TEN THINGS I DIDN’T DO WHEN I SUSPECTED MY MARRIAGE WAS OVER • by Elizabeth Rosen

1. Repaint the bedroom walls in the beige he’d picked out.
2. File jointly.
3. Keep my waxing appointment.
4. Re-up my birth control prescription.
5. Renew my membership at the gym.
6. Throw away the tour brochures for the catacombs of Paris, souk of Marrakech, windswept Patagonian plains, bamboo forest of Kyoto, or riotously-colored Meenakshi Temple in Madurai…
7. Turn down the Taylor Swift.
8. Stop myself from buying that brightly-colored, low-cut dress I’d been admiring.
9. Hold back telling my father-in-law what I really think about his racist Fox-fueled conspiracy theories.
10. Cancel the hiking trip along Hadrian’s Wall, where I had planned to stand atop the ancient stone fortifications that had separated Roman England from the northern barbarians and gaze at the horizon, longing to glimpse an exit, but now expected to see the open expanse of possibility instead.

Originally from the Deep South, Elizabeth Rosen now lives in small-town Pennsylvania where you can find her wherever books congregate. Her work has been published in North American Review, Baltimore Review, Flash Frog, Pithead Chapel, New Flash Fiction Review, and many other places you can learn about at www.thewritelifeliz.com. She is a proud member of the MTV generation and can still tell you all the words to “Karma Chamelon” and where the video for “Hungry like the Wolf” was filmed. Colorwise, she is an Autumn.

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