and spits into a tube, it comes back that she has a sister. Rosa grew up alone, so this is kind of scary. All the stories she heard about rivalries and stolen boyfriends.
She decides she doesn’t need a sister. But still, it won’t leave her alone.
She tries to read it in her parents’ faces. Given up daughter? Secret love child? Rosa thinks back to the empty chair at the dinner table and imagines it filled with a ghost child. She thinks of the toys she didn’t have to share.
One day, a phone call. Nobody speaks, but Rosa knows. This is how it will be from now on. Any moment, Rosa could be in line at the grocerydrugstorebank. A tap on her shoulder, a stranger nudging her to pay attention, it’s time to move ahead.
Francine Witte is the author of four poetry chapbooks and two full-length collections, Café Crazy and The Theory of Flesh from Kelsay Books. Her flash fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologized in the most recent New Micro (W.W. Norton) Her novella-in-flash, The Way of the Wind has just been published by Ad Hoc Fiction, and her full-length collection of flash fiction, Dressed All Wrong for This was recently published by Blue Light Press. She lives in New York City.
Emerge Literary Journal 