Harry leaves me, but I don’t yet know. We didn’t sit down and discuss. I’m leaving you, he never said.
I don’t yet know how in the morning, Harry will tell me to leave the breakfast I am cooking, bacon aroma waking him up, and him telling me to come back to bed. How he will ask me if I really forgive him for last month. How I will tell him yes, because he said it meant nothing.
I don’t yet know how he will pull me close, look me deep in the face like I’m a rainstorm he has to drive through.
And I don’t yet know how I will get to work late and float lovedrunk through the day, how I will stop at the corner later on and pick up our favorite dinner, fresh ravioli and salad. How I will walk into the empty apartment, unpack the food, place the tomato on the cutting board. I don’t yet know how I will hold the tomato plump and whole under the dome of my hand, the aroma of bacon lingering in the air.
Francine Witte is the author of four poetry chapbooks and two full-length collections, Café Crazy and The Theory of Flesh from Kelsay Books. Her flash fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologized in the most recent New Micro (W.W. Norton) Her novella-in-flash, The Way of the Wind has just been published by Ad Hoc Fiction, and her full-length collection of flash fiction, Dressed All Wrong for This was recently published by Blue Light Press. She lives in New York City.