad bad bad, they shout as they climb the hill. The glass is slick and wet so Rita must step carefully around a strew of used condoms and piles of dried dogshit and when she finally reaches the top, they let out a long ommmmm together, letting out the last of the bad. The sun is a chip on the horizon, a fluff of orange fur. When she tosses her trash in the dumpster at the top of the hill, Rita feels lighter. Like she\u2019s climbed a mountain. Like the air up here is thin and rare.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cassie hands her a trash bag that\u2019s technically empty but symbolically full of the stuff Rita\u2019s been shoving into it for years: all the wont\u2019s, shouldn\u2019ts, can\u2019ts, couldn\u2019ts, and a bunch of you\u2019ll nevers, all of it into the sack that she ties off at the top, starving the bad thoughts of oxygen until they die.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":21740,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3530],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction","writer-sarah-freligh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21224"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21741,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21224\/revisions\/21741"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}