A Lie is Based in Truth

Impossible the grander the guess, the greater the collapse. I have always tried to be the pacifist and ended up the coward crouched, hand pressed against this sorry excuse. You see, I flew in on a paper airplane amidst a slip by the sender, and the turbulence nearly killed me. Unfold it. I planted seeds of lavender in Antarctica ice. I fell asleep there and really didn’t mean to—contrition, I’m so full of shit. There is calculus in shoving snow into where my brain used to be, the franticness before a sigh of relief, a stillness overtaking the perpetual hot flush, indeed a race and indeed a photo finish. You see, if I’ve got my wits behind my eyes, then it’s easy to avoid—the fourth person who asks me about it can just walk. We can back away from the catastrophic. I’ll be able to think about knocking with a knuckle or the edge of a fingernail and changing the composition of my life for good, knowing full well it would be out of spite and what’s born would be something else.

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JENNY M. LIU (jennymliu.carrd.co) is most often just a person in soft, loose clothing. Her work has appeared in Waxwing, miniskirt mag, JAKE, The Aurora Journal, and the anthology, 99 Tiny Terrors. She is on Bluesky, Twitter, and Instagram, all @jennymliu.