I find it difficult to fuck someone after I’ve seen a rat. The problem is that even when we’re home—tipsy, buzzing—I can’t get its grotesque pinkness out of my head. The two of us clink fizzing glasses, but all I hear is that clicking rattle. When we kiss, the word tail loops in my mind like some febrile hallucination. I flinch at the touch of fingers on my flesh, imagining the scuttle of scaly feet. I glimpse a flash of midriff and see instead a rodent’s supple torso writhing at the base of a trashcan, delicately licking the rim of a polystyrene carton or sucking soda from sticky pools. The thought of its wriggling bigness has me gagging and heaving all the way to the bathroom.
In Washington D.C., a great number of my dates end this way. I’ve told more white-lies to more near-strangers than even I am comfortable with. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “It’s not you—it’s the shellfish.”
“We didn’t have shellfish,” he says.
“I mean, I’m a celiac.”
“You’re a celiac?”
“Yeah. Well, I suppose I should say ‘I’m a person with celiac disease.’ I’m still an individual; I don’t want to be defined by it.”
“Really?”
“I’ve had it for years. My mother had it, too, and her mother before that, and her—”
“So why did you order the pasta?”
“What?”
“If you’re ‘a person with celiac disease,’ why did you order pasta?”
“Celiacs can’t eat pasta? That’s terrible.”
The unsolicited celibacy of Saturday nights is especially bleak. More than anything, there’s very little else to do. One such evening, trapped somewhere between oppression and depression and cuddling a bottle of liquor in a grim parody of childhood, I text my best friend.
Elle is an actor, or would like to be. Her biggest breakthrough since drama school is the discovery that using Uber Pool for hookups is cheaper and more practical than any of the dating apps. On Sapphic Antics, the successful podcast she recently started, Elle describes herself as a “rampantly polyamorous lesbian.” Privately, I think this makes her sound more permissive than she is. Her rigorous approach to even the most minor of relationship indiscretions has been compared more than once to the ‘Broken Windows Policy.’ Elle’s never taken this as an insult. She insists that the proportionate, transparent repercussions of her system are fairer and more lenient than those grim punishments meted out by rancorous lovers who allow their grievances to fester. Whatever your view on the theory, it’s hard to deny that it works for Elle. If her podcast is as biographical as it seems, she had more orgasms between her July and August credit card statements than I’ve managed in the last six months.
Help me! I type.
Invulnerable to the time difference, Elle responds with a flood of WhatsApp messages. It takes a while to decipher her emojis—they’re not all as immediately intelligible as the eggplant—but the general thrust is that she thinks I should see a therapist.
It’s not me who has the problem! I reply. It’s this goddamn city. It’s overrun with vermin.
I know, says Elle. But what about the rats? She deploys the yellow winky face.
Seriously. The rats are fucking everywhere.
Exactly, replies Elle. And you’re not fucking anywhere.
It’s true, but I’m still not convinced. She sends me the fat little rat emoji and I nearly choke.
Did you gag? she asks.
Okay, okay. I’ll go.
The therapist is tall and lean, and his glasses make him cute in a vulnerable kind of way. He asks me to call him James. He starts by posing questions about what he calls my “triggers.” I find myself imagining what his real name is, and what he’d look like in the shower with steaming water running off those sinewy haunches. I’m beginning to appreciate the potential benefits of therapy when suddenly he spouts the word “squirm” and I have no choice but to run to the toilet and grip the bowl like a greedy kid.
When I return—teeth chattering madly, a little milky vomit on my chin—he makes me tea and rubs my back. It doesn’t feel entirely professional, but at this stage I’ll take pretty much anything I can get.
We sit on the couch and talk about the bubonic plague, and charnel houses, and the SAS. He tells me that rats can squeeze themselves into holes the size of a quarter, and that his aunt once lifted the lid of her toilet to find a rat just basking in the bowl. It’s starting to feel a bit like a date. I tell him about my first time seeing a rat, and how I fantasize about them dying in horrific ways. I tell him that when I watch people cutting the grass on the Mall, I hope their blades will slice clean through all the little heads lurking there. I scan the road for a glimpse of torsos smashed flat by the weight of a truck. I take walks by the river and peer into the mucky waters, longing to see a bloated carcass floating belly-up—engorged, or roughly chopped by the blades of a propeller. I tell him I want to poison them, shoot them, gas them.
He’s looking at me quite intently. The hands on his mug are roped with chunky veins. The nails are bitten right down to the quick. Very sexy.
