My rejected short stories: "47 hours."

I didn’t want to talk. I wanted to swim in last night until his scent washed off. 

But food was coming. So I put down my tray table and put up my forcefield. Which only lasted until that damn spork.

I heard a laugh as I took its cellophane jail to my teeth, and a smile escaped as I finally met her eyes. Her face bloomed like a sunrise.

“Cold Chinese noodles, perfect for lunch,” she gushed, like we were friends at our favorite restaurant instead of strangers trapped on a flying bus.

“Yes,” I said, but thinking that my perfect lunch, the empanadas I bought with him across the street from the office, would laugh at a spork.

We ate them while standing just outside the store. He because the crusts were best while they were still warm from the oven, me because everything tasted better while watching him smoke.

So why was sitting on a plane, eating with plastic instead of my fingers? It was time to go back
to my own kitchen, where I wouldn’t find an Australian waiting for kisses.

Kisses I had dragged like a sleeping bag onto three planes; kisses I wanted to crawl back to as
soon as I forced down my noodles. Instead I heard myself asking where she was going. 

To see her son for Mother’s Day. She was very nervous, having never flown without her husband. But he died on Nov. 28. Not seven months ago, not last year. “Nov. 28th.”

She was married to him for 47 years. 

The man I was crying over? I knew him barely 47 days. 

And the time we spent alone together? Not even 47 hours. Only if I included all the minutes I spent watching him reach for yet another beer instead of me could the total even get close.

So what could I say that wasn’t lame? I sipped my coffee, hoping to shake some wisdom loose. But all it offered was his face, laughing at the silly American who packed more things to make coffee with than clothes to wear.

Of course he stopped laughing when that suitcase began to brew what smelled like liquid heaven compared to the caffeinated dust we drank everywhere else.

“You can tell it’s good because of the foam,” he said, finally no sarcasm shaping that crooked smile as he pulled me out of sight of the others so he could kiss me.

Afterward was all agony and ecstasy: The agony of waiting for everyone else to leave. The
ecstasy of finally being alone. 

Then agony again when I felt one hand take only one second to unhook my bra. These would not be the fumbling fingers I was used to.

Feeling the fear on my skin, his hands stopped. 

“We can... just talk.”

His voice thawed the fear, so I asked for more Aussie to melt it.

“Why do you love surfing?”

“There’s just... nothing else like it. That feeling, when the wave is curling around you, and it’s
just you and the water.”

I tried to imagine not being terrified to have water surrounding me. My mother had been the brave bodysurfer who wore bikinis, but I was too scared to go in the water, too shy to wear a
two-piece.

So I spent all my time at the beach just watching those beautiful surfer boys run out of the
waves and straight to someone else’s towel. Finally now with one standing in front of me, I decided it was time to go into the water.

Because the thing about those fumbling fingers? They seem safe because they can’t dig deep,
but you should know they still get you naked; just naked and bored. I was ready to be naked
and breathless, naked with some naked surfer skin to touch.

So I jumped into the waves, emerging nearly drowned, wearing only a smile. 

And just as I feared, while the water was swallowing my swimsuit, those fingers were opening that hidden room and hanging new pictures on the walls. Pictures I hadn’t stopped staring at since I left: those impossibly blue eyes, the shark tooth lying on that smooth chest, the shark tooth dangling in my mouth.

As she reached for her coffee again, I tried to imagine how many pictures she had collected in 47 years, wondering which were her favorites. I smiled, thinking we were both drinking memories.

But when I lifted my cup, his face was gone. Instead I saw her, drinking one of the 17,155 morning cups of coffee she had with her husband, enjoying just another breakfast in 47 years of laughing and crying, smiling and arguing, with the same face.

And the face I missed? I last saw it floating in her coffee, his smirk disappearing as she emptied her cup.

And my cup? It still had 17,154 more of her mornings for me to drink.

This fiction piece was submitted to and rejected by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Sun, and likely others I am forgetting. It is published here because I never, or hardly ever, reject my own stories.