Photo by Amit Lahav on Unsplash
“Cha-ching,” my dad says, pulling an envelope from a plastic bag labeled Karls mail.
The envelope contains a check and, without even looking, I know it is worth approximately eight dollars.
Every three months, one of these payouts arrives in my mother’s mailbox. The checks are from Walgreens and made out to both of my parents: Donna and Karl. Though the pair are ten years divorced, Walgreens—where my father drives a delivery truck and is enrolled in a nonlucrative employee stock deal—never got the memo.
“Let me guess. $7.58?”
My dad makes a loud buzzer sound with his mouth. “$7.98.”
Last night, I’d watched my mom open the check, glance at the amount, then stuff it—still unsigned (read: YES. I SAW IT, BITCH)—inside my dad’s Ziploc mail bag, mumbling “I’m not giving him shit.”
You might be thinking, Only eight dollars? That’s just…petty. You’d be correct. “I put up with Karl’s bullshit for twenty-seven years,” she declared, as if I hadn’t heard this speech a thousand times. “His lying, his cheating, his selfishness, his refusal to grow the hell up. I’m not signing off on a goddamn penny.”
Because my dad lives in Colorado Springs, an hour north of my mom’s house in Aurora, he receives his mail whenever my sister and nephew visit him, making my mom’s refusal to sign an even greater inconvenience. Most of the time the checks end up in the trash, but not today. Today, he’s already in Aurora, and he’s determined to get his rightful due.
“Right on,” my dad says, nodding. “Let’s go get Donna’s autograph.”
The “us” implied in “let’s” consists of me, my dad, and my ten-year-old nephew, Carlos. Carlos and I are both on winter break, and two days earlier, I’d driven up from Albuquerque after completing my first semester in graduate school. I am working on an MFA in creative nonfiction, which essentially means I’ll earn a degree in talking shit about my family. “My classmates love you guys,” I say in my dad’s truck, on our way to my mom’s job. “You’re everyone’s favorite characters. Gummy Bear’s especially.”
Gummy Bear is the code name for my crush, Julia. My father and I both have patchy love lives that are often hard to keep up with, so we’ve developed a system of nicknames based on memorable details about our romantic interests. In Julia’s case, it’s gummy bears. The night I fell in love with her, we ate a bag of them, trying to guess the flavors without looking at the colors. Each time I decapitated a bear with my teeth, I’d lay its body on Julia’s tongue with my fingers until she eventually said, “Hey, I want a head too.” I gave her a whole seafoam one, digging a matching one out of the bag for myself. We decided the flavor was Dial soap.
It would have been simple if she didn’t have a boyfriend. Instead, our romance has remained nothing more than an electric current between us. We barely acknowledge our pulsing chemistry. At this very moment, while I am in Colorado scheming to get my mother’s signature, Gummy Bear’s boyfriend is flying out to Portland to meet and spend Christmas with her family. This makes me want to die.
“Oh yeah?” my dad says. “Gummy Bear has good taste.”
“Can I take your picture for her?” I ask, opening Snapchat. Our streak is 92 days strong. We’ve earned the double pink hearts (“best friends” for two months straight), and in that time, we’ve developed a conversational aesthetic all our own—ALL CAPS EVERYTHING—because we are always excited to be talking.
KARL IS IN TOWN, I caption the photo, AND ON A MISSION TO GET DONNA TO SIGN A CHECK.
I take the paper from the middle console and snap the amount. $7.98.
She writes back in seconds.
WHAT WILL HE DO WITH HIS FORTUNE? MAY I SUGGEST: A WHOPPER MEAL? HALF DOZEN DONUTS? 2.3 GALLONS OF GAS?
I laugh so earnestly that my heart aches.
“I will not be able to live a happy life if I don’t ever get a chance to kiss her.”
My nephew chimes in from the backseat. “You sound crazy, Auntie!” He raises his pitch, imitating me, “I’m Michelle, and I will be depressed my WHOLE. ENTIRE. LIFE. if my Gummy Bear won’t kiss me! Just kill me now!”
He and my dad laugh together.
I turn to face him. “Carlos, I hope one day you can feel this much passion about someone. It makes life worth living.”
“You know what I think makes life worth living?” my dad asks.
I raise my brows.
“Television.”
My mom’s job is only a five-minute drive from her house. She tends the front desk at a physical rehab facility for the elderly in exchange for an hourly wage that confines to poverty and 20 hours of PTO per year. Somehow, she is not depressed.
