Treehouse

Chris Fox

The biplane banks off the coast of Myrtle Beach,
a strip of paper the size of a cookie-fortune
attached to it by a thread:

Will You Marry Me, Gwendolyn?

Five miles inland, at Panda Wok, three prep-cooks struggle
to stuff an oversized banner into a fortune cookie:

WILL YOU MARRY ME, WENDY?

Gwendolyn decides on the Chicken Lo Mein.
Wendy, hearing the sound of a plane,
looks up for a moment, then returns to her book:
Bang, about a young girl who finds an antique revolver in the field behind her house,
a chrysalis of some kind lodged in one of its chambers.
What happens next
changes everything.

Chris Fox has been published in The Blue Collar Review, The Black Fox Literary Magazine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Wavelength, and Rosebud, where his poem “You” was a runner-up for the William Stafford award. He is the author of the No Wave joke book NO-YES//NOISE, which he composed while doing stand-up during the years 2009-2011. He currently resides in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

See Chris’s list of 5 Things You Should Read in our ongoing contributors’ series.

♦