She read her writer friend’s new book of flash fiction. She read to review, but being a writer, also to steal. Skipping around, smiling at a few sentences, she tapped her jaw as she identified with the sad characters. People often spoke of how similar her and her writer friend’s styles were, and she thought, No shit. He’d taught her how to write—at least until she’d slept with him. Then no more talking—sex galore—but he did write poems about her breasts, cursive on weighty calligraphy paper. He was not a good poet; he sounded like Keats in a Cuisinart. And her breasts didn’t resemble his physical descriptions—had that waterskiing accident really addled his memory?
After reading most of the collection, she started the review. In a cheerful tone she outlined the qualities that made her writer friend’s writing thrive. Yes, the themes were riven with melancholy, but such was life, especially for writers and especially writers who didn’t know themselves, who drank themselves drunk, who could express what life they had only through sex. She carefully spaced this parade of attacks throughout the text to seem fair-minded, and, given her writer friend’s extraordinary impishness, she thought he would react kindly to such thoughts and would even want to start something up with her again because she was not as timid as she seemed.
She tried to write something of her own then, something wholly different from the style of herself or her writer friend, something from a coyote’s point-of-view, but she stalled and called her writer friend. The call went to voicemail. She said his book was one of his best and that not once did he ever fool her. She never felt love for him, even when she had nothing else in her life—no child, no friends, no degree. Never, no love felt.
She went onto her sun porch with a drink and laughed. Now she had something to write about.