Flash
Janice D. Soderling

What she said was that she’d had an unhappy childhood and I was supposed to fix it. I can’t fix it, I said. I can do broken bicycle chains. I can do broken windows. I can do broken plaster falling off the front of your house. But I can’t do broken hearts.

She was a pretty girl and she was crying by then and pounding on the counter, her blue mascara running. You can fix it, she said. I know you can.

OK, I said. I’ll try. So we got married. But I was right. I couldn’t fix it.

Janice D. Soderling is a past contributor to Toasted Cheese. Her flash and short fiction has appeared in many print and online forums, most recently Soundzine, Shakespeare’s Monkey Revue, Literary Bohemian, JMWW, Right Hand Pointing and Boston Literary Magazine. She lives in a small village in Sweden. E-mail: wordwright[at]telia.com