Bitterbone Fruit

Rental-room fiction / open ending / painfully poor and miserable fiction

The poorest year of all,

Bai Li and I squeezed onto a single sofa in the basement, hardly something you could call a bed, sharing one cigarette.

More often than not, when it had burned halfway down, she would start to cry

and look at me, saying, "Everything will get better."

That pale, drifting nicotine, bearing dreams yet tinged with death,

passed out of her lungs and into my eyes.

The smoke rings gathered the fog of Berlin; the ash clumped together, unable to melt into snow.

A few summers passed.

Just as she had said,

things really did get better.

But everything was gone.

Theme: Bitter fruit