Ripe

Muck me, Fleur tells the woman at the bar, who thought she said fuck me, and so they did, and close enough. Want to shower? the woman asks in bed the next morning, dressing the question with a wink. Why? Fleur replies, picking up her clothes. That would ruin it. Fleur shimmies up her pant legs, the cotton polluted by a weeks’ worth of mundanities: sweat, earth, mustard stains, the worst kind of drugstore body spray. Want my shirt at least? the woman asks, grabbing one off the floor. Fleur is tempted: the camisole is a beautiful color, reminiscent of dead sky and glacial waters, but its scent is just as void. No, my job has a uniform, she says as an excuse, and then adds I have to get to work now because it’s topical, and true. The woman nods, slips on the top herself, and walks Fleur to the door. On site Fleur throws on coveralls and takes her seat five feet in the sky. When she first started as a garbage truck driver, her mother — a lover of cleanliness, and her own godliness — sighed. Her father — a lover of bootstraps, and pulling upwards — merely grunted. The truck itself groans, its steel bones shuddering like a plane taking off with none of the ego. Every time Fleur brakes a waft of compacted trash gasps through the hull, and by lunchtime she is starving. A raccoon, startled from its own midday snack in a nearby bin, scrambles across the street with a rotting pomegranate in tow. She prays god make me vermin in the next life as she runs it over to make room in reincarnation’s rungs. In the rear-view mirror, the roadkill looks like flattened fruit. Once her shift ends she drives back to the scene. Only a fresh stain and splay of seeds remain. Goddamn good samaritans, she thinks, carving the fleshy rim from a seed with her fingernail. Fleur collects the rest in Tupperware and heads home. Her apartment is empty and immaculate. She sets the seeds in the fridge. No one will eat them, not even her. She wishes she had taken home the woman’s shirt. Now Fleur has nothing but her own body, with its dampened creases and diminishing posture and deficient reasons for feeling so hollow. When she turns on the shower she thinks this is how the abyss must sound. Then she steps inside, the hoarded remnants of herself disappearing with the vapor.

---

Gretta Trafficante‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Pinch, The Rumpus, Cleaver Magazine, Maudlin House, Gooseberry Pie, and Lunch Ticket. Gretta is the recipient of Columbia University’s Brownstein Writing Award and the 56th New Millennium Flash Fiction Prize. Check out more of their work (https://grettatrafficante.carrd.co/) and their occasional musings on X (@G_Trafficante).