Lydia Copeland

In Your Direction

My clothes, in my arms, radiator warm. I walk through the rooms still dripping bathwater. My teeth feel different today, like rocks sliding across the desert, stones in rings. Today I made a shepherd’s pie, knitted the knits and purled the purls of a red hat, rendered in crayon a blue ankylosaurus for our son. When the phone rings the dog thinks you are home, and our son runs to the door calling you pop-up instead of papa. But now you are walking down a street. It is night, and rain that was ice melts into the wool of your coat. There was snow this morning. Now the slurp of rain boots. Of course there was someone on the train. Someone who looked and looked again in your direction. Who, drifted out of conversation with her sister’s friends, was lost in the bed of your eyes. Later you tell me how nice it felt. Nothing to write home about, you said. Just someone across from you on the new train car, whose coat and boots dripped rain on the floor.

Lydia Copeland lives in New Jersey with her husband and her son. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Quick Fiction, Glimmer Train, elimae, Twelve Stories, and others. Her chapbook, Haircut Stories, is available from the Achilles Chapbook Series.