BY THE TIME I REALIZED  she was calling to tell me you were dead, my emotions did not compute so I couldn’t speak and she must have thought I hadn’t cared much at all. She said she didn’t know my relationship to you, only that when she accessed your phone—she was your legacy contact because why wouldn’t she be—she learned of my existence and prominence in your life. There were phone calls and text messages exchanging poems she found boring, inside jokes she didn’t think were funny, recipes, music and films, absurd dreams, and childhood nostalgia. I cut her off. I didn’t want to listen to her sum us up like a list of items in a will. I asked if you’d ever mentioned me and the definitive no was expected but ached. I waited for her to ask the question, had we been having an affair, but she never did and if she had, I would’ve told her no, you were my faraway friend. But she didn't ask so I didn't tell her every poem was a promise, every recipe was one we wished to cook side by side, every song lyric an insinuation, every surreal scenario concocted by a sleepy mind and every past moment tumbled like a rock made rough and new by an imperfect memory were laced with longing that we could have been or would someday be in the same place, and that there are other ways to say I love you than the words and other ways to love someone than sleeping in their bed or sharing a time zone or stretch of earth, but she didn’t ask if we loved each other so I thanked her for calling and we both said I’m sorry for your loss. •


Anna Vangala Jones is the author of the short story collection Turmeric & Sugar (Thirty West, 2021). Her writing has appeared in Wigleaf, Berkeley Fiction Review, Craft Literary, Short Story Long, HAD, XRAY, The Bulb Region, and Terrazzo, among others. Her stories have been selected for the 2026 Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions, Longform Fiction’s Best of 2018, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and other award anthologies.

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