When we arrive, Sunny Days is deserted. It is a weekend, and the admin are at home with their families. My mom’s desk sits directly inside the front doors, but her swivel chair is empty. We start to roam the building, which is a cavernous work of architectural genius: 30-foot ceilings and sky lights. Sunny Days has the feel of a cathedral.
We circle the nurses’ station, traverse the halls, peek into patient rooms, and wander into the dining room to pluck cookies from a jar. Donna is M.I.A.
“Let’s go play pool,” my dad suggests and hightails it to the so-called library. The room is full of body-length mirrors, a pool table, two chairs, and a 100-gallon fish tank. A small stack of books that seem to be for decoration only are the only nod to the room’s official name. Considering that the residents are in constant pain and have limited mobility, the pool table is rarely occupied.
While my nephew and dad triangle the balls, I call my mom. When she picks up, her voice is light.
“Hi, Mama,” I say. “Where are you?”
“I’m on my way back to work from lunch. Did your daddy make it to town yet? What are y’all up to?”
“We’re at Sunny Days, waiting for you.”
My mom’s tone flips as if I’ve just told her we intend to rob the place for pain meds.
“Why are you there?”
“Dad wants you to sign something.”
“What the hell is it?”
“A check.”
I pivot toward the pool table. “So…Mom just hung up on me.”
“Uh oh,” my nephew says.
My dad smashes the rack. “I’m stripes.”
Although my mom didn’t mention where she had lunch, I know she’s on her way back from McDonald’s. She is addicted to their sweet tea, which she refers to as “my crack.” The morning prior, I’d accompanied her on her morning trip through the drive-thru. A static voice had blared, “Welcome to McDonald’s,” to which my mom responded, “Good morning, Nicole,” and the voice—or rather, Nicole—said, “Hello, Miss Donna.”
Cruising to the second window, my mom gave me the D.L. on Nicole. “She’s got a hard life. She’s raising three kids on her own. Well, she just got a new boyfriend, but he sounds like a real piece of shit.”
“Nicole told you all that in the drive-thru?”
“Yes, Michelle. Sometimes there is a wait at the window.”
I estimate that my mom’s ETA is less than five minutes away.
“Last weekend I took 2.0 out to walk around downtown Springs,” my dad says.
2.0 is my favorite of my dad’s revolving girlfriends. Her name is also Donna, hence the nickname. In August, she and my dad drove down to Albuquerque to help me set up my studio apartment. It was the first time we’d ever met. Due to spatial limitations (and limited income), all three of us shared my queen-size bed for four nights.
I thought this was amusing, but when I called to tell my mom, she disagreed.
“You shared a bed with her?”
“I had to!” I said.
“Who slept in the middle?”
“Dad, obviously,” I said. “He’s the connective tissue.”
“She must have low standards,” my mom determined. “But why should that surprise me? She is dating your father.”
“You know you’re insulting yourself too, right?”
“At least I had the sense to leave his cheating ass.”
This was technically true, though my mom hadn’t left him until their marriage was absolutely and utterly unsalvageable. For years, I watched their romance unravel in bitter, dark spools, until one day there was nothing left. I could never congratulate her for being strong enough to walk away because I was too busy wondering what the fuck had taken so long. (The answer, I would one day understand, was that she loved him.)
“So,” my dad continues, “there are new statues downtown—I think they’re from the University’s art students—anyway, I was looking at a topless mermaid, and I said, ‘This one has nice breasteses,’ and 2.0 got jealous and made me take her home.”
“2.0 just had a double mastectomy,” I say.
“So?” he asks. “They were made out of clay, Michelle.” He looks at my nephew, shaking his head. “Women.”
I pull out my phone to transcribe this conversation for Gummy Bear, when my mother appears in the doorway. She has a large sweet tea clutched in her fingers and takes a long pull from the straw before saying, “What the hell are you doing here?”
This is rhetorical.
“Grandma!” Carlos cries out and runs over to hug her.
“Hi, honey,” she says sweetly.
“Hi Donna.” My dad pulls the check from his back pocket.
Snatching it from his hand, she yells, “Oh my god, Karl! I can’t believe you drove an hour for…” she looks at the check to confirm, “eight lousy dollars! What kind of cheap ass would do that?”
