Vanessa is driving me to the eye doctor, but I don’t want to go. A man will look into my eyes and make the scales fall but what is that to her? Vanessa is already clear-eyed. There are people who do not flinch but at the same time are melancholy about it. She’s one. Have I told you about the time she ran after a boy stealing her bicycle? She overtook him on foot but then gifted him the bike after hearing his desperate story─ everyone home hungry, sick or dying; his sloping shoulders. And there was the time she bought a shack at auction, sight unseen, and hammered it into something inhabitable. Painted it pink and gold until it rose out of the dun-colored gravel to glow all over the neighborhood, which looked to be perpetually bathed in sunrise. The neighbors all loved her, except for the felons next door. She promised me she’d get a guard dog, but keeps bringing home abandoned puppies from the street instead. They need me, she shrugs. So, on this dirt road where cherry-blossom confetti floats on hills from which leaping rabbits emerge flashing swords of grass between their teeth, I embrace my contradictions the way Vanessa does. If I ever want to reframe the meaning of halos around streetlights beyond the cringe of my shades, I need to see what she sees when the sun first slaps her face in the morning.
Cheryl Snell’s books include poetry and fiction. Her most recent writing has appeared in On the Seawall, Maudlin House, Ghost Parachute, Flash Boulevard, Bending Genres, and Midway. She has stories in the 2025 Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions anthologies, and lives in Maryland.