Big Mood
By Margie Sarsfield
Six years ago I dropped a bowl of buttered spaghetti on the carpeted floor of a dorm room in Colorado. I wasn’t in college. It wasn’t a dorm room. It was employee housing. It was a ski resort. It used to be a club med. I say dorm room because that says it best. Someday it won’t be six years ago. I lived there with some guy I lived with – but it was my spaghetti – it was all I had. // I was twenty-three and drunk all the time: fifths on the bathroom floor next to the tub with the shower running so I could smoke cigarettes and talk to my friend about the songs he cried to in high school, always a good listener and only sometimes on pills anymore: my greatest achievement. // I have always eaten too much. Spaghetti has always calmed me. Hungover all shift (probably) standing on my feet eight hours (probably) fighting with the guy I lived with (probably) coming back from the club med communal kitchen, I dropped my one thing and do you think I ate it anyway? Do you think I squatted down and fisted spaghetti back into the bowl and left the carpet dirty in a circle of butter and parmesan?
Is that what you think I did?
About the Author:
Margie Sarsfield is a Pushcart-nominated writer living in Columbus, Ohio. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, Seneca Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Hippocampus, and Quarter After Eight. She is the winner of University of Louisville's 2019 Calvino Prize and Midway Journal's 2019 -1000 Below Flash Prose Contest.
About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:
CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.