Northern New England Review Volume 42 | 2022
Northern New England Review is published as a creative voice for the Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine region. NNER publishes writers and artists who live in, are from, or have connections to Vermont, New Hampshire, or Maine. If you live here, were once from here, lost or found your heart here, or are currently searching for it among the green hills, sparkling ponds, and rocky coasts, NNER has the poems, short fiction, and creative nonfiction you want to read. Northern New England Review is edited and designed by students and faculty at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, New Hampshire. Questions can be sent to Margot Douaihy, editor, at douaihym@franklinpierce.edu.
Northern New England Review is published as a creative voice for the Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine region. NNER publishes writers and artists who live in, are from, or have connections to Vermont, New Hampshire, or Maine. If you live here, were once from here, lost or found your heart here, or are currently searching for it among the green hills, sparkling ponds, and rocky coasts, NNER has the poems, short fiction, and creative nonfiction you want to read.
Northern New England Review is edited and designed by students and faculty at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, New Hampshire. Questions can be sent to Margot Douaihy, editor, at douaihym@franklinpierce.edu.
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you love the lord.
Ricky thinks me waiting for my sister in a storm is a
goddamn tragedy and he’d like to tell me a thing or two about being
stood up. He was married once and she was always leaving.
What would happen if all the stars in the universe died out? I
ask Ricky this and he laughs because how do you even answer a thing
like that? I say it’s crazy, right, because all those stars actually died
billions of years ago. What a ridiculous thing, to build our calendars
and astrologies and secret underground railroads on things that were
dead years before we even existed. Ricky sucks his bottom lip and says
he never thought of it that way.
He says we’d go look at the stars together if it weren’t for the
storm. I say maybe Lizzy’s babies are up there in the sky. Pieces we
could’ve had, should’ve had, but never really had at all.
The phone behind the bar rings. It’s Lizzy and she’s on her
way to Indiana. There’s a guy who loves her and her scraped-out belly.
I pull the phone wire tight around my finger and uncoil it. It throngs
between me and the wall and I breathe through the familiar ache
throbbing in my heart or my gut.
What if this is the storm to end all storms? What if we
wandered forever and found ourselves here? The balloon bobs
pathetically at my shoulder like a nagging lover.
Ricky says he bets Lizzy isn’t as pretty as me and I tell him
he’s wrong. I’m okay, but Lizzy is beautiful like some untouchable,
unknowable, unreciprocated thing.
I wonder what Indiana looks like and then I wonder what
anywhere-but-here looks like. Ricky holds my hand when the power
goes out. I am surprised that I’m comfortable as we sing Cash and the
Stones with the grizzly-faced men in the dark. Somehow it feels like
this is all that really matters, anyway.
68 | BETH ANN MILLER
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