Sarah Freligh
After Edward Hopper
And still they come here every summer, same motel, same room. Each time, they unpack, backs to each other, change into bathing suits and walk to the beach. He sits like a lifeguard, alert to any movement. She closes her eyes and remembers the man who begged her to leave her marriage, the man who’d seen the shadow around her, nothing good in her future. And nothing was, nothing was ever good again, and so they come back here each summer to wait for what will never wash up. Think of bones bleached by salt water, the insistence of a small child to look at me daddy, mommy, watch me.
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Sarah Freligh is the author of seven books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize, A Brief Natural History of Women (Harbor Editions, 2023) and the forthcoming Hereafter, winner of the 2024 Bath Novella-in-Flash contest. Her work has appeared many literary journals and anthologized in New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), and Best Microfiction (2019-22). Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation.