Three Fiction Pieces
Sarah Freligh
Gus Grissom
​ Rita’s new boyfriend, Harry, wants to do it in a cemetery at night because it’s quiet and he can hear himself think. Also, he’s fascinated by dead people. She says, Uh-huh, I get that, though she doesn’t at all, doesn’t understand why someone, especially a guy, has to think while he’s doing it or what in the world Harry has to think about. She hopes it’s not Margo Morgan, the redhead he dated in high school whose boobs are way bigger than Rita’s will ever be and—contrary to the rumors— are real. Rita used to see her in the locker room after tenth grade gym class parading around towel-less and pleased with herself. Summer before senior year, Harry had Margo’s name tattooed on his shoulder, so the whole time they’re fucking, Rita’s getting banged by Margo Margo Margo.
After they’re done, Harry rolls off her and lights a cigarette. Rita pulls her underpants up and her dress down and wanders around, looking at the grave markers, a family named Grissom, who died off long before Rita was born: May and Earl and Gretchen and Stephen and a small stone that says only Baby. For a junior high history class, Rita and a nerdy guy with zits and giant black glasses did a report on the three Apollo astronauts who burned up during a training exercise, Gus Grissom and two others that she can’t remember. She used to repeat his name under her breath whenever she was stressed, fast like a prayer, GusGrissomGusGrissom, and it helped slow the wild horse of her heart whenever it broke out and threatened to bolt. For extra credit, she tracked down the telephone number of the guy who opened the hatch after the fire and fished out what was left of them, but she hung up when he said hello, what sounded like a sob.
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The next time they do it in the cemetery, it’s late afternoon. She’s just off a lunch shift, and Harry’s on break from the 7-Eleven so it’s all hurt and, Hurry, hurry. The whole time, she thinks about the Grissoms, whether they’re related to Gus, and if they dreamed about the fire the way she has the last couple of nights, whether it hurt or not, and for how long. They were screams and then silence. Harry’s mouth’s open, but nothing comes out except for a couple of stutters when he collapses on top of her, his whole dead weight. She can’t take a breath, can’t breathe, asphyxia is what killed the astronauts.
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The third time, Harry wants to do it on top of a hill at high noon, away from the Grissoms and their circle of shade, away from the trees and the shadows, in broad fucking daylight. He wants to do it out in the open, a little show for the cars on the road below, for the poor working stiffs suffering through another Monday, for god’s sake, they deserve a fucking show.
Get it? he says. A fucking show.
When he goes to unzip her, she twists away. Rita, who swaddled herself in a towel in the locker room and dressed behind a curtain, she can’t. The sunlight, the people. She can’t.
Harry is fire. He’s coming, closer.
Gus Grissom.
Under Things
​ The attendant finds the underpants in the #34 dryer: white with red hearts, women’s size 4. What his mother used to call underthings, hang on a line she’d string across the basement. He and a neighbor kid used to sneak down there and pretend they had to fight their way out of a jungle of bras. Once, he yanked a bra off the line and slingshot a pair of sweat socks across the room, made the neighbor kid laugh until he wet his pants. That was the time his mother beat the devil out of him with a belt, threatened to cut off his dirty hands. For years now, he’s scrubbed and scrubbed and never felt clean.
The underpants belong to the twenty-something girl at the folding table just under the TV. Minutes ago, the man had watched her pull her things out of this dryer—towels and t-shirts and underwear—and slam the door. He sees a lot of angry people at the laundromat. They hit the change machine with their fists when it rejects their dollars or swear at him under their breath to hurry, for fuck’s sake when he carefully counts out ten bucks’ worth of quarters. They complain because the picture on the TV is fuzzy or that the batteries on the remote control are shot. He can tell by the way the girl folds her laundry that she’s angry, too. Everyone has someplace to go, but here they are, stuck at the laundromat, where nothing works the way it should, and they get angry.​
The girl has blonde hair with dark roots, what his mom would call a dyed hussy. Mrs. Stephenson next door was a dyed hussy on the prowl for a man. Just like an alley cat, his mother used to say. Howling and yowling. But Mrs. Stephenson was nice to him. She always said hello, offered him a cookie so fresh from the oven the chocolate was still a little gooey. Our little secret, she said. His mother didn’t allow sugar in the house, calling it the devil’s invention. Boys got high on sugar and did things, bad things, usually with girls.​
He watches the girl stack her folded clothes into a plastic basket, pausing once to look at her cell. She pokes at it with her fingers and waits and then pokes some more, smiling this time. He wonders what his mother would say about cell phones, whether they’re an invention of the devil, too. He wonders what made the girl smile, who it was. She yanks on her jacket and grabs the basket one-armed, maneuvering it through the door.
He waits until she’s out of sight to go into his office where he arranges the underpants on the shelf with what else he’s collected:
a pink halter top, a pair of shorts, a tube of red lipstick, and one flowered sock.
He’s nearly done building the girl.
Fallout
​ Rita is sitting in a circle with five other women, six if you count Cassie, the facilitator and the only one who isn’t picking her cuticles or shredding a Kleenex between her fingers. They’re there because they need to paste themselves together, because time hasn’t healed one damn thing. Cassie tells them to think of trauma as something nuclear that you have to get rid of. You can dig a hole, a deep, deep hole and throw the trauma in. You can shovel dirt over the trauma and pack it down, but it’s still going to leach out and poison everything around it. Rita thinks of the old movies they used to show in school, the ones where students slid off their chairs and tucked themselves under desks while the bomb exploded outside. In the movies, the kids walked home through fallout, which looked a lot like snow, though you didn’t dare touch it. You couldn’t roll it into a ball and build a man out of it or throw it at a boy you liked to get his attention. It was the fallout that would kill you, eat you up from the inside out. Like trauma, only prettier.
Bio
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Sarah Freligh is the author of seven books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize, Hereafter, winner of the 2024 Bath Novella-in-Flash Contest, and Other Emergencies, published by Moon City Press in 2025. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologized in New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018) and Best Microfiction (2019-22). Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation.