Your father teaches you to ride a bike by holding a handful of M&M’s and running ahead of you far down the long road beside the lake. If you catch him, you can have the M&M’s. It sets a precedent. One has to be hungry. How many syllables are there really in “Memory?” I believe it depends on how badly you want it. Don’t mis-take me: I am as afraid of ruining this as I have been of anything. I don’t know if I believe anymore that there are best words in their best order. There is only what one leaves behind.

Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller are the co-authors of There Is Only One Ghost In The World (Fiction Collective 2, 2023), winner of the 2022 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest. Their work also appears or is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, Salamander, and elsewhere. Although they have been writing together for ten years, they have only met once.