"Lying" by Nina King Sannes

Two women lie together against the cold bed, hips and elbows sharp against winter-

hardened foam. Hands marked by bedlice, clasping damp beneath the sheet. In the dark window,

light flashes. And the delayed rumble — as though a storm, blowing itself out over the Atlantic.

The dark one has her back to the window, long feet dangling off the bed edge. She faces the

sallow one. Both are hard-bodied, flesh poor. No more danger here than anywhere, though the

illusion would give comfort at least. Not like here, suspended up seven stories, sky only in the

window, unpolluted, city dark.

Small, easy stories from the sallow one. After the other had cut the meters off her hair, how

she’d found a grackle nest, a bowl of soft hair, her own cells cupping the blue eggs. But she didn’t

tell the tall one that the eggs were crushed under the mother, Anofex-weakened shells unable to bear

their own incubation.

Neither one was fooling her mirror, both afraid but unwilling to show it for the sake of the

other.

She tells about the clutch of young rabbits in the field who were pink and blind, the soft,

genital feel of their ears. How she put them in her pockets, and made them a nest in the cypress

treeline. She didn’t mention how her tiller had turned half of them into pink pulp, and how the

displaced ones had surely died in the cypress knees. The act of removal was for the sallow one’s

conscience alone, the rabbits slow dying unreal because unobserved.

Another flash, groaning walls. And their hands clutch, nails biting flesh. Windowpanes rattle

in their framing, no use in anything other than this. They consciously relax, smooth the sheet.

Smoke obscures the stars.

Nina King Sannes is a writer from the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. She holds a MFA in fiction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a winner of the AWP Intro Journals Award, and her work has previously appeared in EPOCH magazine and The Colorado Review.