Cross-Attachment
By Mari Harrison
The first thing I mistakenly loved was a voicemail’s silence: six seconds of room tone, a refrigerator humming, and distant traffic. I played it nightly, the emptiness finishing my thoughts.
The Bureau’s apology for the cross-attachment arrived. Someone else was meant to love Erin in Phoenix. I was meant to love a man who drowned years ago. Files touched. It happens.
They offered reassignment, therapy, a rebate. I asked if the silence could stay.
“No. Love is a closed system.”
Now I memorize absence: empty chairs, burned-out bulbs, static between stations.
I am good at loving what cannot love back.
Mari Harrison loves language the way she loves coffee: obsessively and at all hours. After years crafting speculative fiction for the government and occasional poetry (as Mari Nichols-Haining), she left to chase fiction. These days she writes alongside her husband Jesse, also a writer, drawing on a mutual muse and striving to be a less chaotic version of the Fitzgeralds.
Now that's 100 words pulling their weight