by Becky Petterson
They meet in the middle at the park in their childhood neighborhood. The grass is yellow and shriveled, the leaves already curling toward their mortality. The two women embrace, the distance between them a living topography impossible to measure.
“You cut your hair,” Sarah says reaching forward, and Ruth fingers the blunt black tips swinging just above the em dash of her collarbone. Sarah’s outstretched hand quivers in space, gentle as a dove, then drops.
They met in the eighth grade, when their faces were still as round as suns and too bright to look at directly. Ruth’s intelligence manifested itself as meekness, a defense mechanism for a drunk father. Sarah’s intelligence manifested itself as fuck you-ness, a defense mechanism for an absent father. From the beginning their personalities, procured subconsciously by the shapes of men, failed to pass an unspoken test.
A river hems the park and they sit on the embankment, their soft limbs stirring the hot, late summer air. They haven’t seen each other in over two years. Their lives, in different states of upheaval and divided by geographic lines, feel like different edges of the same chasm, uncrossable by any outstretched palm or bird in flight. Sarah has a bottle of gin in her purse. She heard it rattling on the passenger seat during the drive up, small collisions between liquor and the practical minutiae of her life, as the orchard row optical illusion ticked across the edges of her vision. Sarah pours fat fingers into two empty paper coffee cups.
“They never leave their wives. Except when they do.” Sarah hands Ruth a cup and holds hers up in a toast. “And it’s never the ones you actually want. Except when they are.” Sarah stops speaking and they both take long mouthfuls.
The gin spreads across Ruth’s tongue where it catches in her throat, a strike-anywhere match. She’s afraid that if she speaks her words will land like sparks. She nods and thinks about all the reasons she loved Sarah when they were thirteen, and how her love then was indiscernible from fear.
Sarah would wear crop tops underneath large men’s dress shirts, flashing her midriff and the gentle curves of her shoulders. She stole beer and cigarettes from her mom’s boyfriends and skipped school. She was fearless and sarcastic and beautiful. And, for all her flaws and mistakes, people loved her, loved the way she defied the world and defined herself.
Once, at a sleepover, Sarah dared Ruth to walk down the street naked. The midnight moon spilled against Ruth’s bare skin. They padded down the middle of the road, the streetlights’ glow glancing off the sidewalk like eyes looking sideways. Ruth started growling and barking, lit with a feminine energy she didn’t know she possessed. She threw back her head and howled, her neck a question mark in the dark.
Their friendship contained a longing they couldn’t define—they each recognized something in the other that they felt was missing in themselves. Sometimes they were so full of want that they lashed out at the most beautiful thing they knew: each other. When Ruth felt estranged or lonely, she clutched her intelligence like a rosary, as if something invisible could save her. When Sarah felt maligned, she found the edge and flung herself past it, confident that she would save herself.
Sarah finishes her drink and pours another. Her nails are manicured, thick and glossy, and they click like teeth against the glass neck of the bottle. She continues talking as though she hadn’t stopped, expecting Ruth to keep up, to catch up, to know. Their friendship is a room they return to, the walls and furniture always the same. “But this one. This one chose me, right from the beginning.”
Even when he was having sex with his wife? thinks Ruth. Some things can’t be said though, especially between people who told each other everything. Sarah lights two cigarettes. Ruth takes one. She hasn’t smoked in years, but her body still recognizes the fullness. Her mouth is dry and hot but she doesn’t cough, just reclines into something she will never fully leave behind. Geese clear their throats and lift off from the ruffled edge of the water. Ruth wonders what it feels like to trust your body in flight and opens her mouth to ask Sarah. This is the kind of question they could spend hours on. But Ruth pauses, caught between the ephemera of her thoughts and the physicality of her friend’s presence. Sarah now paces the bank, her toe ring glimmering in the grass. Ruth studies the shape her friend’s body makes, more slender than Ruth has ever seen it. Sarah has shrunk herself into a piece of someone else.
A woman’s life gone. Ruth can’t see the contours of the facts but she can feel them, cloven and tusked, and her thoughts move in widening circles. Ruth’s own husband is at home with their children, and it was Sarah who married them. She got ordained online and officiated the ceremony on a gray and blue day underneath trees so tall their branches seemed to hold the clouds in place. Sarah said, as she sat on the bathroom counter and smoked a joint while Ruth reapplied lipstick before the reception, that she didn’t really believe in marriage but that she believed in them. Ruth intuited what Sarah was really saying: She couldn’t picture herself getting married. But who got married believing it would end in divorce? Surely not this distant woman whose husband now lives with Sarah, who is toasting love or misfortune, depending. And isn’t everything? Depending.
Sarah and Ruth chain-smoke and drink. Their conversations drift, stopping in familiar places.
“Why are guys so obsessed with their own cum? Where it goes? How it goes. If it goes?” Sarah’s voice is bitter like coffee.
