Francine Witte
I decide to shop for your last meal. I buy a steak. Red and marbled and streaky with fat. A box of chocolate pudding. A single garlic clove. A box of bloody wine, and finally, a broccoli tree. The steak is the weight of your heart. The fat is bulgy and white as your eyes when they lie. The aisles are dressed up for Christmas. Peace and falala for sale. The chocolate pudding for dessert. a perfect cover for poison. The garlic to ghost the room with your breath. You, lying there in a broccoli forest, looking just like a sleeping prince. You, no longer angry how life pounded you down to the ordinary. You, with a smile on your way to adventure. And, of course, a dozen eggs with the shells, that unlike me, are brittle and waiting to break.
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Francine Witte is the author of four poetry chapbooks and two full-length collections, Café Crazy and The Theory of Flesh from Kelsay Books. Her flash fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologized in the most recent New Micro (W.W. Norton). Her novella-in-flash, The Way of the Wind, has just been published by Ad Hoc Fiction, and her full-length collection of flash fiction, Dressed All Wrong for This, was recently published by Blue Light Press. She lives in New York City.