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  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
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Erin Flanagan

Crack of the Fruit


Candace pulls the charcoal and his hip appears. In three short lines he has a knee. She drops the charcoal on the easel’s ledge and brushes her fingers on her pants. She has black smudges all over her clothes, remnants of these three hours, proof that she is here. Her teacher calls time and Jason’s shoulders push toward his ears then roll back, his arms stretching behind his head. Candace wants to believe she is the only one who knows his name. Jason. Jason Jason Jason. She says his name as she draws him, his figure coming to life.
            A year ago Candace was trapped in a mall bathroom, her body held prisoner by the narrow stall. She hasn’t been to a movie since she was fifteen. She is fat. Specialty-store-shoes fat. What the doctors label as morbidly obese. But here, in this class, all of that disappears—the over-cooked gnocchi she consumed for dinner, the cream-filled doughnuts she ate in her car. All the way back to the butter and brown sugar bread she snuck as a child, the rice cereal her mother fed her as a baby. Gone. The foods disappear when she is drawing, as she connects to the canvas, as she connects to Jason, the man she draws.
            Between twenty-minute poses Jason stands by the building’s entrance and smoke two cigarettes, a piece of fruit in his hand. He alternates inhalations and bites wearing a plaid flannel bathrobe. The first night of class she went outside while the others headed to the basement vending machines. “Hey,” he’d said to her and she stopped, startled, than said “hey” back. Over the weeks they have moved onto conversations about Candace’s other courses which she has stopped attending—she doesn’t have time, her whole life contained in this three-hour class—and Jason’s job as a semi-pro golfer at a community course. He is a headless body on her easel now, and after break she will begin his face, the hollow of his eyes the most difficult part.
            A girl walks by and smiles at Jason under the edge of her hair. She glances at Candace, her eyebrows pulling together, than quickens her pace. Jason scuffs an untied Chuck Taylor against the cement and exhales. “I wish people would stop staring,” Jason says. “I’m on break.” He looks at her knowingly. “People are so rude.”
            The comment is like a stab and Candace understands what she thinks has connected them, the drawing, isn’t the connection at all, but the opposite: their physical bodies in the world. His thin perfect wrists jutting from the cuffs of his robe, her fingers dimpled like a baby’s.
            He bites into the pear and she can tell from the crunch it’s out of season, not yet ripe. She hears the crack of the fruit as he takes the bite in his mouth, but for all her memory and all the food, she can’t recall what a pear tastes like.



--
Erin Flanagan is the author of two short story collections-- The Usual Mistakes and It’s Not Going to Kill You, and Other Stories—both published by the University of Nebraska Press. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere, and she has held fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences. She is an associate professor of English at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.




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  • Home
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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
      • Luiza Maia Spring 2024
      • Christy Lee Rogers Spring 2024
      • Erika Lynet Salvador Spring 2024
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Diamond Forde Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Charlie Coleman Spring 2024
      • Isabelle Doyle Spring 2024
      • Reyzl Grace Spring 2024
      • Kelly Gray Spring 2024
      • Meredith Herndon Spring 2024
      • Mina Khan Spring 2024
      • Anoushka Kumar Spring 2024
      • Cate Latimer Spring 2024
      • BEE LB Spring 2024
      • Grace Marie Liu​ Spring 2024
      • Sarah Mills Spring 2024
      • Faisal Mohyuddin 2024
      • Marcus Myers Spring 2024
      • Mike Puican Spring 2024
      • Sarah Sorensen Spring 2024
      • Lynne Thompson Spring 2024
      • Natalie Tombasco Spring 2024
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2024
      • Donna Vorreyer Spring 2024
    • Fiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Bryan Betancur Spring 2024
      • Karen George Spring 2024
      • Raja'a Khalid Spring 2024
      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
      • Adina Polatsek Spring 2024
      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
      • Matthew Fertel Fall 2024
      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
      • Jian Kim Fall 2024
      • Robb Kunz Fall 2024
      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
      • Clayre Benzadón Fall 2024
      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
      • Sara Burge Fall 2024
      • Judith Chalmer Fall 2024
      • Stephanie Choi Fall 2024
      • Sarah Jack Fall 2024
      • Jen Karetnick Fall 2024
      • Ae Hee Lee Fall 2024
      • Svetlana Litvinchuk Fall 2024
      • Mary Lou Buschi Fall 2024
      • Angie Macri Fall 2024
      • Gary McDowell Fall 2024
      • Sam Moe Fall 2024
      • Camille Newsom Fall 2024
      • Elizabeth O'Connell- Thompson Fall 2024
      • Olatunde Osinaike Fall 2024
      • Jessica Pierce Fall 2024
      • Diane Raptosh Fall 2024
      • Isaac Richards Fall 2024
      • Robyn Schelenz Fall 2024
      • Christopher Shipman Fall 2024
      • Alex Tretbar Fall 2024
      • Ruth Williams Fall 2024
      • Shannon K. Winston Fall 2024
      • Wendy Wisner Fall 2024
      • Anne Gerard Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Fiction Fall 2024 >
      • J​oe Baumann Fall 2024
      • ​Morganne Howell Fall 2024
      • Matt Paczkowski Fall 2024
      • Ryan Peed Fall 2024
      • Gabriella Pitts Fall 2024
      • James Sullivan Fall 2024
  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
      • Paul Simmons Spring 2025
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2025
      • Elzbieta Zdunek Spring 2025
      • Na Yoon Amelia Cha-Ryu Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
      • ​Bleah Patterson Spring 2025
      • ​M.A. Scott Spring 2025
      • ​Liam Strong ​ Spring 2025
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2025
      • ​Cassandra Whitaker Spring 2025
      • Angelique Zobitz Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
      • K. J. Coyle Spring 2025
      • Meredith MacLeod Davidson Spring 2025
      • Jessica Mosher Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025