“Is this a stand-up routine? Because it feels like it is.”
“Maybe it’s because they made something. ‘Look, I made this for you. I’m sharing it with you. Look what I can do.’” They both laugh and the air crackles.
The day sheds the afternoon, the hours piling at their feet, empty as husks. Sarah frequently pulls her phone out from her purse, checking for messages before finally settling it in her lap. Ruth combs her hair with her fingers, feeling the unfamiliar emptiness where her strands end. She’s always had long hair and sometimes she can still feel it brush against the small of her back, the fingertips of phantoms.
In high school, Sarah had an affair with a student teacher. Ruth watched as a grown man risked his entire life for something he could never really have. Ruth was giddy with secondary power. As an adult, Sarah makes jokes about it, shrugs, and says she got really into Lolita.
The last time the two women really talked was just after the birth of Ruth’s second son, and Sarah claimed Ruth was acting superior due to her marriage. This was six months into Sarah’s new relationship, and when she finally revealed that he was, in fact, married, had been when they first met, and still technically was.
“I knew you’d act like this,” Sarah said, her face wavering, ravaged and tiny on Ruth’s phone screen. Ruth, still raw from birthing her son, folded her arms like wings over the featherless, transparent limbs of the avian baby asleep against her chest. Her body sensed a shift in currents that her mind, caught in the sleepless pocket created by her son’s birth, couldn’t follow.
Ruth imagined the recriminations in Sarah’s staggered breaths: You think your marriage is proof that you somehow know better. The view from where Sarah had placed her, or where Ruth had placed herself, made them both dizzy. She could hear what Sarah was really saying, which was that they both knew better but that Sarah was going to do it anyway and was angry Ruth wouldn’t tell her it was okay.
Ruth smokes with her friend on the bank of the river, just as they did when they were teenagers, or when she was home from college, or in the months leading up to the wedding when they met to practice and remember and just be themselves. Listening to Sarah talk about a boy is a familiar topic—comfortable yet discomfiting. Ruth remembers in high school watching that man burn his life down and hold the ashes out to Sarah, expecting her to phoenix the shit out of them. Except now Ruth’s giddiness is replaced with fear and sadness. Back then, Ruth couldn’t blame a strange man for believing Sarah had magical powers; Sarah could seemingly subvert reality into something better. Part of Sarah’s magic has always been that she sees the world as malleable, and right and wrong are basic tenants that are mutable from moment to moment. Ruth wonders if moral ambiguity still has the same currency.
The sun slowly, heavy as a yolk across the shell blue sky. The water darkens. Insects are a thin whine, like a sip of white wine that is too sweet and cold. A line of lights is chained together in the distance, a gleaming horizon barely visible in the washed-denim sky. They each pour another drink and light another cigarette. Ruth turns and exhales toward the dry scrape of leaves on the ground.
A man and a woman emerge through the trees with two labs. They are gregarious and relentless, a barrage of noise and energy and water. Sarah smiles, endlessly delighted by dogs and strangers who can affirm something about herself. Ruth squirms while Sarah pets the dogs, one hand holding the still burning cigarette while the dogs jump up at her, leaving muddy claw marks on the white marble of her legs. She has always been able to charm others with her openness that is simultaneously temporary and true. Sarah has always contained a quality that other people recognize and either want for themselves or are happy to stand beside—Ruth included. Ruth is restless for the solitude of nicotine and alcohol, but is also relieved for the distraction. It’s dog walking hour. How many kinds of hours are there in a day? Witching hour. Lunch hour. Rest hour. Children’s hour. Happy hour. Each passing hour. Time cupped in her palms like water, then handed off.
Sarah turns toward Ruth and reads her friend in a way that still surprises Ruth, in a way that not even a husband or a child can. Sarah hooks her discarded shoes with the fingers of one hand and says goodbye to the couple, tossing a ball for the dogs so they launch themselves away and into the water, and the two women leave. Their adult selves are jettisoned from a space they roamed in childhood. The bank still remembers: Sarah throwing her naked body into the river and yelling for Ruth, still fully clothed on the shore, to jump in; the two of them smoking joints in the bushes and ironically making crooked dandelion chains with weed thickened fingers; the days passing with the slowness of a pebble tumbling smooth in the current. They retreat, cradling their twin cigarettes as the water and voices recede.
“Hungry?” Ruth asks.
“Should be,” Sarah checks her phone again and slips it into her back pocket. The fabric closes over the device with a sigh.
Ruth spins the phrase in her mind, getting caught on the corners. There is so much that they should do. Should quit smoking. Should drink less. They are more likely to do what follows the contraction—a contract with. Shouldn’t sleep with married men. Shouldn’t love them or move in with them. Even if they leave their wives. Especially then. Because then you really are a homewrecker. Or maybe the home was wrecked to begin with. Or to end with. Shouldn’t tell your oldest friend not to fuck married men, or love them, or live with them. Shouldn’t stand around to watch the idol fall. Should witness the dust cloud from the distance.
Ruth uses a delivery app on her phone to order a pizza. They swing on a playground while they wait, the familiar motions pulling them upward. The hinge of the swing opens up and out, reminding Ruth of when she first met Sarah at thirteen. Back then, meeting Sarah had felt like swinging by herself for the first time as a kindergartner, powerful and beautiful and finally touching something that had always felt out of reach. When the swing approaches the top, just before falling back down, Ruth feels like she’s looking through the bottom of an empty glass, the once wide world now narrowed and blurred and feeling very far away. She imagines it is what prayer feels like for someone who believes in God. Ruth’s laugh is almost a howl, canine and primal—an instinct buried by others, an echo of her naked thirteen-year-old self who prowled the streets at midnight. This is the self that only exists in Sarah’s presence.
The pizza arrives and Sarah calls out, throwing herself forward to the earth, confident she will catch herself. Ruth stops slowly, the momentum leaving her body as the weight of their words and their day rises towards her falling form.
They sit on the hood of Sarah’s car with a greasy cardboard box balanced between them. The afternoon heat, released from the asphalt, radiates upward. They pour fresh drinks and press their paper cups between their knees. One extra-large pizza, cheese and olives on Ruth’s half, sausage and pepperoni on Sarah’s.
Ruth hasn’t eaten meat since the seventh grade when her brother paid her to read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and write a paper for his freshman English class. Her husband still eats meat. The first time he cooked himself a steak after she gave birth, she sat on the sofa nursing their son and cried as blood oozed from the meat onto his plate, the scent of copper in the air matching the smell of her hemorrhaging body. Ruth could tell the story now without malice, but when she told Sarah years ago, her friend heard what was underneath and pointed to Ruth’s moral superiority. They knew all of each other’s understories, their underpinnings, and failures.
“I don’t have your moral acuity,” Sarah had said. Ruth had protested, citing the time in college when Ruth had abandoned Sarah at a house party when the shrooms kicked in. Sarah had laughed and said she didn’t think that was indicative of any real moral failing: “Maybe you’re just bad at taking drugs.”
Ruth still marvels at the mythologies they carry and the ways they help invent each other. They both still excuse men, a nascent habit born out of instinct or survival, femininity or personal circumstance. They shape each other, but they allow men to shape them first.
Overhead, the streetlights flicker and moths follow their false beacon. The air is slick with the day’s sweat. The Goo Goo Dolls sing about ice spilling from a spoon on Sarah’s phone, and Ruth wonders what it does to the teenage brain to hear in their favorite songs that the only worthwhile loves are the impossible ones.
“Don’t I deserve to be happy?” Sarah’s voice is smaller than Ruth has ever heard it.
Ruth knows the question is as rhetorical as a knock-knock joke told by her three-year-old. Knock-knock. Who’s there? Happiness? Or one definition of it. Sarah used to believe in upside-down wallpaper and buying art that made her feel something. There had been boyfriends before, affable and laughable and transitory, never leaving a ripple in their lives. Then she fell in love and moved out of her house with the upside-down wallpaper and put her haphazard collection of abstract nudes and flamboyant floral artwork in storage. She rode around on his motorcycle, and they bought a white sofa that she eventually spilled red wine on while crying because she found out he was still having sex with his wife. When the sofa was hauled away and the divorce signed, they rode the motorcycle until that too was sold to pay for the child support, and only the red wine was left undrunk in the wine rack. That became an acceptable version of happiness to Sarah, at no one’s expense except her own, and his ex-wife’s, and his—because he bought the wine rack and paid for the divorce.
Rhetorical, but still. Not superior, but still.
“Of course you do.” Ruth glances sideways at her friend. “But deserving is dangerous. As a concept I mean.”
Sarah nods, places an unlit cigarette between her lips and tips her head, asking for a lighter. Ruth hands her one.
Is having the same thing as deserving? What about losing? Taking? Earning? What do all the ings mean? Are they all endings, or are they beginnings?
Sarah and Ruth have had this conversation before, tentatively, and every time the revelation is the same, a recognition that this isn’t what every little girl dreams of: your lover having sex with his wife while “choosing” you. It’s all just dinner conversation. It all fails the Bechdel Test, a continuation of the same failure of their personalities from all those decades ago.
“But I want to be happy,” Sarah whispers, bending to light her cigarette and handing the lighter back. Ruth nods, steadies herself for the flames, and opens her mouth.
Becky Petterson holds a bachelor of science in communication with an emphasis in journalism from Southern Oregon University. Her work has appeared in Mslexia, Pile Press, Peach Fuzz, The Lemonwood Quarterly, Flash Fiction Magazine, and carte blanche. She won Apple in the Dark’s 2025 flash fiction competition and was a runner-up for the 2025 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.