About the Feature
We Had Fun in the Dark,
Photo by Fineas Anton on Unsplash
didn’t we? Could I call it misdirection if I couldn’t see? Marco, Polo. Playing tag in the hedge maze at midnight—I was never crafty enough, only won by hiding. Used to say “we” when I talked about weekends when it was just me and his footsteps. Spent nine years incandescently aware. Sometimes I could tell from the heft of the air if he’d left the door standing open. Later the neighbor invited me to her backyard wedding, sidled up in her costume to say I could hear him, you know. I knew. I’d brought a dessert, the invitation told me to, and when the sun went down we had a cakewalk. Someone’s daughter stepped in a Swiss roll and cried like she’d be smacked for it. I held my dirt-crumb pie, tried not to stare back at my driveway. Why, the bride was asking, were my floodlights always on?
About the Author
Brittany Cavallaro is the author of the poetry collections Girl-King and Unhistorical (University of Akron Press). Individual poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Yale Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere. Cavallaro is also the New York Times bestselling author of novels for young adults. She teaches creative writing at Interlochen.