“I want to set them on fire,” I say. “I want to hang them, quarter them, tar and feather them. I want the rats to see the dead bodies of their mothers, their brothers, their great-aunts, the corpses of their babies, and then to die themselves in pain and abject misery. I want to see their carcasses nailed to walls or picked at by carrion, their innards laid neatly on the tarmac like offal at the butcher. They are foul. They are awful. They are a plague, an atrocity. I want them to know what an abomination they are. Does that make any sense?”
James nods slowly. “It’s certainly helpful,” he says. “You’re doing great.”
“I’m really not. I’d have thought that was obvious. I mean, I haven’t had sex in months. Literally months.”
James nods again. I’m starting to wonder whether he’s got full control of his neck muscles. He reminds me of that plastic Churchill Insurance dog that used to sit in the back window of people’s cars, bobbing its head up and down as they drove. My father had one; it was the kind of corny thing that made him laugh. He collected garden gnomes, too. His second wife, a tyrannical bitch of a woman who worked as his secretary for just as long as it took to capitalize on his nervous breakdown, was not a fan. She would vandalize them while he was at the office. They were resilient, but not much remains impervious to a sledgehammer long-term.
When Dad retired to focus on his hobby, Jennifer ran off with her Zumba instructor—a twenty-three-year-old Australian with a popular YouTube channel and some questionable views on race. Tyler’s daily lifestyle vlogs tended to focus on how “blessed” he was in suddenly finding love. The fact that his visa would shortly expire was never discussed. His 800k teen subscribers were also unaware of the precise ways in which the “cashew milk” he promoted would indeed prove “life-changing.” Tyler failed to mention that the main ingredient was an artificial sweetener so toxic that even the FDA acknowledged its links to a heinous new strain of bladder cancer. That she and Tyler were perfect for one another was the only point on which my stepmother and I agreed.
Before her departure, Jennifer heaped the remaining gnomes into a grinning pyre and dropped a match. Dad didn’t bother pressing charges. Once the fire brigade had left, he sent an email to Tyler explaining that cashews produced juice, not milk; and that Jennifer would need her own bathroom for reasons best left unexplored. Then he strapped his great-uncle’s coal-mining torch to his forehead and went down to the cellar. He unlocked a secret metal door which he’d had installed some years before (the kind better known nowadays for concealing hordes of pallid children who are each other’s mothers and half-sisters at the same time) and spent the next five hours lugging boxes upstairs.
By the time the sun came up, over a hundred gnomes were carefully arranged amongst the scorched pots and rockeries of Dad’s front garden. People assumed his collection was ironic because he was a decent horticulturist and an intelligent man, but really it was just his passion. He didn’t care about the sneers of the neighbors, or the vulgar graffiti, or the hate mail from the residents’ committee. Dad was a pretty strange guy, and there’s no denying he made some bad decisions right up to the end, but he was wise enough to know that gnomes weren’t the real problem.
“So,” I say, remembering that James charges by the hour. “What can I do about it?”
“Well,” he replies, with almost comic slowness. “It seems to me that you have certain preoccupations which are, at present, inhibiting your ability to live and work in the city. Do you think that’s fair?”
Is he taking the piss?
“Yeah,” I say, deciding to give him the benefit of the doubt. “I suspect that may be fair.”
James is nodding again. At this rate, he’s going to give himself repetitive strain injury. He takes a deep breath before posing his next question. “How would you react to the suggestion that these preoccupations are having a negative impact on your interactions with other people?”
Christ alive. “How would I react?” I ask, the sarcasm in my voice no longer disguised.
James inclines his head, just once, and brings his fingers together. He’s really starting to get on my tits now. “Well, James, I guess I would react by saying that’s pretty much what I just told you.”
His face morphs into a cocktail of condescension and displeasure—the change is disturbingly swift. It reminds me of how my politics teacher reacted when I threatened to tell everyone about the time he’d fingered me in a cleaners’ cupboard at the Christmas disco. I’ll admit it was pretty horrible—slut was the descriptor favored by my mother after a few drinks, and I’d heard it enough—but a nurse at the local sexual health clinic who spent her lunch breaks smoking weed with Elle was persuaded to steal some official-looking paper and an NHS envelope stamped PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL. My understanding—from Mr. Roberts’s abrupt departure and the subsequent news of his divorce—is that his pregnant wife opened the letter, so it wasn’t all bad.
