The Afternoon

by Jennifer Lemming

Clutching at the brisk wind and fading wools, she felt as cold as all her lost assumptions.

She made it inside to her kitchen and was acting most peculiar. Her moods, jarred by revisits to the horrible mess in the car left her with only enough energy to just gaze at the striations in the rock of the countertop which, she thought, did little to coax her away from immature emotional growth.

          She glanced at the leftover lunch, fixating on the spinach leaf, arched limply backwards, soaked in oil. She gazed outside through the glassed panes of the dining room’s French doors, into her backyard, at the bird feeder where she saw the little sparrows stretched out for food. And she thought even the birds also wanted her attention, but all this filled her with apprehension.

          Feeling that it was the ultimate expression of her exurb, bathed in the soft autumn’s palpable amber glow, a gelled resin made worthy by envy. It would be days before they found her body in the garage.

           She turned her vision back into her kitchen, all her emotional jargon clamped together, just bits of frosting oozing from beneath curled, pale linoleum.

Jennifer Lemming lived in Indianapolis for 14 years. During that time she won 1st place in The Dancing Poetry Contest 2004 in San Francisco for the poem "Lunatic," read at the Chicago Printer's Book Fair and spent 4 years as Co-editor of the Indianapolis, Indiana literary magazine, Ichabod's Sketchbook. Her flash fiction, "Mis-En-Scene," was previously published in Yellow Mama. A sentimentalist by nature, she now lives in North Dakota.