This statement is false, and she knows it. My father has driven the hour to spend time with me, their daughter, who is in town for the first time in months. He has only driven five minutes to have the check signed, which is worth it.
I open Snapchat and start recording.
“Why are you taking a video?” my mom snaps.
“For Gummy Bear!” I say, realizing too late that I now have to delete the video because I used her nickname.
“Gummy bears? What the hell are you talking about?”
I shoo my mother’s question away, not wanting to rub salt into her wound. She is jealous of the secret language my father and I share. One that is much bigger than just nicknames for all our partners, but rather a lifelong joke she hasn’t been invited in on. “Nothing.”
I feel like a Maury cinematographer as I chase my mom to the nurse’s station while she yells, “I can’t believe you are so goddamn cheap that you drove a whole hour for eight dollars! How much gas did it take you to get here? Huh? Are you even going to break even, Karl? You cheap piece of shit!”
You cheap piece of shit. You cheap piece of shit, echoes through Sunny Days’ empty halls.
“BELIEVE IT, DONNA! BELIEVE IT!”
I send the clip to Gummy Bear with the caption, VOLUME ALL THE WAY UP, then snap a still of my mom signing the check. I am disappointed that I didn’t choose a video when she throws it back at him and the air catches the sheet, rocking it smoothly to the floor.
When my dad bends down to pick it up, my mother smiles, winks at me, and mouths, “Got his ass.”
My nephew laughs so hard I can see his uvula.
As we leave, my mom hollers at my dad’s back, “I WANT MY HALF!”
In the car, I read the most recent exchanges between me and Gummy Bear aloud.
WAS THAT A SALT WATER FISH TANK I SPOTTED IN THAT VID??
$30K TO INSTALL AND $10K YEAR TO MAINTAIN. WORTH EVERY PENNY?!?!
BELIEVE IT, MICHELLE. BELIEVE IT!
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” my dad says.
I ignore him and switch apps, only to see that Gummy Bear’s boyfriend has tagged her in a post on Facebook. He’s checked in at the airport and written, En route to Portland! I eye the time he posted and guess that he’ll arrive in Oregon in three or so hours.
“I feel sick,” I say.
“How come?” my dad asks.
“Sorrow. Jealousy.”
“You sure that’s it?” he asks.
“Yeah, what else?”
My dad flashes me a side eye.
“What?”
“I have to tell you something, but I’m worried it’ll hurt your feelings.”
“Tell me!”
“It’s your pooch, Michelle,” he says sternly. “It’s big. You sure it’s not a baby making you sick?”
I place my hand on my gut.
“You think it’s big?”
“Well, it’s not not big.”
“Do you think it’s my dress?” I am wearing a clingy, silky number.
“Can a dress give you a Santa Claus belly?”
My nephew shakes his head.
“I know what happened,” I say. Gummy Bear altered my gym routine. After a few weeks of flirting and hanging out at my house on Wednesday evenings, Gummy Bear joined Planet Fitness, ostensibly so that we could exercise together. We were busy—overworked graduate students, and she had her relationship to tend to—so we met when we could, which turned out to be 5:30am. More often than not, we’d meet in the parking lot, and I’d climb into her car to eat RX bars and share a thermos of coffee. Some mornings we only used the gym as a meeting point before carpooling to a nearby restaurant, where we’d eat breakfast burritos and talk until she had to go home.
On the days when we actually made it inside the gym, we were lackadaisical in our intensity. Sometimes Gummy Bear arrived tired and would sleep on a yoga mat while I held planks beside her. I would flick my attention between my stopwatch and her face. Her complexion was creamy, the bridge of her nose sculpted like a doll’s. Pouty, perfect lips. She had no idea how pretty she was.
Gummy Bear felt awkward in her femininity, which, she’d told me, made being around me all the more confusing since I am completely at home in mine: all long hair and makeup and manicures. I had spent the last few months watching Gummy Bear watch me self-consciously and, soon, she too painted her nails and wore blush. Her mirroring me pained me, but I understood. I was living proof that a woman could be both gay and hyper-femme, and Gummy Bear thought she wanted to be these things too. But she had not yet been with a woman, and understanding her individual femininity was like a maze she couldn’t find her way through.
My dad shrugs. “Well, you can’t change that today. It’s lunch time. Let’s go to Taco Bell.”
In the cantina, we spread everything out on the table: one nacho supreme, two tostadas, a fan of soft- and hard-shell tacos, and little pouches of cinnamon twists.
