Clare wrote this in a single night, in one sitting. It was a magic event, and she still does not fully understand what she was writing. She does not, for example, know anyone in the story in real life. Or, she used to not know anyone in the story. Now, of course, for whatever reason, given the existence of the small man who seems to teach poetry, she does.

Clare calls up the Word document for the draft she turned in to the undergraduate literary magazine where the fiction editor was an ex-boyfriend. He had ended the relationship summarily but said he would like to “keep reading [her].” Clare is basically glad she obliged, though the two of them don’t keep in touch. Then again, Clare doesn’t really keep in touch with anyone.

She tries thinking now about what this ex-boyfriend, the editor, might have seen in these words, which is to say, what anyone might have seen; who she had been to all of them, then, at school. The sentences feel so odd under her eyes, because she will never write something like this again, and also because it is extremely unlikely that she will write anything at all, ever again:

The Lift

By Clare Elwil

This woman his wife gave him two daughters, Amy with thick hair and Jenny who has been slightly bald all her life. Both of them smart, both of them in college now. His wife was squatting to get under the sink and find him the Joy. He was overweight, and he was a cardiologist. He caressed his belly.

He was supposed to wash a dish, but instead he set down the Joy and picked up an apple. We did it last night, he thought at the moment he bit. He wandered into the living room where he could see the field that stretched from their deck to the trees and what was going to be a highway on the other side of the trees. It was October, and during this month it always felt like riding in an airplane to stand in the living room of their summer home. He had never done this before. He wasn’t living in New York anymore, and he was not a cardiologist. The sale of the apartment had gone through. Massachusetts was full-time.

Except for Florida in the winter. The phone rang.

“Richard, sweetheart,” his wife calls him.

The phone is still ringing. She has not picked it up, and this house might be a universe long. Why did they decide that the living room needed to be two stories tall? The fireplace is holding up the ceiling, but something seems to be making the room rock as Richard goes to the phone. He is wearing sock slippers with pasted-on treads. The socks are too small. They are for children. “Hello?” he asks.

“Hello?” says a girl with a voice like dust.