Associate Editor Jess Jelsma Masterton: When I first came across “Some Meaning—” among our miCRo submissions, I couldn’t help but feel that the piece was particularly apt for our current moment. In the past few weeks, I imagine that we have all been searching for some modicum of “Meaning.” In the news. In our now socially distant relationships. In our Twitter feeds as we sit, alone, in our houses and apartments. The more we look for meaning—the more we repeat the word to ourselves over and over again—the more we begin to question the very concept. In “Some Meaning—,” Leonora Desar tackles this conundrum, bringing both the hollowness and everything-ness of “meaning” into sharp focus.
To hear Leonora read her story, click below:
Some Meaning—
Every day the alarm would go off and every day I’d wait to feel some Meaning. Maybe today, I’d say. Maybe today is finally the day.
I’d go to work and still not find it. Then my boss would say, Here you go. Some Meaning. I’d reach out and take it, but it was only coffee. Or tea. Or sometimes a bad donut/pencil. So I’d bend over and show him my lace underwear. He liked it—
He’d bend me over the desk and look for Meaning. He’d say, There is something in your thighs or in that freckle there, but when he inspected closer, he couldn’t find it, and then we’d go to Burger Heaven and have some lunch—
He had a wife. Two kids. He was still waiting for Meaning. Then he told me the truth—that it was never going to happen. His only chance was getting to the Top. He’d spend the entire day climbing, when he wasn’t at Burger Heaven or checking out my underwear.
He said that I should focus too. He handed me the Corporate Ladder. It was brown and ropey; he told me that it stretched. That I should climb. One foot then the other. I could even do it in place. Or during lunch. Or even while showing him my underwear. Or even while asleep—
And I spent hours too—
Searching in his ear, or in his cheekbone. In the long curve of his cock. I’d whisper to it, Are you Meaningful, and it said, Yes. Yes. I looked for it in his smell, dandelions mixed with orchids that he borrowed from his wife. Maybe she was the Meaningful one. I called her up and asked, Maybe you can give me Meaning? Sorry, she said, I cannot, and can you stop fucking my husband?
But I could not. We spent hours at the Burger Heaven. We ordered french fries. Hamburgers. Cole slaw. We looked for meaning in sour dill pickles and in the raw pink bellies of fried pork. In the waitress’s green slanted eyes, in the way that she tenderly took our food orders. In the way her breath rose, like she had just finished a race.
Leonora Desar‘s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in River Styx, Passages North, Black Warrior Review, Mid-American Review, and Columbia Journal, where she was chosen as a finalist by Ottessa Moshfegh. She has been selected for The Best Small Fictions 2019, Wigleaf’s Top 50, and Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020.
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