They can say whatever they want. But you know, she talks so slowly I could love her forever. I’m so glad she found me. This has been kind of a rough summer for me. My girlfriend left me. My wife’s sick. My shrink has been acting really hostile. My back went out. The weather’s been wacky, too. And what with the frankenfish and the hogweed scares, it’s just a creepy time. And then this girl comes through the bar’s dark and says, I have a feeling I’m going to love you more than God loves Wonder Bread, in a tone so languid the sentence lasted minutes. I said, well there’s a lot you don’t know about me. And she says, I don’t know anything about you. I paused and looked down, I shot that man on purpose. Luckily, she said, I have the resilience of an abused child.

Alec Solomita has published fiction in The Adirondack Review, The Mississippi Review, Southwest Review and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared in, among others, 3Elements Literary Review, Literary Orphans, Silver Birch Press, and, forthcoming, Driftwood Press and Fulcrum: An International Anthology of Poetry and Aesthetics. He lives in Somerville, Mass.

Some of his other published poems can be found here: Invisible, Pulpy the Wit and Upstate/I’ve Come to Think