“Are you guys happy?” I ask, picking up a loaded tortilla chip.
“What the hell are you talking about?” my dad says.
“It’s just a question. To get to know you both better.”
“I’ve never in my life thought about silly shit like that,” he says and points his spork at me. “Is this what you and Gummy Bear talk about?”
“Yes,” I say, “and other things. Like, what was the hardest part of our childhoods. Where we feel unfulfilled. What’s been the saddest moment of our whole lives.”
“You know what 2.0 and I talk about? What do we want for breakfast—Reese’s Puffs or Fruity Pebbles? What show we want to watch next—Ancient Aliens or Finding Bigfoot?”
“That is so depressing,” I say. “Isn’t it?” I elbow Carlos.
He shrugs while crunching into a taco. “I would’ve said Reese’s Puffs for breakfast and Finding Bigfoot!”
“Ditto,” my dad agrees.
“You two don’t know anything about love.”
“Then how come Grandpa was married twice?” Carlos counters.
“Well, how come he’s single now?” I say.
“How come you’re single now?” my dad asks.
“Hmm, I don’t know. Oh wait—probably because Gummy Bear has a fucking boyfriend!”
“I bet Gummy Bear’s boyfriend doesn’t ask her to relive the past every damn day,” he says, chewing through his words. “Maybe you’re too intense for her.”
“Am not!”
“Might be!”
Carlos runs a finger through the nacho cheese. “We’re sharing that,” I snap.
“So?”
“Donna 1.0 used to get mad at me for never asking about her day,” my dad says. “Her damn day! If she wanted to talk about it so much, why couldn’t she just tell me about it? Why’d I have to ask first?”
I smack my palm against my forehead. I have heard about this issue from my mother my whole life. “Your daddy is so selfish,” she always said. “He only thinks about himself.” I would nod and make suggestions, namely divorce. She always used the same examples: “On our very first date, he took me to Dairy Queen. He came out with a banana split for himself and a small vanilla cone for me.” When I was a kid and they were still together, this story was playful. She and my dad would laugh until they were snorting so much that our house sounded like a pigpen. Now, the story is laced with double perspective and always ends with, “I should’ve known better than to marry him.”
“Women,” my dad says, then burps. “Let’s go get this money.”
Twenty minutes later, my dad holds seven singles and ninety-eight cents, fresh from the bank.
“Should I give Donna four bucks or split it right down the middle. $3.99?”
“Four dollars,” my nephew says.
“Let me ask Gummy Bear.”
TAKING A POLL, I write.
GIVE HER $2.99! she answers. KARL HAD TO USE HIS GAS TO CASH IT.
“Right on,” my dad says. “I love Gummy Bear.”
“Me too,” I say, and it rings so true that my stomach sinks. I imagine her boyfriend on the plane. Will Gummy Bear kiss him at the airport? Well, duh. I point out the window toward the mall across the street. “I need cheering up,” I say. “Let’s go listen to some Christmas music.”
In the Aurora Mall, the food court is the best place to hear the music playing over the P.A. system. The bass is never clogged by the competing playlists pouring out of the store fronts, and because the ceilings are as high as the heavens, it sounds like a concert hall.
Craving a secondary dessert, my dad buys a deluxe caramel apple from Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. The cashier, a teen who probably goes to the same high school I did, slices it and tells my dad his total is $5.87.
“Goddamn it,” my dad says, refolding the four bills he was planning to pay with and stuffing them back into his wallet. Then he fishes out his debit card and says, “Charge it.”
We settle in at a table that provides an excellent view of the TVs. John Legend’s rendition of “The Christmas Song” plays, and the screens switch between showing him wearing a Santa hat and pop-up music facts like, John Legend was born in Ohio.
“Huh, I didn’t know that,” my dad says, raising an apple slice to his mouth.
Gummy Bear snaps a picture of her mother stirring something on the stove with the question: GUESS WHAT’S IN THE POT???
“Now this is just insensitive, don’t you think?” I ask my dad, showing him my phone. “I’ve got to guess what her boyfriend will be eating during his welcome dinner?”
I text back immediately. BUTTERNUT SQUASH SOUP? MINESTRONE?
WRONG. SPAGHETTI SAUCE.
While I consider how to reply, Kelly Clarkson’s smoky voice croons, “Please Come Home for Christmas,” which gets the better of me. My eyes well up and spill over.
