Eugenia by Susan Holcomb

She’s a poet and a bass guitarist, the coolest in my LA mommies group, and someday soon: a breakout late-in-life pop star. “I could be like a female Leonard Cohen,” she tells me one day at the park. She’s turning thirty-nine this year but still destined for stardom, super-stardom. And I, hanging on her every word while our toddlers dig pits into the sand, believe her.

For weeks I marvel at her, make a study of her, seek out the exact source of all her power. Smudged eyeliner, thick curling dark hair, the kind of jeans the younger generation says are cool now. Easy, careless beauty, and she says she doesn’t even get Botox. “I smoke exactly one joint a week, on Fridays,” she tells me on the sly. “You know how it is, after you get the kids to bed.” Oh, what I would give for just one Friday! Girl crush, single joint, glitter and stardust. I would go to all her shows. I would run the fan club.

At the park our children teeter-totter on their lookalike scooters. Eugenia tells me how she got pregnant at nineteen, but lost it. Her boyfriend at the time was Catholic. He raged for weeks, certain she’d had an abortion. “But I was ready to have that baby with him,” she tells me. Her two-year-old approaches. She ruffles his thick curling dark hair. “It’s weird, isn’t it?” she says. “Squaring who you are with who you might have been…”

One day she tells me she’s stopped playing guitar, stopped writing.

“But you’re Leonard Cohen!” I exclaim.

She laughs. Her Botox-free face crinkles at the eyes. Didn’t I understand, that smile seemed to say to me. We were in the sand box. We were just playing pretend.

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SUSAN HOLCOMB — Susan holds an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and studied for a PhD in physics at Cornell. Her writing has been or will soon be published in swamp pink, Southern Indiana Review, The Boston Globe, Epiphany, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook WOLFBABY, a collection of flash fiction, won the 2023 Cupboard Pamphlet Contest and was published this spring.

Art by LAURIE MARSHALL — Laurie is an award-winning writer and collage artist in Northwest Arkansas. Her stories have been longlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, selected for Best Small Fictions 2022 and awarded the 2021 Lascaux Review Prize in Fiction. Her art has been featured in Fictive Dream, Rejection Letters, Mayday Magazine, among others. She is currently in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. Find examples of her work at www.SeeLaurieWrite.com.