MY EX-BOYFRIEND—WHO WE now say is my best friend which hurts my actual best friend’s feelings though it’s not a real title accompanied by any sort of perks—helped me move into my new apartment in a faraway state today, so I tell him he can stay over for the night before his long drive back home alone. It’s only fair, I try to explain to my actual best friend over the phone but she laughs and says we’ll probably fall into bed together one last time for a wistful unhealthy goodbye. I think she’s wrong and this move is us starting fresh. Right now we’re at my neighborhood grocery store and I’m struck by that strange sense of being lost in a dream. I’m squeezing fruit like I’m touching the body of a new love while my heart is still longing for the familiarity of the one I’ve just left or lost. My ex-boyfriend / best-friend-in-name-only reaches for a mango at the same time as me so we can touch hands and pretend it is an accident of fate, but I pull away before he can prove my actual best friend right. In the liquor aisle, we hesitate but buy some tequila so as to make the temptation tonight almost too much to bear or resist. “Am I here because I come running whenever you call or because I can lift heavy furniture for you?” He’ll ask this when we’re almost asleep and I'll tell him, “you're here because you’re my best friend and I'm going to miss you.” That last part will be true. •




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

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