Fishing

by Lisa Thornton

 

You can tell the good ones by the size of their eyes. Measure the distance from pupil to pupil and make a pile for the ones more than three inches apart and the ones less. The ones more than three inches apart are keepers, lovers, ones to ponder. Don’t even bother with the other pile or think about it for a second. Not worth your time.

Before I had the car accident my forehead was smooth but now there is a line like the lightning strike on Harry’s Potter’s but straighter, lower, between my eyes, with pink dots running up either side from the stitches. They said if it hadn’t had a roll bar. If it had been any other kind of car.

I didn’t know he wasn’t a keeper. Back then I couldn’t measure. I didn’t have the tools. Might not have used them if it I did. I just wanted to feel him, be in him be around him be a part of his life. Have him be a part of mine and then have our lives become one life that is too tangled up to separate, like line tangled at the base of a tree at the water’s edge.

But he wanted me to be in his by leaving mine behind. He was from the wrong pile. I flopped around, he tossed. We hit each other, slapped each other, made each other wet and angry and sad.

If it’s not right for you don’t eat it. It is poison. Someone else’s Last Supper. Retching on the side of the road I see her go by, laughing, not knowing about the brakes, the ice, the tree. Not knowing that he’ll pull the emergency lever, that they’ll fly out of control. That the car will take flight. That she won’t live out of water. That she’ll have to dive back under to make it out again.

 

 

Lisa Thornton lives in Illinois with her husband and son. She has poetry in Matter Literary Journal, Roi Faineant and Fiery Scribe Review. She has a BFA in Political Science and a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. Maybe someday she will master something. She can be found most days staring out the window waiting for the corn to grow tall and on Twitter @thorntonforreal.