Margaret Luongo
Summer 2024 | Prose
Two Stories
Spores
At a party, a heap of us on the rain-soaked grass. I worry about my jacket, but I find a man and forget. We talk and I can’t get comfortable. His mustache asserts itself. In the morning we are all shy of each other, wet and dirty. I can’t find—something.
Then my kitchen swarms with boys, all dressed in 1940s clothes. One boy cooks furiously at the stove. The others create kinetic chaos, vibrating around the island. An old friend arrives, and I assure him, being unsure myself, that I can cook for him. Once, I nearly killed him with mushroom pasta and rosemary pesto. Women arrive—my sister, aunts, and mother—and the males leave. I find molding cheese in the cabinet above the stove. The boys wrecked everything, though the one—the ruiner of cheese?—was industrious.
I can’t find my packed suitcase, my purse, my ticket. An Italian lady waits patiently for me: “I’m pregnant, you know,” she says, though she is far past child-bearing. The place is damp, the air rich with invisible spores; in the time it takes to find my suitcase, black spots have grown on its fabric divider. “I have to change my clothes,” I say, worried she’ll abandon me. “Do we need tickets?” I ask. “It’s okay,” she says and waits for me to change.
Neglect
A thief broke into my apartment and stole all my tools. How they got the miter saw through the window over the kitchen sink is beyond me. I wouldn’t have been capable of setting up the saw horses on the fire escape and dismantling my primary relationships one by one. This didn’t happen in one night. I never heard a sound. Also, I left the window open.
Margaret Luongo is the author of two story collections—If the Heart is Lean and History of Art, both from LSU Press. Her work has appeared in Tin House, The Cincinnati Review, Granta, North American Review, Consequence Magazine, Five Points, MicroLit Almanac, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and other journals and anthologies. Recipient of the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship, a Hawthornden Fellowship, and an Ohio Arts Council grant, she teaches creative writing and contemporary literature at Miami University in Ohio, where she lives with her husband, artist Billy Simms, and their feline companions.