Two Girlfriends, Then Another By JWGoll

Paul Sableman CC




Two Girlfriends, Then Another                                     


     My first girlfriend grabbed my hand and turned me into a strong wind, the kind you struggle with to keep your feet. I felt the kiss, then became a storm system threatening to thrash the land with angled rain and boot-shaking thunder. Then she leans in and I’m a cold, dry mistral. It passes after she turns toward her house, leaving me shaking in shallow puddles. “Let’s wander the world!” she shouted over her shoulder, “a blessing or a curse, our choice.”
     My second girlfriend lived in a swamp thick with ooze, decaying vegetation, and miasmic fever. She toyed with mud men and slathered thick yellow sludge on my face, belly, and ass transforming me into a vessel of clay. Then she fired me hot and I became porcelain from which she drank her tea. 
     The last one marched up from behind taunting and teasing — then she injected me with a hypodermic and shot me with a gun. I ignored the words, was immune to the drugs, and bent bullet trajectories with my mind which impressed her so much she lotioned herself with lemons, danced stark, and tended dahlias and roses in our garden.
     I didn’t know weather was inside me, didn’t know I could be hard and fragile simultaneously, didn’t know I was resilient. You’d be forgiven to think I finally got it right, but of course there’s no such thing as happily ever after. The garden dried up, she stopped bathing, the music and my confidence faded, all of which I should have seen coming because, as everyone knows, no one survives a third girlfriend.  



JWGoll is a patient advocate at a large teaching hospital in North Carolina. His fiction is strongly influenced by experiences as a photographer in Chicago, the Dakotas, and Central Europe. He has a degree in photography from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. His flash fiction work has been published in dozens of small presses (jwgoll.com) and his debut book, “The Terminal Art” (Sacred Parasite Press, Berlin), will be coming out September of 2026.     
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