I open my mouth to speak, but James holds up a finger. I’m not so keen on those hands anymore. “Take a moment to think about what I’ve said, please, Sasha,” he says. “This is a safe space. There’s no need for you to be upset.” I suddenly realize I know exactly what kind of girlfriends he has: his mates all agree they’re boring as hell, but no one ever considers what that might say about him.
I can hear James scheduling our next appointment as my heels clop down the stairs. I wonder how long it’ll take him to realize that I’ve left the room, or that myopia and decent-looking hands only get a guy so far.
Elle texts me on the way back to the office. How did it go????????
I type, It never ceases to amaze me how mediocre white men can really get ahead in this place.
That’s the American Dream for you, she replies.
Another alarmingly warm fall sets in, and the city’s pestilence festers. The air hangs heavy, like the weight of a grievous error, and the putrid stench of trash and piss lingers in even the most fortunate neighborhoods.
Nobody speaks. D.C.’s inhabitants drag themselves to work, their shirts dark with sweat and their faces pale from damp, sleepless nights listening to cockroaches skittering on the bathroom tiles and rats fucking on the roof. The air is wet, but Rock Creek has run stone-dry and the Potomac shrinks from its banks to reveal shopping carts and take-out boxes half-buried in the silt. Fish flounder in the filth, their bellies swelled with plastic, and rats slink forth in the fetid daylight to swallow them whole. They’ve started eating the squirrels, too, and the cats. There are rumors that in the South Eastern quarter, a pack of rats ambushed the terriers sent in to catch them and tore the dogs to shreds with rabid, greedy claws and shrieks of glee.
In the CBD, it’s clear they’re thriving. At rush hour, they clamber cheerily up the stairs from the metro. Some have learned to balance on their hind legs and can be seen wandering down the avenues clutching litter at their sides like tiny briefcases. In the evening, they bask in the clammy warmth of restaurant patios. A child’s photo of a rat swinging playfully from the White House flagpole goes viral, and the internet bubbles with memes of various critters nesting in the artfully teased locks of the first lady. Elle sends me a gif of a rat king seething in the place of the president’s toupee, but I’ve forgotten how to laugh. Their audacity astounds me. A video of a rat squeezing its way into the Supreme Court does the rounds on Twitter, and those who can bear the heat take their placards to the steps and chant. The president says he will not be intimidated. There’s not enough water for the police cannons, so they use nerve gas instead.
My neck and shoulders grow tense from the stress. Every rustling leaf on the sidewalk has me paralyzed, so I stop walking to work and take cabs instead. I stay in at night and tell the men who message me that I’ve gone back to England for my grandmother’s funeral, even though she’s not dead and I’d be devastated if she were.
I can’t sleep. I imagine filthy feet scratching around my house, ghastly hides crawling with ticks and lice and blowflies and sewage and death. Elle achieves a personal best for number of WhatsApps per day, but I don’t know how to respond to any of them.
I stop taking lunch breaks and weekends and spend the time online instead. My boss notices how frazzled I look. She assumes it’s the extra work for our current case and suggests I take some time off. They’ll just about survive if I’m at home for a couple of days, she laughs. She obviously doesn’t realize that I won’t, or that working pro bono on sexual harassment cases is somehow the only thing that makes me feel good about life.
To avoid further questions, I head to the bathroom to apply some bronzer and the only lipstick I can find—a trendy mauve shade which conspires with the lights above the sink to turn me into one of those creepy dead girls who linger at windows in horror movies and once caused me to spend a whole month’s salary on drapes (despite living on the 26th floor and knowing that zombies don’t exist, pre-teen or otherwise). I send a selfie to Elle and she replies immediately: WTF??? Halloween’s not ‘til the 31st, babe.
Back at my desk, I down a double espresso and perform some typo-heavy Google searches in a frenzied attempt at self-diagnosis. I learn the terms urban rodentologist and leptospirosis. I read about how rats copulate twenty times a day with up to six different partners. It seems wildly unfair that vermin should get all the play, so I go on Tinder and swipe right a few times, but the memory of my last date makes my stomach turn.
I try to focus on the facts. A Washingtonian article tells me that a single rat can produce 25,000 droppings per annum and take out the power supply to a third of D.C. with one swift bite. It says that, for a rat, a dog turd is like an energy bar. I learn that the biggest rats weigh in at an appalling nine pounds, and I crosscheck with a recent all-staff email to confirm that the healthy boy which Aisha from Accounts birthed last week did indeed weigh considerably less.
