Beth Konkoski

No Time to Waste

After he kissed her in the dark hallway outside the girls’ locker room and felt the small bird tremble of her shoulders, after he described the six rows of spices in his mother’s kitchen cupboard, capturing the soft giggle in her voice through the phone, after he took her to Prom and put a corsage around her wrist, accidentally snapping the white elastic and wishing he hadn’t, then saying he liked her hair and the dress she was too flat-chested to wear, after he failed out of college because he never woke up for classes, after he shifted his attention to a high school girl and drove around in his ’60 Chevelle with his best friend beside him and the younger girls ready and free in the back when they flew over the railroad tracks and almost flipped end over end, the physics of it raw in his hands as he steered them to safety and found the brakes, after the girls’ fear smelled like burnt toast, after his back seat smelled like vomited Mad Dog and McDonald’s burgers, after his parents started locking the house and moving the hidden key where he couldn’t find it, so his long body slept curled up beneath a canvas of stars on two lawn chairs pushed together in the backyard, after they shaved his head at boot camp, after he hid his tears when his mother kissed him goodbye, and no matter how often he called home it never stopped the loneliness of his well-made single cot, after he lost his grandfather and flew home for the funeral, calling the girl from the airport because her lips and dark curls would not leave his dreams, after she answered his call but told him it was not meant to be, after he kept calling anyway, after she finally let him visit her at her dorm room on his way home for Christmas, his mother in the car by the curb while he kissed this girl sitting on a bed he would never see again, but her lips like always held him close and made the loneliness fade to only a small bell across the bow of the ship where he now had to live because he couldn’t make smarter choices, after he told her he was headed below the equator and he would write from Bahrain, after he picked up the pieces of soldiers blown from the USS Cole as they floated in the salty water of the Persian Gulf, after he served his time, watching the sky and wondering if any moment might bring a missile, he told himself he would marry the girl, no matter how long she might make him wait.

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Beth Konkoski is a writer and high school English teacher living in Virginia. Her work has been published in journals including SmokeLong Quarterly and Bending Genres. Her collection of fiction, A Drawn & Papered Heart, was published in 2024 by Kallisto Gaia Press.