SOUVENIRS FROM ANOTHER LIFE

She grew up in New Brunswick, in a small house a few streets down from the thrift store and The Painted Pony Bar and Grill. Her dad was dead, but she had his old record player and a life-sized poster of Jim Morrison hanging on the wall above her bed, and she used to lie on her back and listen to Jimi Hendrix and The Doors and think about William Blake, and the known and the unknown.

The house. While she’d been gone, her mother had hung a sign with the word “Family” on the living room wall, above a series of framed photos. Outside the kitchen window, there was a red barn. Three black cats lived in the hayloft, emerging to eat scraps that her mother left in a bowl by the back door. When the weather was nice, they sat in the setting sun and licked their paws.

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She watched them from the window. It was early enough still. She was used to having a cigarette before dinner, and she was trying anything she could to keep her mind elsewhere. She sat in the window seat. She wore a tank top with a long silver chain and a silver cross that touched the top of her cleavage. She had a tattoo arching above her left breast that said “Always in my ♥” in a beautiful script. Sumptuous, her ex had said the first time he saw it, the first time she took her shirt off in front of him.

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She had dressed more conservatively then. She’d worked two jobs to put him through school, and then he left her, and what did she have to show for it? They had never even gotten married. Cow/milk, as her grandmother would have said. Shorthand for what they were all thinking. Her mother had worked two jobs, too, but she’d put herself through school instead.

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There was a jigsaw puzzle, half-finished on the coffee table. Multicolored rabbits, lined up in a row. She glanced at the picture on the front of the box. The grass in the background would be the killer.

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This is an excerpt from “Dark Horse,” a story by Leah Browning, first published in Terrain.org.​​​

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