Jealousy Always Brought Out the Best In Her by Christine Fugate and Rina Palumbo

Green eyes widen, brown roots starting to emerge beneath blonde hair, she has a killer smile, feral, sultry and dangerous. Not her now. The person she only remembered from that night, the night of a long car ride the three of them took into the swamps of Tennessee, hot sticky air, screaming cicadas and the tension between the three of them. There was desire and lust but it had nothing to do with the swamp or the humidity or the night noises. It was jealousy. It was watching her friend asleep, eyelids fluttering  her eyelashes  as she dreamed, lips parting, and a song emerging, low and soft, her singing, sleeping friend with her head on her shoulder, and she was trying so hard to understand the words and closing her own eyes and seeing  water nymphs in deep pools surrounded by meadows full of white blooms swaying in soft cool breezes and it was so real she wanted to make it stop, make the music and the images  stop by pressing her lips onto those of her sleeping friend so she could taste the water and touch the flowers and feel the breeze. But the car stopped, and the dream stopped, and the jealousy stopped when she opened her eyes and saw the look the third person gave to her once sleeping friend. And the smile her awakened friend gave back. And, since she didn’t need to be at her best, she left their song and she walked down the highway and she stuck out her thumb and hitched herself to being somewhere else.

Christine Fugate (she/her) is a writer, producer and award winning documentary filmmaker who has had her films shown across the world and who has writing published in academic and literary journals. She is currently an Associate Professor at Chapman University in Orange California. Learn more about here at  https://www.christinefugate.com

Rina Palumbo (she/her) is working on a novel and two nonfiction long-form writing projects alongside short fiction, creative nonfiction,  and prose poetry. Her work appears in The Hopkins Review, Ghost Parachute, Milk Candy, Bending Genres, Anti-Heroin Chic, Identity Theory, Stonecoast Review, et al. Read more of her work at https://rinapalumbowriter.com