Open Up

By Stacey Balkun

/ First Place, 2025 Plentitudes Prize in Flash /      

Believe her when she says she loves, you, baby, your girlfriend with a full glass of wine. She loves you, she says, she knows you. She knows what you need and brings you chicken pho when you’re sick. A bag of good coffee beans. Open up—she’s here to pick you up for a concert, a movie, reservations at the new tapas restaurant, even when you have a full fridge of groceries, are working on a deadline, saying no in every way you can but don’t you appreciate the invitation? She’s busy, too, you know. She understands, which is why tomorrow, she’ll weed whack the lawn, now six weeks overgrown. Tomorrow, she says, she’ll take the heavy trimmer up from your hands, mad because she said she’d do it. What are you thinking, baby? She’ll get to it. She doesn’t like to be rushed.

She loves you more than you love books, and you should know this, she says. When she calls finally after never showing up and you are standing in the home storage aisle of Lowe’s Hardware, choosing from the floating shelves because the stacks are starting to stress you out, making it difficult to write, dumb girl, don’t you know who loves you? A woodworker. She shows her love with gifts, baby, and will go to the lumberyard soon, build you exactly what you need because she knows what you need. And so, ten months later, you’re still staring at the new pile of oak planks on your porch, tripping over paperbacks accumulated all around the shrinking desk. She doesn’t have time right now, to do it right and don’t you want it done right?

She buys a set of steak knives. A bottle of good Shiraz. A pair of stemmed glasses because she doesn’t like the ones you have. She doesn’t care for your hand soap, either, or your shampoo. The brand of brown rice, the clumpy fluff in the pillows. Open the Amazon boxes as they arrive, baby, all of your own belongings sifting into the closet, shadows now under the shimmer of newness, your home losing its you-ness, which, believe her, is exactly what you need.

And you, silly girl with your silly reading glasses. You’ve wanted more alone time, haven’t you? So when she says she’s opening up the relationship because she found a woman who doesn’t tighten her mouth after every excuse, she’s really doing you a favor. She’s done this before, with other girlfriends, who, let’s face it, all lose their luster over time.

Try not to look at her hands as she says this, waving them as if waving off a fruit fly, as if brushing the ghost of you back into your walls. She empties the dark bottle into her glass, leaving everything around her dull and dry. On the porch, another package arrives to be torn open.

She knows you. She loves you, and this is how you should be loved, how you want to be loved, she says. You had always thought open like a gift, like leaves of a book, but now you see the corkscrew, silvered in her hands.