Other Things That Burn

a collection by Mena Brazinski

Preview:

The Girl

For the first time I have a girl who tells me she loves me and I am drunk on the way it makes me feel. Not the way she makes me feel, but how being loved by someone makes me feel, how I am wanted and important and there is someone to ask about my days and someone to spend my days with, and after, I recount to her the day we spent together.

For the first time I've got something to do after work, someone to meet in the parking lot, a thought curling around me while I teach children on Saturday mornings whose mothers would clutch their pearls if they knew who I was dating, except we're not dating, not quite, we are something else entirely. I don't know how to define it, but if someone ever puts it into words, I will nod once, and then very deliberately not text her about it.

The girl and I, we go on dates in dive bars and hold hands under the tables and she pays for my dinners while we watch the drunk adults on the east side of the town I grew up in, the side by the river, the side that floods every spring, we watch them get even drunker while they watch basketball on Sunday afternoons. They yell at the players and the TV and they yell at the waitresses but never once do they yell at us, a pair of teenagers with wind-kissed cheeks who fight over the bills and never drive home while it's still light out.

She says, The way strands of your hair fall in your face while you're concentrating is beautiful, and I'm so full of love I could burst, like nothing could endear me to her further.

I have never felt closer to heaven.

I have never been further from God.