The rodent-related clickbait is astonishing. I try to resist, but like any common or garden addict, barely ten minutes pass before I’m gorging on lines of a monstrous Huffington Post article entitled “Rats Entered Corpses Through Vagina And Anus At D.C. Hospital”. I vomit, again, right there at my desk, and the intern who’s not allowed a lunch break comes over to ask if I need anything. He’s good-looking, in an indecently young kind of way, and I wonder why I haven’t noticed him before. The puke drips from the desk and together we watch it splash the suede of his new shoes. I find it weirdly moving how he pretends not to mind.
The fan wafts the scent of vomit gently around the space. The intern asks if I’m okay.
“I’m pregnant,” I say. “But only eight weeks, so please don’t tell anyone.” Fortunately, the intern’s pretty naïve and still in possession of that prep school penchant for the clandestine. I suspect he also rather enjoys my accent and its connotations, so I tell him that the father is also my mother’s latest husband and that our tryst occurred on their wedding night, upon the very altar where the nuptial vows had so recently been uttered.
The intern’s freckled cheeks flush a deep and rather fetching crimson as he stammers out a Boy Scout promise. Of course, there’s no way for him to know that I haven’t screwed anyone in months, or that almost a year has passed since my mother finally succeeded in drowning herself in gin. I ask him for some Kleenex to mop up the vomit and suggest we go for drinks after work. He seems confused but eager to please, so when he comes back with the tissues we agree a time and place. Once he’s gone, I remember that his name is Rufus, or maybe Rupert.
Emptying a packet of gum into my mouth, I type How do you cure a mortal fear of rats? with renewed vigor. I’m about to click the link beginning, ‘My Own Private Terrorists’ when I spot an advert for a support group which meets every Friday night. Anonymous drop-in sessions, it says. No commitment necessary. I take a breath and note down the address.
When the Uber driver hears my accent, he asks how I’m finding D.C. He’s older than I expected, and speaks in a slow, measured way that reminds me of a professor I had at Cambridge—several times, in fact: most memorably in his tiny office at the top of a dingy Sixties stairwell in which my fellow students waited politely for their supervision.
I tell him—Gregory—how I’m struggling with the heat, and how I’ve mostly stopped going out because of the rats.
“It’s definitely bad,” he says. “But that’s like—what’s that British idiom? ‘Cutting off your nose to spite your face.’” His eyes in the mirror are tired and kind. “Don’t you think?”
“I probably seem a bit obsessed.”
“It’s okay. I find it kind of endearing.”
I ask him how long he’s been driving and he says it’s been nearly three years now.
“Oh—I actually just meant how long have you been out today?”
“Right,” he says, smiling. “Since about half five. I’m a teacher during the day.”
“You’re a teacher?” I echo, pleased with my ability to slip into the rather basic configurations of D.C. dialogue.
“Yeah,” he says. “I teach literature to young offenders. But my mom got sick, so…” He flicks the indicator gently and we turn onto M street. A rogue shaft of sunlight breaks through the smog and glitters on the golden dome of the Farmers and Mechanics Branch. It used to annoy me that there are no apostrophes, but somehow it doesn’t matter right now. Hot shadows grow long over the tarmac. Everything seems impossibly sad.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say.
“It’s okay,” he says. “The driving isn’t so bad. It pays the bills. And, you know, I get to meet interesting people.”
We sit in traffic and listen to the radio and the hum of the AC. From my window I can see a man sitting on the sidewalk, clattering change in a tin cup. His possessions are piled in plastic bags beside him and a cardboard sign rests against the stump of his leg. His remaining foot sports the latest Nike trainer, gleaming white against the grime of the concrete. I can’t decide what’s more upsetting: that he did buy it, or that he didn’t.
It says on the news that there’s a storm coming.
“Thank God,” says Gregory. I think he means it literally; a plastic rosary dangles from his rearview mirror.
I ask him what the rats will do. Does he think they’ll rush inside in one huge teeming swarm? Will they have enough food, or will they turn on humans?
There’s a pause before Gregory says that he doesn’t know. He touches the accelerator and we roll forward before the lights change again. His movements are very deliberate. I realize I haven’t felt this calm in a long time.
“Hey,” I say. “Do you want to go for a drink some time?”
Gregory looks out of his window. “It’s kind of you to ask,” he says. “But I’m not sure that’s a good idea right now. Thanks all the same.”
