Lorna Perez

Astronaut

The two women sit over wine in those last weeks of summer: before papers and classes and deadlines and committees.

I understand, says the dark-haired one, why she did it.

Who? says her blonde friend.

That crazy astronaut woman who drove across the country to confront the other girlfriend. I mean seriously. Who the fuck else is she gonna date? Can you imagine her trying to get a date at a bar or on eHarmony? She’s listening to some schmuck tell her about going to Tempe for a big regional sales conference, and when he lets her, she replies, yeah I just came back from space. I mean, we think it’s hard to date now, what if there's only one guy, and we had to do the space thing? Just imagine, the two of us, then?

Giggling, the blonde looks up. Yeah, she says, precisely.

Lorna Pérez is an Assistant Professor of English at Buffalo State College where she specializes in Latino Literature and multi-ethnic literatures of the United States. She has creative pieces forthcoming in OtheRican: Voices of the Greater Puerto Rican Diaspora (Aurora Levins Morales and Vanessa Rosario, eds.)  and critical work forthcoming in Between Worlds (Deborah Poe and Ama Wattley,eds.)