#amybutcher

I’ve been traveling these last few months and not especially writing, and I think sometimes it's quite good to be quiet, but I did pen this short little thing that hobartpulp was kind enough to publish, so thanks, you guys.

"Still, it bothers me about the flowers.

It bothers me about the flowers because I think these people need them most. Celebration of a life or mourning, the flowers—which grow along the mortuary’s brick and are the first thing these people see, the last thing they witness after witnessing a body—are theirs, I think, not ours.

That my roommate would pick them to put on our table—for what, a day? or maybe two?—evidences, to me, a vast discrepancy from the life she lives and the one she claims to live.

The dumplings became a family tradition, and now they’re the only one we have left. Our family has only ever known smallness—my mother’s brother and father’s father died in the nine months between my conception and my birth, so that by the time I was born, our extended family was thirteen people. Time passed, our numbers dwindled, and now all we have left are the dumplings.

In junior high and high school, the library became the ideal dating scene; as innocuous as it was, it was also a breeding ground for the men I wanted: sweet, shy and sensitive, bookish but not agoraphobic. I can’t tell you how many men I’ve shared a $0.50 hot cocoa with, or how many walks I’ve taken to the neighboring convenience store, where’d we buy Cheetos and register pastries to illegally split behind “Anthropology-1850s.”