Antidote

By Tara Campbell

The tapping wouldn’t stop. Jackie tied her robe and shuffled to the window. It opened silently—she’d oiled the hinges, back when she was still in love with him.

“Would you please stop?”

“I just want to talk,” he said. But she’d heard it all before: I never said that. You didn’t hear me right.

Jackie dug a bag out of her pocket. Plastic crackled like sparklers on a summer night.

“Dammit, Jackie, you know I’m allergic.”

She shook a peanut into her palm, then tipped it into her mouth.

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

The window swung silently shut.

         
Tara Campbell is a Kimbilio Fellow, a fiction editor at Barrelhouse, and an MFA candidate at American University. Prior publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Jellyfish Review, Booth, and Strange Horizons. She published a novel, TreeVolution, in 2016, and a hybrid fiction/poetry collection, Circe’s Bicycle., in 2018. Her third book, Midnight at the Organporium, will be out in 2019.