Debts You Haven’t Paid
- Dec 9, 2022
- 3 min read
by Kathryn Kulpa
1. The girl in first grade with the big glasses that took up half her face and one lens was smogged over because she had lazy eye and you asked to borrow her milk money to get chocolate milk and she said she only had enough for one but she’d give you her milk if you’d be her friend and you said you would and you sat with her that day in the cafeteria, but never again.
2. The man in the orange prole cap in the white pickup who followed you for miles on the state highway, making weird hand gestures out the window, and you thought rapist, you thought serial killer, and would have called 911 if your phone wasn’t dead but instead you took an exit quick with no signal and he followed you into the Wawa parking lot and as you were looking in the glove box for the pepper spray your stepmom gave you when you moved out he yelled YOUR CAR IS ON FIRE and you got out and it really was, but he drove away before you could thank him.
3. Student loans, that year you haunted the bursar’s office, waiting for the funds to be released; it was the summer of the big heat wave when all the old people in Europe died and you thought you would die too, in your third-floor off-campus apartment, and then the loan money finally came through and there was just enough left to buy the last air conditioner in Wal-Mart and you were putting it in your window when it slipped from your sweaty hands and bounced on the sidewalk, just missing your downstairs neighbor who was walking home, and you sank to your knees in that stifling little room and cried until your neighbor knocked on your door, AC in his arms, dented but intact, and he put it in the window for you, where it wheezed like an asthmatic bulldog but still worked, and the day after that, when you weren’t sweaty and sobbing, you knocked on his door with a plate of brownies but he was gone, all of a sudden, your landlady said, something about a visa.
4. The chatty co-worker with Disney princess sweatshirts and squirrel teeth who had everything you didn’t have, a husband and a car that didn’t drop pieces of itself all along the road, and you were short on rent and asked to borrow $500 from her and then you got another job and were supposed to meet for coffee to pay her back but then your dog got sick and you ghosted her and have ghosted her since.
5. And now this kid you have, after all the pills, after all the tests, after all the calendars with angry red Xes drawn through one week each month, drawn so hard the paper punctured, and let’s not even do this, you told him, maybe we shouldn’t even have a baby, the world is shit anyway, it’s useless to try, and then it wasn’t and you lay in bed two months out of nine, waiting for payback, waiting for karma, and now this kid is staring at you with eyes like a helix nebula, reaching for you with hands like starfish, and you want to tell her no, you are a crap person and will probably be a crap mother, but that’s not what she needs from you, she is a planet and you are her sun and all you can do is shine for her regardless, shine in all your imperfect light.
Kathryn Kulpa has stories in Ekphrastic Review, Five South, Flash Frog, 100 Word Story, Smokelong Quarterly, and other journals. Her work has been chosen for Best Microfiction and the Wigleaf longlist and nominated for Best Small Fictions. Her flash chapbook, Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted, is forthcoming in 2023 from New Rivers Press.
