Stephanie Pushaw
Bio
Stories (2/0)
Nocturne
Before the final nightfall there were all the others: thousands of irrelevant squandered dusks we’d all ignored, smug in our certainty that day would reassert itself the way it always had. Sunsets, we figured, were for special occasions: the drowsy tumble of the blood-red orb into the warm dark waves on some South Pacific island honeymoon, the garish spray of gold and violet against the bright slopes of a ski resort. A million obligations plucking at our psyches every instant, the kids and the coworkers and the spouses and the people with whom we were cheating on the spouses, the cryptocurrency and the foreclosures and the meal prep, the philanthropy and the high-intensity interval training and the end-of-life care for our aging parents, and we were supposed to indulge in such repetitive banalities as sunsets?
By Stephanie Pushaw3 years ago in Fiction
Dumb Luck
Dumb Luck Beth, newly unengaged and a little bit more reckless than usual, wore exactly the wrong dress to the casino cruise. Over watery margaritas at an oceanfront dive in Vero Beach the night before, ensconced in a wraparound booth with a bachelorette party consisting of eight of her new best friends, Beth had clinked her tumbler into theirs in the glittering, restless dim and agreed: why wouldn’t she hit the cruise the next night with them, try her luck? Emboldened by the false confidence of four or five cocktails, having successfully (if temporarily) corralled the shrieking, bereft part of herself still reeling from the dissolution of her own engagement, Beth had become part of this group of keyed-up strangers. She was in coastal Florida, alone, on what should have been a honeymoon. She liked their cheerleader intensity, their giddiness that had likely been forced at the beginning of the evening but, with the continual administration of pump-up pop songs and tequila shots, had transformed into something that looked very much like joy.
By Stephanie Pushaw3 years ago in Humans