Two hybrids by Sarah Sorensen

Transubstantiation for Beginners

Magic glides through me, a black velvet painting fuzzed into the static of my archived life. I knew him when I was wild as daisies. He was my grandmother’s Labrador Retriever. Black as a lake in the moonlight, I spent hours drowning in him. 

He was my first dog, though he wasn’t mine. It’s so hard to love something that will never fully be yours, but it’s the only way to love anyone. Be overtaken, drown a little. 

...

Grandmother’s organ rides the orange shag carpet, vibrating on the deep tones that I lean into as I experiment. The peddles are out of reach unless I get off the bench. Occasionally, I descend to push them with my hands until they yield. A mint button will play a song on its own. Not a good one, but better than mine. Sheet music sleeps in the bench, unused. Its black marks are as random to my eyes as a broken jar of ink, splattered across the page. It is enough to just hear the sounds, one by one. I press my fingers to the long white keys and short black ones, making sounds long and short. 

In the yard, the weeping willow hides me, a dream splashed in green over my prone body. Time spills so slowly, like tree sap. I am a golden star laid in the grass, drinking the summer sun. A blade makes a whistle laid between your thumbs if you blow into the hollow. My father taught me that. I practice it now, over and over. 

Then I go inside, hungry. There is Jello in the fridge in sundae glasses, Cool Whip atop in a perfect white cloud. Now? Can I have it now?

Grandmother is at her kitchen table. Coffee and a worry in her hands.

“One day,” she says, pointing to the figurines lining her shelves, “these will all be yours.”

The concept of her absence fills me with a dread that I can remove only by avoiding the truth at all costs. Only by remembering that time is slow as sap. Only by remembering the perfect Jello that I long to pierce with my spoon. Only by remembering Magic.

...

Sap has a way of emptying out, while coating you. It smothers you, even as it escapes your grasp, and so do those you love.

Some of the figurines are mine now. Small figures, brittle with fear of breaking. They inhabit my home like they are holding their breath, waiting to exhale a series of events that I never witnessed. Waiting to tell me things that I am better off not knowing. 

Mine, a vision of the taffy in her basement cold space. Mine, the remembrance of her laundry shute, and the fascinating rooms that were unused, gathering boxes and furnishings. Her home, frail and multi-faceted, like exquisite crystal. 

They tell me the floor in the living room was inlaid with a sunburst pattern beneath the orange shag, but I never once saw it. Is it laid bare now? If I came to the door, could I be let in to run my hands over it? I am estranged from parts of myself. Family is a malleable concept, but the blood still remembers. 

...

I am an archivist of my own life, though I’ve smashed so many darlings in the rough trade of gathering. So much changes in the light, the angle, the prism.

I remember Magic dashing down the yard, hopping the fence, and feeling the blood shotgunning through his legs. He ran lost and free for miles. 

We brought him back. 

My body longs to abandon. My body aches to be brought back. Magic still ripples in my veins, like a scintillating wire, gnawed hard. 

Some day it’s yours, and you’ll learn your carrying capacity. You’ll learn the weakness in your hands. You’ll pick someone to give it to. Make a point of draining it out into words. This is the gift I am offering you. Take it, before it suffocates me.

I Only Drink It Black

The sparrow leaps up, not fast enough. She hits with a twitch, a collapse. Dead on a country byway. You didn’t see summer. That hurts worst. In the diner, my waitress with crossed front teeth leaves the carafe of coffee. Beyond the window, broken feathered trash. We are not more than this. I want the teeth to come back so I can gaze at them, crooked, hard, and true. Her small deep eyes tell me nothing. My waitress’s hair falls loose and stiff from her top knot, resilient as fox fur. Or maybe displaced feathers. What had she stopped for on the road? Please bite down on my tongue with your luscious teeth. The deep brown coffee, glassy in my white ceramic mug, shimmers like a drunk eye. Once, I fell in love with another woman’s crooked tooth. I am so full of her reflection and she does not see me. 

Sarah Sorensen (she/her), MA, MLIS is a queer writer based in the Metro Detroit area. Sarah has been published over 70 times in lit mags, but her most recent work can be found in The Route 7 Review, Stonecrop Magazine, and Another Chicago Magazine. She's honored to be a Best Small Fictions 2025 and runner-up in the 2025 Rock Paper Poem Poetry Contest. She has one tiny fireball of barks and an unstoppable cat son.