June Glass
As my husband pointed at the field, the beer in his hand overflowed, and I caught the suds with the beer in mine. He said “sick” and seemed to like that. A panther snarled, marking another Carolina first down, and I was actually pretty happy.
The rain had stopped, finally, and the field was green and wet. Our two daughters wore neon ponchos. We all did. Blue ones.
They told me about Susan B. Anthony during a timeout. How her coin slipped under their pillows. Susan B. Anthony, they said, was—on good authority—the tooth fairy.
“Yes,” I said, pretending to be in on their secret.
“Shh.” Dad didn’t know.
“Shh, of course,” I said.
I kind of looked like her, they said, producing the coin.
“I’m only thirty-two,” I said.
***
Halftime. I got us nachos. The cheese was low, so the woman behind the counter had to squeeze the bag. One glorious orange glob.
“Good?” she said.
“Good,” I said.
Nearly back at my blue plastic seat, I saw the girls smiling in front of the field with their arms around each other. One vacancy in each of their precious pink gums. Two visits from Susan B. Anthony.
My husband took their photo. He brought the good camera, a Christmas gift he never used. I didn’t want to be in the photo, not like this, so I hid in an empty chair a few rows behind.
“A couple more,” he said, focusing the lens.
The girls grew restless, their white shoes splashing the filthy stadium water, almost-sun on their neon backs. I watched the miniature version of it play out on the LCD screen on the back of his camera. An advertisement echoed throughout the stadium. Something about tailgate party packs.
My husband adjusted the focal length, reaching the frame beyond our girls, into the inzone where GO PANTHERS was spray painted onto the grass. The Topcats, they were called, now, danced on his LCD screen.
“Can we make a funny face?” our daughter asked.
My husband paid her no attention. He zoomed in even farther and floated the lens over the cheerleaders’ bodies, landing on their breasts, legs, stomachs, faces, tasting and sampling them with his lens, much like a fly. The shutter ticked on each body part, depositing all into his memory card.
“Can we do a funny face?” my daughter pleaded again. She did a funny face. They both did. That’s right girls, I thought, you do not need permission to do a funny face.
Back on my husband’s camera, the Topcats flicked their legs into high kicks. Their fringe skirts raised around their nude tights so a flash of their blue compression shorts showed underneath. I could tell by the way my husband lurched forward that this is what he had come for: a blue flash of crotch. The shutter ticked continuously now, and my stomach felt suspended, as if someone with cold hands had reached inside me and picked it up. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.
“That’s enough. The game’s about to start,” my husband said to my girls, lowering the camera at last.
After a few minutes, I sat back down beside him and my husband clapped wildly as the players came back on the field. He shouted “Let’s fucking go!”
One of my girls said, “We missed you, Susan,” and I laughed.
“Oh, I really missed you,” I said, stroking her frizzy head.
My husband put his arm over my shoulder to reach for a chip. How often, I wondered, would I return to this moment, thinking I should have known? He got a big dip of cheese and all around us, everywhere it seemed, the crowd roared.
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June Glass is a trans writer and filmmaker. Feature films she has written and directed have screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, Los Angeles Film Festival, Rooftop Films, International Film Festival of India, and all over the world. She is a graduate (Class of ’24) of the Bennington Writing Seminars and has taught film at The New School, Adelphi University, and New Mexico Highlands University. She was a finalist for the 2023 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest and an editor’s selection for CRAFT Literary’s 2023 Flash Prose Prize. She lives in New York and New Mexico.