Joanna Ruocco: Dan

“I’m not getting up,” she said. “Not for awhile.”

The song was already fading. Something prodded her leg, very lightly, her abdomen, her neck, or it might have been an itch produced by her own skin, traveling across her body’s surfaces. Below the surfaces, there were deeper layers to which the itch could not penetrate. The surface sensation traveled, dissipated.

There’s a rate, she thought. But it’s not the kind of thing you can calculate.

How relieved people would be. If only she could tell them.

She felt the paper moving beneath her, and she lay very still on top of it, not saying anything, not moving at all.

Joanna Ruocco is the author of Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych (FC2, 2012), A Compendium of Domestic Incidents (Noemi Press, 2011), Man’s Companions (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010), and The Mothering Coven (Ellipsis Press, 2009). A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, and winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, she co-edits Birkensnake , a fiction journal, with Brian Conn.