Sue is a drunk. Georgette is a flirt. Fiona wishes she’d never come to sports night, but here they are again, huddled in the kitchen playing Hearts while their husbands—buddies since college—whoop and holler over the football game on the large-screen TV in the living room. Sue slips into the mudroom at Georgette’s house—it’s her turn to host—and fills her glass from the mickey in her coat pocket. Her liver is fatty, and she’ll die in seven years, but she thinks the news articles about zero alcohol being the only safe amount is a conspiracy fueled by tree-huggers and people who actually like yoga.

Georgette pretends she doesn’t know what Sue is up to and rolls her eyes at Fiona. They get a strange enjoyment watching Sue implode, but they’d never admit it, not even to themselves. It makes them feel better about the extra pounds they each carry around their middle, and the cigarettes they sneak at night on their back porches when everyone’s asleep, even though Fiona will be killed by a drunk driver in twenty years, the day after she quits smoking for good. When Sue’s eyes and skin turn yellow, they’ll drop off casseroles and send cute cards to placate their consciences with sayings like Fuck Cancer and You’ve Got This! and only sometimes wonder if they should’ve stepped in.

Fiona wishes she had better friends, but finds it exhausting to keep up with lunch dates, birthday wishes, and Instagram posts. It’s easier to hover along the edge of this little group stitched together by time, their husbands, and convenience. The truth is, Fiona doesn’t like most women. She finds them petty and competitive. She’d rather sit with the men in the other room, but then she’d come off as standoffish, and she’s always prided herself on being polite.

Georgette envies Fiona and how her husband touches the small of her back when he passes her in the hallway. Last month, Georgette kissed him when they went to the basement for more beer, and later wept in the locked bathroom of her own house, hunkered on the cold ceramic tiles, because he didn’t kiss her back.

Later, after the football game is over and yawns pepper conversation, the couples retreat to their own houses and unstitch the evening in minute detail. The women wonder—but never out loud—if this is all there is to their lives, if they’ve reached their true potential, or if their higher self spins somewhere out in the universe, one inch out of reach.

Sometimes, Georgette wakes in the night in her sexless bed and counts the number of Saturdays she imagines she still has left, and fantasizes about finding a lover who’ll cup her face in his palms and kiss her oh, so deeply.

Sometimes, Fiona wonders if Georgette fancies her husband and vows to watch more closely the next time they get together because Fiona knows that what she has could disappear in a second. A millisecond.

Sometimes, Sue wishes somebody—anybody—would notice the clink of bottles in the recycling bin, the extras she squirrels in the back of her closet, or the mini-bottles she keeps in her desk at work, and care enough about her to say stop.

***

Dawn Miller is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Best Small Fictions nominee, and Best Microfiction nominee. She is a recipient of The SmokeLong Quarterly Fellowship for Emerging Writers 2024. Her work is published in many journals and anthologies including The Cincinnati Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Forge, and Fractured Lit. She lives and writes in Picton, Ontario, Canada.