Ethel
John sits at the scuffed kitchen table, looking up online how much eyeballs fetch in the black market. I release a sigh, the ocean inside my teacup rippling. When I told him I could work some street corner, no problem, he looked at me with his sea-glass eyes all sad and liquid green. “We don't have to do that anymore,” he said. But at least it would only be sex. What he's suggesting is selling actual body parts.
Like old Ethel. We had to strip her down for parts and sell them in the scrapyards around our salt-encrusted town. Now her corroded metal skeleton sits in the backyard, jagged nettles and lilac-capped thistles sprouting through her cavities. Sometimes we step outside and shiver all over her gutted front seats, sharing a rolled cigarette under the foggy sky as the north wind blows from the sea and gnaws on our exposed skin.
It’s only a car; I shouldn't be so broken up about it. But John and I had spent months—a whole lifetime—living out of Ethel back before he inherited his nana's house and all her myriad of debts. We used to park the ancient Impala by the ocean, where everything was cold and moist and free, and we couldn't tell apart wave from cloud. There, salt water drizzled against Ethel’s roof, and barnacles and other dwarfish crustaceans mistook her underside for the hull of some beached ship.
I drain my tea, rough-cut sugar crystals caught between my front teeth. Pushing off the stained kitchen counter, I peer over John’s shoulder. A wet cough makes baby rattles out of his lungs; the cracked screen of his phone is iridescent with the tiny particles of his spit.
John looks up at me, his dark green eyes alight. “Ha! Almost one grand each.”
Bio: Avra Margariti is a queer Social Work undergrad from Greece. She enjoys storytelling in all its forms and writes about diverse identities and experiences. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online, The Forge Literary, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, SmokeLong Quarterly, and other venues. Avra won the 2019 Bacopa Literary Review prize for fiction. You can find her on Twitter @avramargariti.