Meagan Arthur

FLAT

Daze of green, and the hedge shifts up and down, up and down like I’m watching it unspool, the adjacent yard above the leaves coming into and out of view, So when you’re hungry just eat three almonds at a time, Arna is saying, and I nod as I bounce, the trampoline pulling under my weight as I watch the tips of the hedge again, appear and then swing upward, out of my vision, and I’m thinking about that boy on TV, only a year older than me, the metal springs asserting their squeal as Arna gets up off the black and starts jumping with me, And we have to jump for as long as we can, I tell her, and she nods firmly, we will be here jumping for hours, we are agreeing silently, we will not stop, And we should go for a run tomorrow morning, after church, and I nod, I’m watching the blur of the green in the hedge pull my focus, its kaleidoscopic power sucking in my sight as I feel the sweat sneak down the curve in my back, bounce higher and higher and higher, I’ve started to look at the girls at school, paying attention to how wide their thighs are, and I can feel mine now, touching with each jump, That boy on TV with his straight shoulders and eyes that could be green as this hedge, I can already feel them, the widening parts encompassing my middle and the curves waxing themselves on me, The hedge is overgrown at the bottom and not shaped correctly, The boy on TV with his body that stays flat from top to toes, that doesn’t jut out and lunate and take up space, We have to keep each other accountable, Arna says, and I nod again, but she doesn’t understand, she just wants to be skinny, The trampoline shifts underneath our bare feet and I look down as I bounce, the dimple I create with my soles could be black and could be infinite and could suck me in deeper, the hedge moving like a screen that stops time in place, Arna stops to lay down in the sun, her legs widening before the knee, like mine, I look back to the hedge and think of the boy and want to be him so bad it hurts, Up and down and bounce and cry out, Cora stop, you’ll knock me off, I don’t, I don’t tell Arna that what I really want is to be flat, Someday I’ll look down at myself and see what other people see, the slopes other people will call beautiful, and Arna will say something like she envies my chest, the way my waist dips in, I’ll want to tell her then, that I am trapped in this body and there isn’t a way out of it, that all I wanted was flat all the way down, that time wouldn’t stop and shook everything off balance, that I don’t even know what I am anymore, but I won’t

Meagan Arthur is a cross-genre writer from the Seattle area. She graduated with an MFA in Prose from the University of Washington in 2018, where her fiction was awarded the Grace Milliman Pollock Award. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, River Styx, The Journal, Puerto Del Sol, Quarter After Eight, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where she has been awarded the Vice Presidential Fellowship. She serves as the Senior Prose Editor of Quarterly West.