“What’s wrong with you?” my dad asks.
“Gummy Bear!”
“What’s happening?”
My answer is long winded—Gummy Bear’s boyfriend is only a few hours out from tasting her mother’s homemade spaghetti sauce, which is painful enough, but he is also about to access all the parts of Gummy Bear’s life that I never will: the way her childhood home smells, the brand of toothpaste the Bears keep in the bathroom, whether they use cloth napkins or paper towels, what percentage of milk they drink. He’ll get to pet the family dog. I haven’t even stood inside her bedroom in Albuquerque.
“Is this really the shit girls think about, or is this a you thing?” my dad asks.
My nephew pats my arm and says, “It’s okay to be sad, Auntie.”
This makes me sadder.
I excuse myself to the restroom where I sob silently into the neck of my sweater on the toilet. I set an alarm on my phone and allow myself two whole minutes to think about everything Gummy Bear’s boyfriend knows about her that I do not. What her bedsheets look like. If she has any out-of-sight moles or birthmarks. What she sounds like when she comes. If she has any ticklish spots. When my phone alarm goes off, I take a deep breath and remind myself that I know her like a friend. A best friend. Emotionally, intimately in a different way. This makes me feel better. Even though I never even pulled down my pants, I wash my hands for the comfort of the other patrons. In the mirror, I wipe away two smudges of black—one under each eye—until you can barely even tell they were there.
As I return to our table, I try to think of something funny to send Gummy Bear. Maybe a poorly dressed mannequin? A pouting child waiting in the Santa line? Oh my god, I think. The Kiddie Corral!
When my nephew was four years old, my dad brought him to this very mall to meet the woman he was having an affair with. We called her Ana Senior (I’d dated a woman named Ana years earlier who had similar abusive traits). Ana Senior had agreed to meet my dad and Carlos at the Kiddie Corral, a location my dad believed would make Ana Senior seem non-threatening and fun to my nephew. My father, however, had dramatically underestimated Carlos’ loyalty to my mother, and despite pinky promising that he would keep the meeting a secret, Carlos marched into my mom’s house afterward, screaming, “GRANDMA! GRANDPA HAS A GIRLFRIEND.” It was the final nail in the coffin of their marriage. I had written about this in an essay I submitted to workshops. Gummy Bear had read all about it.
“I have an idea,” I say, lifting my coat from the back of my chair.
On the walk over, I ask my dad and nephew if they’ll pose for me. “It’ll be funny if you pretend you’re introducing Carlos to Ana Senior, and I’ll use the drawing tool in Snapchat to draw her in as a stick figure.”
They oblige.
Gummy Bear responds quickly. OMG. I WANT A VIRTUAL TOUR OF ALL THE PLACES THAT ARE MENTIONED IN EVERY STORY YOU’VE EVER WRITTEN.
I like when Gummy Bear shows that she wants to know me. Once, we laid in my bed with the lights off (mindful not to touch) and listened to my favorite Alanis Morissette song. “There are two lines in this one that are so me,” I told her, “that I can’t believe I didn’t write them.”
“Bet I can find them,” she’d said.
“Where to now?” my dad asks as we walk toward the exit.
“I miss Grandma,” my nephew says. “Let’s go take her the money.”
My dad takes the scenic route to Sunny Days so I can send Gummy Bear photos.
HERE IS MY OLD HIGH SCHOOL.
HERE IS A PARK I USED TO COME TO A LOT.
Gummy Bear writes back: I WANT TO GO BACK IN TIME AND HAVE KNOWN YOU FOREVER. I DIDN’T KNOW IT WAS POSSIBLE TO BE EVEN MORE IN LOVE WITH YOU THAN I ALREADY AM.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” I yell, wanting desperately to screenshot her message. I resist, aware that Snapchat will notify her. Before I close the app and her words disappear forever, I read her message out loud. “Is this her telling me she’s in love?”
“Sounds like it,” my dad says.
“She says it right there,” Carlos says. “Could I be any more in love with you?”
“She’s in love with me,” I say, but as the words leave my mouth my soaring mood drops, like a ball tossed into the air.
My heart aches for Gummy Bear in immense, hard-to-explain ways, and I think of something my friend once told me. “Time isn’t individual, unique moments, but a vast dimension that we experience second by second,” she’d said. “Whatever is going to happen in the future is already on its way.” We had been walking in the woods, and she lifted her palm into a sunbeam. “Think of the sun. You understand that the sun warming us right now is actually in the past, right? But the sun also exists right now, in our future.”
