Keely O'Shaughnessy
Katy Morris dares you to keep your hands high above your head as you tip over the edge into watery oblivion. Loss is her laugh when you refuse, hands still clamped to the safety bar.
Loss is the descent. It’s steep. Foaming rapids soaking your shirt. Katy’s shape presses into you as the cart jolts back onto its rails. The way she looks at you, damp hair, freckles glistening with spray. It makes you jab your tongue to the roof of your mouth.
Loss is the candy floss you buy after. Its pink fluffiness. Wispy sugar strands turned liquid by the water in the air. Deep magenta syrup like your first period that you won’t experience for another year and a half.
Loss is the way Katy tells you her mother says to always carry pads in your purse, in case she leaks through her drawstring shorts. She says some girls have it tougher than others. It’s the way she tells you it’s not all bad, before she leans in. Before she kisses you. Her lips sticky, sugar, sweet.
Loss is entering the corn maze at full speed, hands entwined, running as one, past the ticket booth boy, yelling. Towering, golden stems whipping your bare legs and bronzed arms. A succession of lefts followed by a right.
Loss is how a low dipping sun casts the longest shadows.
Loss is all those summers later, in a field that isn’t a maze, that doesn’t even have corn in it, with Rob. He whispers into your face, brushes your hair from your eyes, and half limp he pushes himself inside you, so you feel kind of full and empty all at once.
Loss is how, if the field was sown with corn, it would flatten under the weight of your bodies.
Loss is Katy leaving for college years ago, travelling, diving headlong into life.
Loss is you watching Splash Town become a mall, become a parking lot, become an empty space in the town where you grew up.
Keely O'Shaughnessy is a fiction writer with Cerebral Palsy, who lives in Gloucestershire, U.K. with her husband and two cats. She has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and won Retreat West’s Monthly Micro contest. Her micro-chapbook, The Swell of Seafoam, was published as part of Ghost City Press’ Summer Series 2022. Her writing has been published by Ellipsis Zine, Complete Sentence, Reflex Fiction and Emerge Literary Journal and (mac)ro(mic), and more. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize as well as Best Small Fictions. She is Managing Editor at Flash Fiction Magazine. Her debut collection, Baby is a Thing Best Whispered, is forthcoming with Alien Buddha Press. Find her at keelyoshaughnessy.com