We tittered over words like bosoms and knockers and jugs, peed our pants giggling over Venus de Willendorf, fretted over the possibility of our own boobs hanging low someday like Gram’s, conducted pencil tests. We graduated from hopscotch to wincing from brain freeze at Dairy Queen to heavy petting with all the wrong boys in semi-public places to barely passing driver’s ed. Sniffing cheap perfume in the mall, we pretended to be French, flaunting gestures and accents we imagined Parisian, never thinking we’d be more credible speaking the actual language. We thought we were traveling in a straight line. Decades on, whiskey on the rocks in hand, we cry “uncle” as gravity takes us down. As starlight bends, lays foundations for darkness, we rock in silence and stare.
Micro by Mikki Aronoff
Image by Adam Strong
Mikki Aronoff’s work appears in New World Writing, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Tiny Molecules, The Disappointed Housewife, Bending Genres, Milk Candy Review, Gone Lawn, Mslexia, The Dribble Drabble Review, The Citron Review, Atlas and Alice, trampset, jmww,, and elsewhere. She’s received Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, and Best Microfiction nominations.
Backwards Trajectory 