I explain this to my dad, and he says, “So…you’re telling me that you’re feeling sad about something that hasn’t happened yet?”
“Yes,” I say, because although I don’t know what awaits us—that one day Gummy Bear will no longer have a boyfriend, that I will kiss her on my doorstep, that we will lay in bed and actually touch, but that Gummy Bear will always be unsure of me, unsure of what it says about herself to love me, unsure of how to love herself beside me—I can feel the future coming.
“Does your relationship with mom still hurt you?”
“My marriage with Donna that ended in 2011?” he asks.
“Yes, Dad, that one.”
“No,” he says. “Donna is like a sister to me now. But don’t tell her I told you that. It’ll hurt her feelings. She’s still in love with me.” He eyes my nephew in the rearview. “I know you like to spill the beans, buddy, but how about you keep this to yourself?”
Though my mom would never admit it out loud, she does still love my dad. I doubt she’ll ever get to the point where she sees him as a brother. But what do I know? Five years ago, I didn’t think my parents would ever speak again unless absolutely required by law, and, well.
My phone lights up with a text from my mom: What are you guys doing?
“She must have sensed us coming.”
Coming to bring your money.
“Told ya,” my dad says. “She’s obsessed with me. Here, take a video for her.”
My dad begins belting Mariah Carey’s “Obsessed.”
“Why you so obsessed with me? Don-na, I wanna know-ow-ow.”
My mom sends back a selfie of her flipping off the camera. Get over yourself, Karl.
“You two are childish,” I say, as I forward the video and my mom’s response to Gummy Bear.
IM OBSESSED W/ YOUR FAMILY. I WANT TO BE THERE W/ U SO BAD.
My mom sends a second message: Stop and get me a sweet tea on the way.
From the drive-thru, I send Gummy Bear an artistic series: a short clip of my dad ordering the sweet tea, him paying cash at the first window with the caption, DONNA’S $4 DWINDLES TO $2.92, and then a shot of the large cup with the words, GOT THE CRACK!!! But when we park at Sunny Days, it has been six entire minutes since I sent Gummy Bear the last snap, and she still hasn’t opened them. I know what it means. And though I have been preparing for this moment all day, all week, all month, her boyfriend’s arrival into Portland always felt like something that only existed in the future, a moment we’d never actually catch up to. As my dad, Carlos, and I march through the front doors, I open Snapchat and stare at Gummy Bear’s Bitmoji face. It looks nothing like her aside from the ponytail, but it hurts my heart all the same.
When I stand before my mom’s desk, I notice that her expression is flat. “What’s wrong?” I ask. She knew we were coming. Doesn’t she want her crack tea and $3? Perhaps there is no tea in the world sweet enough to make up for my dad’s presence. Which, fair. When she doesn’t answer, I ask again, hoping, I realize, that she will say, “Oh, nothing,” and ask me the same question so I can tell her that Gummy Bear should have invited me to Portland, but instead, she looks past me to my father and says, “Where’s my fucking sweet tea, Karl?”
“Huh?” I say, mostly to myself.
My dad runs out the front doors to a soundtrack of echoing insults. Then, he is back, tea in hand a smug look on his face.
“Grandpa tricked you!” my nephew yells, laughing. “He hid your tea outside the building. He said, ‘Watch this. Donna is going to be p-i-s-s-e-d!’”
“That wasn’t funny,” my mom says, but she is laughing too.
When it dawns on me that they are bantering, not fighting, my sadness feels silly, self-serving, momentary. The sound of their snorts and giggles fills me with relief. I pull out my phone and take a video, caption it, A CHRISTMAS MIRCALE, and hit send.
I imagine the pixels like sun rays on an unstoppable journey across the country to Gummy Bear, where she sits at the table with her family, next to her boyfriend, with her phone facedown between them, hiding the pulse that I am there, on the other side of the screen, awaiting her in the future.
Michelle Gurule is a queer, biracial writer from Denver, Colorado. She is a third-year MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of New Mexico, where she was Blue Mesa Review’s 2019-2020 nonfiction editor. Her nonfiction has been published or is forthcoming in Homology, Pangyrus, Alien, Stirring lit mags, and has mostly recently won Story Quarterly’s nonfiction contest judged by T Kira Madden. Michelle is currently working on a memoir.