Vosotras

On the night I turned twenty-one, I was studying abroad in Segovia to conquer Spanish, once and for all, and I was walking back from the Plaza Mayor to my flat, a half-mile away, or a kilometer, whatever that means, as the cold air slid daggers under my skin and the sign for the bank said it was five-below-zero Celsius and the clocks all read 0200 horas and a fucking sinfín of cathedrals haunted the corners of my vision as I blinked away fiery tears at the concrete blocks passing under my running shoes, dorados like everything in that place, scuffed, decaying, like centuries-old glories from the Age of Discovery, and I was thinking of you, vosotras, together at the bar, still, ashing your cigarettes, tomando chupitos, in your high-heeled black boots that squeeze your calves under your tight little black dresses, and I considered the word, vosotras, you, plural, juntas, and not me, singular, sola, solitaria, Spanish as perfect as English is not, vosotras, the word fluttered through my head, hitting the sharp edges of the void where thoughts lived, died, swam, and drowned in late night tequila, but, still, unos chupitos de tequila con lima y sal can never transition vosotras into nosotras, not then, not ever, and it was all you and never we, never us, in English, and I cried because no one could see me crying, and I cried more, until the scuffed tip of my flat, dull shoe hit a duro coin on the road and I stopped to pick it up and I saw the store with your black high-heeled boots in the window, but it was closed and dark.

Among the glacial erratics and waist-high stone walls of central New England, R.W. Owen resurrects antique typewriters and writes all first drafts from their glass-and-chrome keys. Ryan’s fiction has been recognized with an honorable mention in the Writers of the Future contest and has been published in Literally Stories, Five on the Fifth, Writers Resist, Idle Ink, Litbreak Magazine, The Rock Salt Literary Journal, and Penumbric Speculative Fiction Mag. Find Ryan on Bluesky, @iviesofinkribbons