Reentry by Amy Lyons

             Diana Gurley McGaw CC



Reentry

   Ativan escorts me to the party. My mother threatened to fly here if I don’t stop isolating. It’s not a specific celebration or a holiday, which makes it worse. A get together, freeform, un-topical. 
   Jean tells me I look ravishing because that’s how Jean talks, nervous or not. Fighting tears, Ellie says so good to see you. I back away gingerly, like it’s a stickup. Out on the balcony, the Washington Monument fits inside Rick’s martini. His pimento peers like a third eye above the eyes blinking from the obelisk. Treetops obscure a thousand tic tac headstones at Arlington National, but a few insist on being seen. I thank them for their service. 
   Kitchen-bound, I pick the wine I brought, take only what once belonged to me. Some guy in an Atari t-shirt wields an empty glass, as if I exist to fill him up. 
   It’s not my cousin’s fault. She clicked on the unicorn blanket that suffocated Liam, but it was me who built the registry at Target and shot the blanket's bar code with that red, beeping beam that adds it to the list.
   Pouring, I ask the guy if he’s more Asteroids or Pac Man, cringe at the anger that sharpens my tone. His vintage bent I can’t abide, but he’s a stranger and I’m mainlining anonymity. Friends lurk. They can’t un-see the circus animals I stenciled along the nursery’s border, the empty crib. Maze-based games are this guy’s jam. Now he’s bragging levels.  
   Fifth in line to relieve myself, I photograph the evidence. Mom texts back, elated I’m out having fun. She doesn’t notice all the women holding it, trying not to burst.  
   Swallowed by the pile on Jean’s bed, my missing coat curtails an Irish exit. I surrender, wake an hour later beneath a blanket of bombers, peas, and wool blends. 
   I tap to hail a no-talk Lyft. My question breaks the rule. The driver says the kids smiling from the square taped to the dash are nieces. She’s only aunt material, she adds. 
   When I was little, my mother belted me in the backseat Sundays as she chauffeured her sister through errands. My aunt was a painter who shared a one-room walk-up with a cockatiel. She wore the same short skirt from March to November and smoked out the window on the way from the market to the laundromat. Once, we dropped her off and found a man sitting on her stoop. My mother said she thought my aunt had ended it. Screaming, my aunt accused my mother of not knowing shit, with her spoiled bitch kid and perfect husband. 
   The driver changes course, says she’s sure she’ll want her own one day. 
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Amy Lyons writes fiction and non-fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Independent, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Lunch Ticket, 100 Word Story, Literary Mama, LA Weekly, Lenny Letter, Backstage, Pulp, and others. Her work has been recognized and supported by an honorable mention from Miami Book Fair's 2020 Emerging Writer Fellowship in Fiction, a 2020 Best of the Net nomination, a 2020 Best Small Fictions nomination, a 2019 residency at Millay Colony for the Arts, and a 2019 Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellowship. 

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