Attachment Theory
- Mar 31, 2020
- 2 min read
by Kathryn Kulpa
We’re at it again, pretending nothing’s changed. Shiny happy people out for a walk. Holding hands, even, but we give that up after two blocks. The effort. The sweat.
We never walk downtown where the tourists go but tonight here we are. The heat drove us out, the strain of being contained by the same walls. We won’t have the talk tonight, but it’s there, waiting. Air conditioning blasts our legs outside a basement pub, the rank smell of beer.
There’s a line outside the ice cream shop. A teenage girl leans against the brick wall, eyes half closed. She’s barefoot. Does anyone walk barefoot anymore? She’s holding a duck in her arms, a real duck with a little red collar and leash. Is he a special breed of duck? I ask.
No, she tells us. Just a regular duck. He was an orphan. They bottle-fed him and he fell in love with their old dog, followed her everywhere. A Chinese crested dog. The dog was always cold. The duck’s feathers kept her warm.
Where’s the dog now, you ask, like I hoped you wouldn’t, but knew you would. The girl puts the duck down when she leaves and he waddles behind her like a grounded cloud. We stand in line, checking our phones. We could be strangers on an awkward blind date.
I hate always knowing what will happen next. We’ll order ice cream. I’ll try four flavors, then order one I haven’t tried and hate it. You’ll order vanilla. We’ll walk home with our cones dripping down our arms. I’ll think about how the sidewalk would feel under my feet, warm and dry and scratchy, but I’ll keep my sneakers on. I won’t feel a thing.
Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her chapbook Girls on Film. She is a flash fiction editor at Cleaver Magazine and has work published or forthcoming in Atlas and Alice, Milk Candy Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine. Her flash fiction was chosen for Best Microfiction 2020.
