A STORY by MADELEINE WOLFE
Stuck but in Motion
Question 27
Margot was late. She sat in her 2016 Ford Focus, which still smelled like her fried chicken sandwich from the night before, and cursed herself for not leaving work earlier. She stared at the minivan in front of her that had a bumper sticker which read: “Do you follow Jesus this closely?” She checked the clock on her dashboard: 5:38pm. She watched the stoplight up ahead go from green to yellow to red to green to yellow to red, and still the cars sat there, unmoving. She breathed in deeply, feeling her chest expand against the seatbelt. She had seven minutes to get there. Where was Margot going? Pick the best possible answer.
A. To break up with her boyfriend, Todd. She was meeting him at the brewery down the street from his apartment. Even though they’d been together for 8 months, she could count on one hand the number of times she’d been to his place. He was weird about space. He was also boring. After all, he was getting his MBA, Shelly had reminded her. That should’ve been the sign to run the other direction. It felt good to realize they weren’t right for each other, but it didn’t feel good to have to tell him that. Maybe she wouldn’t have to, if the traffic kept up. Her actions could speak for themselves. She tried not to get her hopes up as the cars in front of her inched forward.
B. To visit her mom in the hospital. “She’s got at least a year, maybe two,” the doctors had said, “we’ll do everything we can.” But less than a year later, she went into the hospital and hadn’t come out. Margot’s dad had left the house largely untouched, and it felt frozen in time; her mom’s clothes remained in piles in the closet, her shoes were lined up in the laundry room, and the dry erase board on the fridge still had the meal plan for a week long in the past, written in her mom’s loopy cursive. Chicken enchiladas. Stir fry. When Margot couldn’t sleep, her mind would often picture cartoon ovaries with large grey lumps on the ends, like ornaments on a Christmas tree. The ovaries began following her around, and she started to picture them at work, at the grocery store, in spin class. The Jesus van drove forward in front of her and her foot eased down onto the accelerator right as her phone lit up on the seat next to her. She glanced down. It was her dad.
C. To bring her paintings to the coffee shop. They were going to adorn the walls, enlivening the chipped paint and keeping coffee shop lurkers company as they drank latte after latte. Shelly was the one who had sent the initial email. Margot hadn’t had the strength, since she’d assumed it was a no. A get lost. A who do you think you are. A who do you think you’re trying to be. But it hadn’t been a no, it’d been a yes. There was even an exclamation point in the email response. So here she was, carting around her soul in the trunk of her car, ready to be put on display.
D. Nowhere. Margot was going nowhere.
E. All of the above.
Madeleine Wolfe is currently a fiction fellow at The Loft Literary Center. She was a middle school English teacher for 10 years before recently transitioning out of education to work at a small nonprofit that supports cancer patients. When not reading or writing, she's spoiling her niece and nephews rotten. She lives in Minneapolis.