Out of the House--March 25, 2020 (Langan)

Blood, sex, a needle, AIDS, Reagan, America distracted by big hair, shoulder pads, MTV. Cough, sneeze, touch. Donald Trump can't distract us as we prowl markets looking for toilet paper and hand sanitizer, wearing masks that started out simple but then morphed into tie-dye, blossoms, witty stylings of men's underwear, women's bras, so many people on Facebook asking, "Do you need a mask? I'm going stir crazy and sewing them passes the time." Gas is so cheap, but there’s nowhere to go. Why risk filling your tank when you must touch the pump that's been handled by so many people, people who thought, well, why not just fill up the tank? Get out of the house and do something, even if it's just to drive a few blocks to the gas station, stick your credit card in the slot, insert that metal snout in your gas tank and just let it guusshh. Out I go, latex gloves from an old box of L'Oréal on my too scrubbed hands. The feel of the handle, the tug on my arm as the gas chugs into the tank. Niagara Falls in the MiniMart parking lot. The first blossoms couldn’t cheer me, but the gushing of this gas makes me feel more alive today than the pumping and thumping of my own heart. Sadly, my tank can only hold so much.

Kerry Langan's short fiction has appeared in dozens of literary magazines over the last decades. She has published three collections of short fiction, the most recent, My Name Is Your Name & Other Stories. Her non-fiction has appeared in Working Mother and Philosophical Mother. She is the co-editor of Shifting Balance Sheets, Women's Stories of Naturalized Citizenship & Cultural Attachment. She lives, and awaits a Covid-19 vaccine, in Oberlin, Ohio.