Love Spell by Kat Gonso

My brother leaves Alabama for Philadelphia to be a bone broth barista because it’s cooler to sip liquified bones than a Starbucks pumpkin latte, and leaving your family for a fad isn’t a betrayal. It’s summer, and Ada Lynn obsesses over any boy with armpit hair. We make up games to fight the length of a summer day. Describe This Pit Stain (Black widow armpit); and Hot Girl Make-up War (her cherry red lips, the clear winner); and Dreamiest Gas Station Attendant (the ginger with extra pit hair, Ada Lynn declares); and Favorite Bone Broth (opossum) and Creepiest Neighbor (Ms. Edna and her love spell mason jars filled with used band-aids and pig snouts and sage). And when we play The Darkest Timeline while lying head-toe on a bed of burnt red sassafras leaves, her dirt-caked feet stinking in that bad/good way, I realize that my brother will never return, and I’ll be stuck sweating in the South, forever talking to Ada Lynn about bodies and body hair and boys but not girls. Never girls.

Perpetual virginity is Ada Lynn’s darkest timeline. Cursed with a vagina full of dust bunnies, she says with a sigh. I swing my arm around her shoulders and say that my darkness timeline is spontaneous combustion, but what I mean to say is,

losing you, too.

Kat Gonso’s work has appeared in many publications, including SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, Flash Fiction International, and others. Flash by Gonso has been featured in the Wigleaf 50 and won numerous awards, including the Southeast Review’s World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest. Gonso teach creative writing and literature at Boston College and Grub Street.