Where Everybody Knows How You Died

I like to ghost watch as I nurse my scotch. It's funny, scotch made me cough and sputter when I was a person but the burn is nice now—the warmth makes you feel alive. The bar is crowded tonight. Hit & Run Victim is arm wrestling Bungee Jump Splat (he tried to be known as Thrill Seeker but we were all too hung up on the splat.) Choked on a Chicken Wing While Living Alone is sitting at the piano, hands hovering over the keys but not touching them. Leaned Too Far Over the Yellow Line to See if the L Train Was Coming & Fell Onto the Tracks at the Exact Wrong Moment is dancing by herself, swaying to the music Choked on a Chicken Wing isn't playing. Fell Asleep & Didn’t Wake Up asks me if he can bum a cig so I go join him for a smoke. He knows I'm Abducted, Buried in the Woods, & Never Found but is polite enough to pretend he thinks I'm Lung Cancer. He asks if I ever miss it. Life, I'm assuming. I don't answer. Me neither, he says. We cheers with our cigarettes and look up at the night sky as mist floats through the moonlight.

Anna Vangala Jones is the author of the short story collection Turmeric & Sugar (Thirty West, 2021). Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, Craft Literary, Short Story Long, Rejection Letters, and Fractured Lit, among others. Her stories have been selected for the 2026 Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions and Longform Fiction’s Best of 2018. Find her online at annavangalajones.com and @anniejowrites. She recommends reading “Poem in Which I Practice Optimism” by Rachel Beachy in the archives.