Back at the Dump
By Cristina Frîes
An Evian bottle cap. A blue marble. A blue eyeball—there it is. Marissa’s toe flicks it. We’re back at the dump. My right eye looks from the ground to the legs, crotch, boobs, face of my love sweating into her loose strands of ponytail hair like she really is capable of feeling regret. She picks up my left eyeball between two long fingernails coated in dry blood and turns to me with a smile like she’s just fixed us. “I’m sorry,” she says again, placing it back into my socket, and I swear it’s the last time I will say, “It’s okay.”
Cristina Frîes is a Colombian-American fiction writer from San Francisco. Her work has appeared in PEN America Best Debut Short Stories, Michigan Quarterly Review, Epoch, Action / Spectacle, and War, Literature & the Arts. She is the recipient of a PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Tin House Scholarship, and the Adroit Journal Veasna So Scholarship. Her operas have been performed nationally and to critical acclaim. She is at work on a collection of stories and a novel, and teaches literature and creative writing at a college prep school. More at cristinafries.com.