I See You on Weekend Mornings

✧ 2023 World's Best Short-Short Story Contest Finalist ✧

That’s twice a week. In that time, the space of an hour, we independently climb fake rocks, and I examine you with the kind of naked interest that I can only assume feels pointed and rude.

You are generous with me about that. Your face says, hm? when it could say, what? or can I help you?

You look like him. You do. I enjoy looking. Your face is a complex pleasure for me, like layered perfume or tom yum soup. Seeing you with fresh eyes is like meeting him for the first time.

Our fourth-grade desks squared next to each other. Pencil sharpeners and animal erasers lined like totems in their caves.

You are him but arrestingly delicate. Fine-boned where he is broad. The sweetest curl on your forehead. What did Keats say? A faery’s child.

You two must be from the same northern town. Welsh or Irish? I like to picture your ancestors, replicas of you and him, walking side by side down a cobblestone street. The same impish smiles and button noses, wearing your 17th-century garb, all capes and buttons. He is carrying a basket. You are smoking a pipe, or maybe you have your tiny hands in your pockets. You are both walking to the sea.

But I gather that you two are very different. You climber, you adventurer. You would look most at ease on a clifftop or as the skipper of a ship. He collected puzzles. He ate two eggs for every breakfast. He folded the laundry and made the bed with so much care that I felt sorry for him.

And you’re not the type of person to throw my mug on the kitchen floor. You wouldn’t need to. Wouldn’t have something to prove.

I bought that soup mug—yellow handle, apian details—at a discount store specifically for his cabinet. I had never appreciated a physical object so much. Though I’m sure the country has tens of thousands of mugs like it, I haven’t been able to find the same one again in any store.

Not a second after he threw it, his bottom lip wobbling, he grabbed the broom and swept the shards and powdery splinters into the trash.

Every time I see you, I want to tell you that I’m not upset about it.

I know you don’t care. I know you aren’t cousins.

But he had a reason. I can’t remember what I said exactly, but all my words meant the same thing.

“I’m bored of you.”

“You aren’t very smart.”

“You will never make me happy.”

No, I’m not mad about the mug. It was his way of showing me that there was something alive in there after all. That I’d misjudged him.

I’d also like to tell you that I laughed when he threw it. I did. I can be bad at staying in the moment, and everything is a joke when you’re watching from the outside.

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GENEVIEVE DE GANGE grew up in Southern California amidst dry heat, avocado trees, and freeway driving, but for the past seven years, she has been living and writing in the Midwest. She currently resides in Bloomington, Indiana where she is pursuing her MFA in Fiction at Indiana University. “I See You on Weekend Mornings” is her first publication in a literary journal.

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