Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: This essay by Kelle Groom moves in a way that surprised me the first time I read it: the first paragraph is setting, plot, the who/what/when/where/why. In the second paragraph, the speaker goes deeper into thought within that scene, and the third paragraph zooms into the future, putting the rest of it in stark perspective. It’s a masterful way to structure a flash essay that looks back on a friendship.
Listen to Groom read the essay:
Murder City
Laura had an interview at a topless bar on Orange Blossom Trail. Just bartending, but I couldn’t let her go alone—it was murder city. So I slipped on black suede bondage heels, drove her in my Toyota with mushrooms growing on the passenger side, fabric sagging in orange curtains from the ceiling, billowing in the night—a harem car. We parked in sawdust, a cowboy on a barstool nodded us in. There was a drink I used to like, back when I still drank, Galliano, royal pyramid of manageable lava. But this was not a Galliano bar, no Harvey Wallbangers here, the space between the wall and stage was the width of a body, so when Laura was waved down into a closet office, I stood behind a patron who drank while a woman slung her breasts, which slapped together like water balloons.
I’d worried about sag ever since I’d read a sports-bra ad that said the muscle that holds breasts up can go any time, like a rubber band SNAP, and once it’s gone, that’s it. In light of that, the slinging seemed a bad idea. I thought my heels would help me fit in at the bar. I didn’t want to be a sore thumb. No one paid much attention, clothed as I was. The woman on the bar a sea creature—Elegant Eolid, Hermissenda Nudibranch—skin the same bluish-white.
I never wore the shoes again—never the right occasion, and finally moths ate the glue out of the soles. Laura was hired, as she often was, but never showed up for work, as if she just wanted to see if she could step into a life. After she died from cancer, I was on Parramore, parallel to Orange Blossom, and saw a dark-haired woman on a motorcycle stopped at the light. When she made eye contact, that calm almond gaze, I knew it was Laura, out for a ride.
Kelle Groom is the author of How to Live: A Memoir in Essays (Tupelo Press, 2023), I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster, 2011), and four poetry collections. An NEA Fellow in prose, Groom has work in AGNI, the New Yorker, and Ploughshares.
