by Sharon Goldberg
That a burglar will crawl out from under my bed and grab me even though Mommy said, “There’s no such thing.”
That the big, dirty, black dog panting and drooling and sniffing me on the playground will bite me and I’ll get rabies and die.
That Mom and Dad aren’t home from a meeting or dinner or bowling game and it’s late and they might be dead.
That I won’t have a date to the prom even though I’m on the prom committee and the one who suggested the “Arabian Nights” theme and bought lavender and pink striped fabric to make tents.
That I might be pregnant.
That I will forget my lines in “Arsenic and Old Lace” or “A Gown for His Mistress” or “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the Moon Marigolds” and I’ll freeze and stutter and maybe pee my pants and embarrass myself and the other actors will be pissed at me and the audience will ask for their money back and I’ll never be cast in a play again and the news of my failure will reverberate throughout the universe and my wished-for acting career will be dead.
That I’ve disappointed my parents because I don’t go to synagogue and don’t keep kosher and don’t believe in God and am not their good little Jewish daughter.
That Dad doesn’t love me because I’m disappointing.
That no man will ever love me.
That my husband isn’t home yet from his office and it’s late and he hasn’t called so he may have been in a car crash and is in the hospital or dead.
That I’ll never get pregnant.
That I’ll be bitten by a venomous insect or spider or a malaria-infected mosquito while traveling in Costa Rica or Viet Nam or Brazil because my blood type or sweat or skin odor or some other biological component make me a magnet for six and eight-legged invertebrates.
That I will die during facelift surgery after which my husband and family and friends will say my demise was sad but stupid because I should not have taken a risk, even a nominal one, for a vain, elective procedure.
That my husband is in a boundary-shredding relationship with my cousin which I naively catalyzed when I suggested he stay with her while in Boston to row in the Head of the Charles Race.
That no man will ever love me again.
That a ringing phone in the middle of the night means Mom or Dad is dead.
That I will contract Covid and die because my immune system is compromised following two surgeries for a tibial plateau fracture sustained during a colossal ski accident before lockdown.
That I will never ski again.
That I will break my leg skiing again.
That I will never publish any of my writing again.
That our country is on the edge of autocracy but I’m too old to move elsewhere and start over.
That my partner will get sick or injured and become comatose and I won’t know how to handle end-of-life issues because he still hasn’t explained his wishes.
That I will have no peace when I am sick and dying because I don’t believe in God or an afterlife.
That there is a God and he will unleash his wrath on me because I don’t believe in him.
That no one Googles me.
That because I don’t have children I won’t be remembered.
That I’ll be alone, all alone, and no one will worry that I might be dead.
That I’ll live longer if I worry less.
That science will figure out a way we can live forever but I’ll already be cremains.
Sharon Goldberg is a Seattle writer whose work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, The Louisville Review, Cold Mountain Review, River Teeth, Green Mountains Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Jellyfish Review, Gargoyle, Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere. Sharon won second place in the On the Premises 2012 Humor Contest and Fiction Attic Press’s 2013 Flash in the Attic Contest. She is an avid but cautious skier and enthusiastic world traveler.
Emerge Literary Journal 