Mary Miller - The Last Days of California

And then The Young and the Restless was on and I asked questions, trying to catch up with who was with who, what was happening. We were finished eating but no one moved. Once we moved, we’d have to keep moving. We’d have to get in our car and drive home and that would feel like failure but it didn’t feel like failure now. It felt like all sorts of things were still possible.

“Are you going to eat that?” I asked my mother.

She handed me her last piece of bacon, soft and floppy like all restaurant bacon.

“Give me half,” Elise said.

I gave her the whole thing and she ate it like she’d never stopped eating meat. And just like that, she wasn’t a vegetarian anymore. It was strange how you could be something and then not be that something so easily. Last night, I’d been a virgin. Elise had been a vegetarian. Last night, not being those things had seemed impossible. I eyed the remaining biscuit, an unopened jar of jelly. I picked up the jar and peeled off the thin black strip that said it hadn’t been tampered with, took a clean spoon and held it up to my face.

I am indebted to the Michener Center for Writers. It was my dream to be a Michener Fellow and I still can’t quite believe it came true. Thanks to my professors, Michael Adams and Elizabeth McCracken, who were incredibly generous with their time and expertise. I couldn’t have done it without you. A number of friends also read early drafts: Melissa Ginsburg, Ethel Rohan, Elizabeth Ellen, Aaron Burch, Derek Asuan-O’Brien, Dolores Ulmer, Nick Ulmer, Claudia Smith, Jane Collins, and Lee Durkee. Thank you. Thank you, Katie Adams, for taking a chance. Lastly, thanks to Sarah Bridgins, who wanted to represent a woman who said she would always and only be a short story writer.

Mary Milleris the author of the story collection Big World . Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly , New Stories from the South , Oxford American , and American Short Fiction . A former Michener Fellow in Fiction at the University of Texas, she will serve as the John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi for the academic year 2014–15.

Copyright © 2014 by Mary Miller

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