Waxing Gibbous
By Carolyn Oliver
June
All across the country that sweat-spangled summer, thin women took up roller-skating. Steaming in the elevator or waiting for coffee or picking at takeout in her office, Alma watched them, her friends, women she hadn’t hugged in years: Cool mom in half sun on the deck of an LA parking garage. In Providence a painter, bristle of park pines softening, going liquid in the video flow. The real estate agent in Buffalo looping around a cul-de-sac in before-breakfast haze. The barista who still sent a handwritten Christmas card every year, now rolling unsteadily across the linoleum floors in her Tulsa apartment. They shared their initial clumsiness, their laughter as it fizzed and burst when they scraped and spilled and rose again, unbroken. We’re relatable, they called across the miles, we’re just like you, Alma, we’re women with bodies taking up space, vulnerable and yet worthy! Witness our charming awkwardness! And it was, it was charming.
July
How swift and sure they became, sparkling like dancers in the Ziegfeld Follies, their glow-in-the-dark wheels spinning like drunken moons. They bought toe guards and cinched laces tight around their skinny ankles. Alma’s case was hard: an attractive nuisance suit. New homeowners, an old swing set, a six-year-old boy with two compound fractures and night terrors. It wasn’t the only case she was assigned, but it was the one she escaped from into her phone, as she sat in her car before the drive home along the river. She knew she should celebrate the joy of women. Fragile, rare, orchidlike. But did it have to be the joy of these women? As if they needed more praise for their bodies, whole accounts devoted to their whimsical grace. She knew catastrophe could come to them too, could hover and land in the guise of happiness. Maybe it already had, and she just wasn’t near enough to know. Alma would never meet the six-year-old’s mother, or the women who owned the house; she couldn’t peer into their lives to discover what was abandoned, gathering dust. But she’d seen their pictures.
August
The trial started. In dreams the river came back to her, the days on the river when her friends parked a parent’s station wagon on the dusty lane. They’d shrug into swimsuits and leave their towels on the hood to warm in the sun, then jump from the rickety swing into the water. Alma waded, wearing her shorts and t-shirt. Sometimes men drove by, their whistles or insults half-lost in the dust. Alma wanted them to hurt. In her dreams now, they did. After court, after the conference calls, Alma left the office in the almost dark. On her phone her friends were better now, even better. They left off their helmets. Quick turns, reverses, figure-eights, dips, glides with one foot extended, as if they were about to spin or jump, like the figure skaters Alma had loved as a girl, Surya Bonaly and Tonia Kwiatkowski, but without their powerful thighs. Just moving for the delight of it, or for the camera, the invisible person holding the camera and loving them. Alma pulled over. The river was different now, or it was exactly the same. She hopped over the poison ivy, felt the brush of goldenrod against her wrist. The moon a waxing gibbous, tenderly emphasizing her curves and folds as she stripped naked and leaped in, heedless of the noise, not caring who might see.
Carolyn Oliver’s very short prose and prose poetry has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Indiana Review, Monkeybicycle, Jellyfish Review, jmww, Unbroken, Tin House Online, FlashBack Fiction, Midway Journal and New Flash Fiction Review, among other journals. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net in both fiction and poetry. Carolyn lives with her family in Massachusetts, where she serves as a poetry editor for The Worcester Review. Online: carolynoliver.net.