By Victoria Melekian

I was turning left toward the diner when I saw my friend, Louise, limping out of the corner market carrying a brown paper bag, what looked like one of their sturdy ones, the kind with twine handles, and I noticed the flex in her upper arm so I assumed it must be heavy, so I drove into the grocery lot instead, parked and walked over to Louise and offered to help her to her car, but she took a quick step back, pulled the bag to her chest with both arms like she was holding a couch pillow or like a schoolgirl might clutch a notebook against new breasts, and she seemed startled, kind of protective of this bag, and I could hear bottles clinking against each other—we both heard them, and I looked at Louise, it had been a while since I’d seen her, and she seemed frail—pale face, thinning hair, kind of bowed over, which scared me because we’re pretty much the same age, and her eyes, well, hard to say because Louise was looking down at the ground, and I looked down too, at a sprig of bright green weed pushing through a crack in the gray asphalt, and when I looked up, Louise was staring at me and I could see her eyes and the tired underneath them and she saw me see, and she took another step back, turned toward her car, and said, “Well, I better go, it sure was nice of you to offer to help” and I reached out to pat her hand, the right one, the one now holding the bottom of the bag as though she knew the weight of whatever was in there could push through the bag, and she wasn’t going to let that happen, no, that was clear, but she also wasn’t going to let me touch her, not her right hand holding the bottom of that bag nor her left which had moved up to pull the handles together so I wouldn’t be able to see inside so I let her go, I let her just take that extra step back away from me, and I took one myself to provide a buffer, a barrier from me—I wanted her to be comfortable, not leery, and when it all comes down to it, whatever was in that bag was her business, not mine, so I dropped it, just said, “Hope to see you soon, Louise,” and I turned and walked away, and I know she just stood there and watched me because if she’d moved or shifted her body even the tiniest bit, I would have heard those bottles knocking against each other.

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Victoria Melekian writes poetry, short fiction and, on occasion, a novella-in-flash. Her work has appeared in print and online and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She lives with her husband in Carlsbad, California, where the weather is almost always perfect. For more, visit her website https://victoriamelekian.com