“X,” by Lane Osborne (Fiction ’18)

Lane Osborne, a 2018 fiction alum, was recently featured in SmokeLong Quarterly. Read an excerpt of Osborne’s story “X” below:

X

Forget this place. Forget the shoreline, an oil-on-canvas landscape with broad brush strokes of beachgrass-tufted dunes, and gulls gliding above the blue-gray water. Forget the beachcomber sifting through sand; the couple—honeymooners, maybe—sloshing shin-deep in the spring tide; the boy trenching a moat around sand towers, turrets, and crenelated walls that crumble under the weight of water.

Forget your condo, the walk to clear your head. Forget how four right turns would’ve brought you back to where you began, and how you drifted onward, straying past vinyl-sided homes, vacant lots, and storefronts—a deli, a drugstore, a barbershop called Suitcase Ray’s where, maybe, you once got a shave and haircut. Where, maybe, you once talked sports, politics, women, and weather. Forget Suitcase Ray’s.

Forget how you reached here, the water’s edge, just past the stilted cottages that border this stretch of beach. Forget that all who wander are not lost. Forget whether it took you ten minutes or two hours to make the journey. Forget the tan line where your watch isn’t fastened, the empty pocket where you keep your keys, the note for your wife you didn’t leave.

Forget the people you passed, the ones you didn’t. Forget Ben, your best friend who hasn’t returned the book he borrowed. Or DVD? Forget the DVD. Forget the book. Forget your parents, long departed—your father’s honey-rich baritone, your mother in her flour-dusted apron. Forget your sister. No, sisters. Forget them both. Forget Mary, your wife.

Damn.

Read the rest of this story here: http://www.smokelong.com/x/