Lauren Davis

Cleaver Road, 2014

Firepit where we burned trash—we weren’t meant to. The avocado green refrigerator that hummed excessively loud. Three lines of ants that—stubborn, busy, would move over only an inch when I scrubbed the floor. I’m lying. I scrubbed around them. I wouldn’t let them go. We were unhappy in the ways most couples are unhappy. I chipped the fox-shaped saltshaker when I threw it near you. You stepped out of the way, didn’t get hit. I was sluggish back then. Our nights smelled like a burnt bed, like someone before us had scorched the house then covered it up with a bit of plaster and paint. I remember the hole in the fence, in the overgrown yard, in the town where I would fall in love with another, and you would be excused, and pack everything, or pack a little, leaving me to gather your belongings in your absence. Scratches on my hands from clearing brush. Scratches on my hands from the stray black cat. I’m lying about the saltshaker. I was sluggish, but you were also. I’ll never forget the socks and photos I burned in the yard, the nick on your temple, and in and out of the hole in the yard—the fox, which I named Injury. And what followed behind it, close, like the light of your favorite constellation. Moonstruck.

Lauren Davis

Lauren Davis is the author of the forthcoming short story collection The Nothing (YesYes Books), the poetry collection Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press), the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize short-listed When I Drowned (Kelsay Books), and the chapbooks Each Wild Thing’s Consent (Poetry Wolf Press) The Missing Ones (Winter Texts), and the forthcoming Sivvy (Whittle Micro-Press). She holds an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She is a former Editor in Residence at The Puritan’s Town Crier, and she is the winner of the Landing Zone Magazine’s Flash Fiction Contest. Her stories, essays, poetry, interviews, and reviews have appeared in numerous literary publications and anthologies including Prairie Schooner, Spillway, Poet Lore, Ibbetson Street, Ninth Letter and elsewhere. Davis lives with her husband and two black cats on the Olympic Peninsula in a Victorian seaport community.