The Fridge
an excerpt

Part 1:

Molly stared woozily at the bottle in her hand. She didn’t need to read the upside down label to know it was peach brandy, and the fact that it was upside down was something of a clue to the fact that it was empty. She’d had the bottle for months, maybe even years, bought for some recipe she made once and decided wasn’t worth the trouble to make again. She didn’t drink, and yet somehow the bottle was now empty.
She opened her hand and dropped it, expecting a resounding crash and was rewarded with a faint “tink-tink” as the cheap plastic bottled bounced twice on the linoleum and rolled down the slightly sloping floor to the corner by the stove. She peered at it suspiciously, expecting something else to happen.
A tear welled in her left eye and rolled down her nose, directed by the tilt of her foggy head. Her eyes crossed watching it. “Damn him,” she sighed, “damn that stupid bottle, too.” She slumped forward onto both her hands, letting a few more tears fall on the letter there.
Another rejection letter wasn’t a surprise, not really, but she was hurt by the latest. “The young adult fantasy thing has been done to death,” it said, as if the stories she’d been working her whole life on were nothing by Harry Potter knock-offs. Things she’d known about before J.K. Rowling ever picked up a pen, perhaps before she was born. Why couldn’t editors see that her work was different, better, worth a try. And even if they didn’t, why did they have to be so mocking; how rare it was that a rejection letter got any personal content at all, and she gets the personally insulting one. She tried to fling the paper to the ground but missed and was overcome by dizziness.
“And damn Brian, too” she said softly. Even in the aughties, what kind of asshole breaks up with someone via text message. At least he managed to spell “I think we should see other people” out, instead of using txtspk abbreviations. She thought things were going well, even though he’d moved to Springfield for his job, it wasn’t that far. She lifted her head from her hands and tried to focus on the inside of condo she’d sunk her life savings into, the condo they were supposed to be sharing. She would have sold it eventually and moved out to join him. But that wasn’t what he’d planned all along.
She laid on the floor, because it was more comfortable even if it was spinning, and let the tears leak into her hair and ears. She imagined walking along on the ceiling, the crunch that the spackle-y plaster would make, the way she’d have to lift her legs to cross from the kitchen into the bedroom or the other room over the lintels, like on a ship, no wonder she felt so motion sick. How hard it would be to use the appliances, how useless the chairs would be. She mentally ran her toes along the medallion in the middle of the living room ceiling, where the old gas lamp used to be, imagining the smooth texture of the painted surfaces. Reaching in her mind for the door of the fridge and struggling to reach the food inside.
For a moment, she was so entranced with examining her newfound world she forgot to cry. Then her stomach reminded her: of the half-bottle of nasty brandy she’d consumed, and the hamburger before that and whatever else. Making it to the bathroom was out of the question by then. She barely crawled and fumbled her way to the trash can before the heaves took over.