Every time I complain, mom reminds me she won Homecoming Queen while 6-months pregnant. Swilling her 6th cup of black coffee, tepid Folgers which smells like the Wapsipinicon River in August, she points a crooked finger at me. You think standing at a conveyor belt sorting corn all day is hard? Try out-charming Cindy Mullhouse with a full-moon belly busting the waistbands on all your skirts. Buy yourself some insoles and get over it.
And if “but” even peeks its head out from the darkness of my throat, she whips out a picture from her plastic purse, presenting first-hand evidence of her riding a haystack like Cleopatra on an elephant, a flimsy silver tiara nesting in her big hair. I could have lived in a big house like Cindy or even gone to college. I probably could have landed a fucking rocket on the moon if I had the chance.
She ashes her cigarette into a house plant, a habit she never quit while we cooked in her belly, tosses out the soupy coffee grounds from her cup and gazes over my head, beyond the cracked plaster around the pale-yellow door, beyond the shared wall of our duplex, beyond the speck of a town we call home. I beat Cindy fucking Mullhouse for Homecoming Queen she says and fires up another heater.
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Michael Harper teaches at Northern New Mexico College. He received his MFA from the University of Idaho. His most recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Hobart, Fugue, Terrain.org, The Los Angeles Review, and others.