IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN THE CIDER OR it might have been science, this exact moment when Stella pulled the beautiful boy she was holding hands with into the alley and pushed him against the stone wall and pressed her body, every exposed atom, against his, and kissed him, lips, teeth, tongues (and never was there a night so precisely cool and sharp and clear, in a city as old, the cobblestones beneath her Doc Martens worn down over hundreds of years by horse hooves and wagon wheels and bicycles and strollers and mopeds the color of Easter candy) and there she was, clicked into the moment as if it were a groove, as if this crisp moment were the sole purpose of evolution, the reason for microscopic prokaryotic cells and cyanobacteria and anthropods and Flores man and the wheel and spices combined with spices and colors on silks and buckles on belts and oranges where oranges don’t grow and Marco Polo the man and irrigation and jazz trios and peanut butter cups and Marco Polo the game and Golden Retrievers and two-liter bottles of cider on the steps of St. Giles, and Stella felt the universe hold its breath, wrap its extravagance around her (her! tiny, insignificant Stella!) and she knew enough to stop kissing this boy, whoever he was (for the life of her she couldn’t remember his name) long enough to put a pin in this moment, to tip her face towards the sky and acknowledge the air, the wall, her body, the stones beneath her shoes, the joy of being this precisely fucking alive. •





Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in Fictive Dream, Okay Donkey, JAKE, and Frazzled Lit.

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