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by Kathryn Fitzpatrick
©2020 Barbara Cole "Being" | Surfacing Series
IG: barbaracoleart
Kathryn Fitzpatrick is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. Her essays have been published in Out Magazine, Bodega, Cleaver, and elsewhere. Most recently, she edited the collection Flash Nonfiction Food (Woodhall Press, 2020) alongside Tom Hazuka.
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Score
First, the floral shop sponsoring the men’s basketball team—the Flying Flower Pots—the young man long and tightly wound as a hose on a reel, the art-school-dropout daughter desperate to dig her way out, a quick fuck in the greenhouse beneath boxes of zucchini blossoms.
The wedding at a church where the pastor played guitar and sang John Denver behind wiry glasses. A honeymoon to Disney World. Legend has it the It’s a Small World ride got stuck in the Netherlands, and there she saw the world was bigger than you might expect.
Then a mortgage. A pink house dimpled with popcorn ceilings, a home with no heat. Babies fresh and wet like new paint and puppies and a white cat with blue eyes. Someone said once that white cats with blue eyes are always blind.
Here, I learned to turn a blind eye to the truth: when my mother shoved a crisp fifty into the cleave of my adolescence in exchange for silence and left with a man for the night. When my father heated a jar of Ragu on the stovetop, explaining the intricacies of the three-point shot to my brother.
© 2020 West Trade Review
