Conditional by Jennifer Ahlquist

5/13/2022

Conditional by Jennifer Ahlquist

Conditional If she could get off of the sofa, she could make it to the sink. If she could drag herself to the sink, she could suds up the plates piled there, and once the dishes were cleared, her mind would be, too. She might think clearly enough to unpack the rest of the boxes, and when all the boxes were unpacked she could hang the pictures, and when the pictures were hung, then she could organize her hundreds of little objects, by shape and size maybe, or by color, and when all was orderly inside the house she would be able to deal with the garden. Once the seeds were planted, they would sprout soft leaves to drink the sun and when the flowers bloomed she would set a table outside with her clean plates under fairy lights, and she would call everyone and they would gather. “What a sweet home you’ve made,” they would say. “We’ve missed you.” But the garden was not yet weeded and the soil looked stony. It would be expensive, getting frames for all those pictures strewn across the floor, bleaching in the sunlight. She suspected several of her moving boxes to be missing and there wasn’t enough room to put even the things she could find away. The dishes in the sink gleamed with indeterminable gunk from meals she did not remember tasting, better let them soak a while. She sank into the sofa, sore from unpacking. The sofa sank, too, through the floor and the concrete foundation and the hard-packed dirt to settle into the plot of dank earth that had been waiting to swallow her all her life, and she would be gobbled up and stay there moldering while the sofa disintegrated and the right time to call home never came.

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Jennifer Ahlquist is a Philly-based writer with a tenderness for the twisted and the twee. Her work has previously appeared in Epiphany Literary Journal (2019 Breakout 8 Winner, 2020 Pushcart nominee), The Maine Review, the Hoot Review, the Eunoia Review, and Storychord.com.

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Conditional by Jennifer Ahlquist

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