Eleanor Rigby’s Escape
- Mar 28, 2025
- 2 min read
by Meg Pokrass
1. Eleanor Rigby stands in the hallway wearing her mother’s wedding gown. Once a year, she puts it on to admire the flow. She is solitary dreamer who belongs here because she doesn’t belong anywhere else. A secret janitor perpetually sweeping up rice in a church where a wedding has been.
2. She is the most famous lonely person in Liverpool. Or maybe she never lived in Liverpool, and she is lonely while listening to the Beatles’ song. She is a late-middle-aged woman with a late-middle-aged cat and a rice collection in an urn on her fireplace mantel. She is a woman who believes that she can only be loved properly by a priest.
3. There are reasons for not belonging and it has something to do with the fact that she never felt sure of where she came from in the first place. Her mother never felt like a mother, her father never felt like a father, and Eleanor grew to believe she had been beamed-down to Earth from somewhere better.
4. Evensong in the cathedral she is staring hard at Father Mackenzie. He reminds her of herself. Both are alone over the holidays and she wants to tell him that she is his personal happiness, right there in the church. “Don’t pretend you don’t know it,” she wishes to say.
5. But she’s stuck in the familiar song and it follows her everywhere. Reminds her that soon she’ll be dying alone with her name. Nobody attending her funeral, not even a whisper goodbye, old girl…
6. On Eleanor’s fifty-fifth birthday she awakens with the realization that it’s been there all along; another woman’s face stuck in a jar by the door. The more random her features the better, she thinks. Leaps from bed and into an earlier, happier song.
Meg Pokrass is the author of First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of flash fiction. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies, including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International. Recent work has appeared in New England Review, Lit Hub, and MoonCity Review.
