Leslie | Kathryn Fitzpatrick

At our last meeting we played Balderdash and ate gluten-free crackers from a crystal dish. The word was bletting: the slow internal decay of fruits. Her second husband was a lobsterman with COPD who used to joke he’d be the one to go first, leaving her with nothing but a sea-worn cottage and too many antiques. Essex is like that, jammed with expensive, old things. She was pissed at Connecticut’s poet laureate (she isn’t even on Facebook!) and read me an essay about roast chickens and a dead baby she found once, abandoned on a beach. Doilies hung like caul fat from the coffee table. There weren’t any pictures of her daughter in the house, just a bunch of framed paint splatters. Rich people. Outside, fallen crab apples on the lawn caught the gasp of breeze when she told me she was dying. She said, “Tell the department, what do I care?” Her second husband mixed a whiskey sour at the bar cart. “More than anything else, I look forward to watching your self-confidence blossom.” I asked about chemotherapy and silence settled into the foyer. But what else could be said? I don’t know how to keep anything living? 

Kathryn Fitzpatrick is a 2nd year MFA student at the University of Alabama with essays and fiction published in Out Magazine, Atlas and Alice, Hippocampus, Cleaver, and elsewhere. Her work has been called, “biting, brutally honest, and not school appropriate” by her high school principal.