Gratitude

by Felicity Fenton

My friend asked me if I’d heard the news. It was a Monday night, the air warmer than usual for early spring, and we were on the back porch of his house as the sun set and crows perched on the roof of his garage. He was grilling large beef patties, smoking a cigarette, his skin and eyes yellow, thinner than when I’d seen him last, his clothes hanging from him, a white poly-blend vest over an embroidered shirt, tailored pants, fedora, all still claiming his body as his. He had a jubilant wiggle to his step, cocaine charisma, beer, weed too. He told me it was cancer, the not-too-long-to-live kind, and I felt creasing in my brow and thought about removing my eyebrows for a second just so he didn’t have to bear witness to my sadness. I put my arm around his shoulder and he shrugged, inhaled a drag of his cigarette, smiled, and as the crows cawed, we both looked up.

6S

Felicity Fenton's (She/They) writing has popped up in The Iowa Review, The Denver Quarterly, Passages North, Northwest Review, and more. Her book, User Not Found (Future Tense Books, 2018), dives into our inescapable digital world, and her latest, Elegy For My Art Monster / Tumors Everywhere, co-written with Drew Burk, was unleashed by Spork Press in 2022. Currently, Felicity is wrapping up a new essay collection that explores the industrialized body, the natural world, and our tangled web of digital connectivity. She lives in Portland, Oregon.