the house by the dead end by Nadia Born

has been under construction for years so we creep in one summer, just you and me, during that margin of dusk when everything is strange. the pavement has barely cooled and my hair’s still dark-wet from a shower and you’re lighting a cigarette in the flame of a dollar store candle. the floor plan of the house is unfinished and it’s hard to tell what’s what, so we wander in our flip-flops imagining where we’d put the couch, the fridge, the bed. there are tarps held in place by red-gray bricks and a broken window that makes the house look blind in one eye. it’s there that i step on a nail and it bites through my flip-flop and into my heel. my achilles babe, you say but also he died and the nail is gunked orange and i’m shit-clueless about whether i had a tetanus shot so i text my mom and you swat away the other nails one-by-one with my broken flip-flop. romantic, i say and it kinda-sorta is if ghost-infected houses are your thing. we’re young, still believe in our invincibility against misfortune—though that will change soon, too soon—so we carry on, ready to suck the marrow from the rest of summer. do you want to make sweet love? you ask handing my flip-flip back, and i say yes though i’m curious what the sour kind would be. you take off my clothes in that room with the missing window and as your hands trace my sides, i feel like a paper doll, like you’re cutting me out, smoothing the edges. my heel is still bleeding when you enter me and all i can think about is whether i’m going to drop dead before my life even begins. soon i will quit our small town and you and everything i’ve ever known. but for now you smell like bbq and cheap cigarettes and chlorine and our bodies suspend all the anxieties of what’s next. afterwards i’m walking home alone beneath the dome of the night sky, flip-flops in one hand, still under the spell that i’m going to have a beautiful life, that all my lovers will be like you, when i get a text from mom that yes, i’ve been vaccinated against that particular hideous death. even now i recall turning the corner and seeing the lights on in my childhood home and knowing with certainty that something was over, that only the past tense existed within its walls. later when i leave our hometown behind and happiness seems impossible, i wonder about the house by the dead end, whether it’s still there, glass-glittered and engulfed by vines, or whether it’s slithered off the map into the unknown of the dead end, where it might yet have another fate.

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NADIA BORN — Nadia writes about girls who are birds, mothers who are ghosts, and other mysteries. She won LitMag’s Anton Chekhov Award for Flash Fiction and New Letters’ Editor’s Choice Award. Her stories are featured in The Cincinnati Review, Water~Stone Review, New Orleans Review, Mississippi Review and elsewhere. She also has fairy tales appearing in Small Wonders, The Orange & Bee and Flash Fiction Online. Find her online at http://www.nadiaborn.com.

Art by FRANCESCA LEADER — Francesca is a self-taught writer and artist whose images have appeared on the covers of Pithead Chapel, Cobra Milk, the Adanna Literary Review, the Harpy Hybrid Review, and Cream Scene Carnival. Her Cobra Milk cover was nominated for a 2023 Best of the Net award for visual art. Her debut poetry chapbook, “Like Wine or Like Pain,” is available from Bottlecap Press. Learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com.