On Thursday, when you haven’t been touched for three days, you go to Auntie Anne's like it's the only place you could go. And for some reason, maybe just December, you arrive and find it thriving. One friend tells you he doesn't know what Auntie Anne's is, and you reply that you can't believe that's possible. But you also never thought it possible that this year could be this year, that this world could be this world, that you could still find a crowded mall with a too-busy parking lot and sit down on a bench to hear a boy on the opposite side explain the entourage effect to an older woman — his grandma or cousin or mother's friend, with an accent so Bostonian it's overwhelming. You saw recently how the mall you wrote that poem on got torn down, a legacy of where you wore out three pairs of flip-flops that had your nickname on the strap in rhinestone charms. That place to where you claimed you would never return, now gone, gone, brought into rubble and dust. But somehow, today, you can believe this for a moment: there may be something left for the redemptive power of nostalgia. And somehow, today, you believe this may be too: that these weird new Crocs and socks that all the kids are in… well, maybe that's what they, one day, will have the blessing of getting to miss. One day, they too may seek analgesia in a not-so-dying mall from the fact the best friend they've never met has poisoned herself in Missouri. They, too, can numb the fear of her liver failing through the universality of oversized ornaments — through the reliable sweetness of processed cheese dip, the glittering sale marquees.
Allison Darcy (she/her) is a disabled Jewish writer currently living in North Carolina, where she teaches with the Redbud Writing Project and does everything her 50-lb lapdog wants. The winner of the 2020 North Carolina Prize for Fiction, Allison holds an MFA from NCSU and is proud to have stories and hybrid nonfiction in such fabulous venues as ANMLY, WAS, Catapult, and the Eastern Iowa Review. Her friend in Missouri has recovered, and her love for Auntie Anne's is stronger than ever. This is her first skull.
Recent Posts
- Inspiration 1
Raye Hendrix - A Poem in Which Chuck Knoblauch Maybe Makes Snow
Claire Taylor - The Haunted House of Things Left Unsaid
Anna Vangala Jones - Two Poems
Francesca Leader - Sheltered Missionary Kid Returns to America in the Year of Our Lord Jack and Rose
Claire Hanlon - the beautiful game
Erica Leslie Weidner