Warming Trend

by Gia Lo Scalzo

You see, I was like a tire with a slow leak, at first imperceptible and finally flat. But what you really need to know is that he was like oxygen smiling into my veins and I swear I could feel its breathy effects in my fingernails, my shoulders, and my stomach’s pit. I will never understand why this is my story and will know only its taste and its mystery. On Sunday afternoon we argued and I stumbled upon (honest) the text messages and read the chirpy responses of the woman he left behind in coldness and anger and it was then that I knew it was there again (the leak, I mean). Outside my kitchen window I can see the dripping icicles and the silvery reflection of the afternoon sun on the icy spears. Everywhere on the East Coast there are rivers and streams and overflowing lakes; there's a warming trend they say and (quite unexpectedly, you see) I sit here wishing that for once the winter, this winter, would not end.

6S

Gia Lo Scalzo is a teacher who lives in a little house in Connecticut that has a deep and overgrown backyard (affectionately known as the "forest") from which she occasionally hears unidentifiable animal noises. Girls from the Bronx are lost (and scared) in the country.