“Is it the lipstick? I promise you I don’t normally look like this.”
I want to make him laugh but he only smiles. “I think the lipstick’s great,” he says.
We watch gaggles of bag-laden college girls swarm the crossing, unconcerned by the vermin which teem around them.
“Did you know there are more rats in D.C. than there are people?” I ask. “This city has the third highest rodent population in the U.S.”
“Is that right?”
“After New York and Chicago.”
“Huh,” says Gregory. “My father was from Chicago.”
“Did he say they were bad?”
“You know,” says Gregory, “We never got a chance to talk about it.”
“I don’t understand how people can live with it. Why can’t we just get rid of them?”
“I guess there’s only so much the average person can do.”
“But most people don’t seem to do anything. Do they not see how bad it is, or do they just not care?”
He shrugs. “I guess they just get used to it, is all. Look, the traffic seems like it’s pretty bad tonight. You might be better off walking from here.”
“It’s okay,” I say quickly. “I mean, I’m not in a rush. Do you mind?”
“Sure. No problem.” We take a left up the hill and I watch the storm drains for signs of movement. I wish I could tell Gregory how tired I am of being tyrannized, but he pulls up to the curb.
I double-check the address and send the scared face emoji to Elle. She responds You can do it!!!!!!! so I take a breath and ring the bell.
The host, a beleaguered man in a pair of rubber gloves, introduces himself as Garvin. He’s middle-aged but looks even more drained than you’d expect. He ushers me downstairs to a large, starkly lit room where cellophane sheeting has been taped over the wooden floor and skirting. The windows and fireplace have been boarded up with sheets of steel. The chairs arranged in a central circle are white plastic, brand new.
“The meeting won’t start until seven,” says Garvin. “Would you like a drink? Everything’s been sterilized.”
I realize I’ve forgotten all about Rufus/Rupert. The thought of him at the bar just blushing quietly to himself makes me feel a bit bad.
I accept a large glass of white and look around. It seems like a bizarre fancy-dress party. Most people are sporting some level of hazmat gear, some almost weapons-grade, some delightfully homespun. Somebody shrieks and everyone jumps, but Garvin calls out that it’s just a false alarm.
There’s one surprising individual in the corner holding a glass of water. He’s wearing a light gray t-shirt, dark jeans, no wedding ring. He sees me looking and walks over.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hi.”
There’s an awkward silence in which we smile at each other for a little too long. I can feel my desperation mounting, so I look around at the others. “I didn’t realize it was fancy dress tonight,” I say.
It’s lame, but the guy laughs anyway. Manners are obviously his thing. “I know! But at least you remembered the lipstick. Garvin’s mad at me for forgetting mine. Friday’s purple night, you see.”
“Oh no! I’m so sorry I can’t help you with that.”
“You can’t?”
“Nope. You see, this isn’t purple. It’s just that the lighting in here is really bad.”
“Terrible lighting. The worst lighting.”
“Alright, Mr. President.”
Encouraged by his laughter, I introduce myself. He says he already knows.
“What?”
“We went for a drink,” he says. “About a year ago.”
“Oh, fuck.”
He grins. “We did go back to my place, yes. But then you—well, I guess you recall.”
I seriously hope he’s kidding. “I’m so sorry. This is really bad.”
“Not really bad,” he says. “Just mildly humiliating. For me, that is.”
He is, thank God, still smiling. I look at his dark stubble and the neat line around his lips. A vague memory flounders in the goldfish bowl of my mind.
“Wait,” I say. “You’ve got that place in Adams Morgan, right?”
“Nope.”
“Columbia Heights?”
“Different guy.”
“Right. I’ve actually just made it worse, haven’t I?”
“Hey,” he says. “Don’t beat yourself up about it. You were pretty sick. How’s the stomach ulcer?”
“Ah. You’re Nick.” He nods, and I take a gulp of wine. “Ugh. That was a bad night.”
“How come?” His gaze is very direct. “Did I do something you don’t like?”
I think about him undoing my jeans, and his hot tongue, and, later, his deft fingers unhooking my bra. There’s a level of proficiency to which a woman on the dating scene is, frankly, unaccustomed. “Quite the opposite,” I say. My heart’s aping a fucking Jack-in-the-box, but Nick just smiles.
“Well, welcome,” he says, clinking his glass against mine. “I guess this is your first time?”
“It is! I’m excited but nervous. You know, nervously excited. Excitedly nervous.”
“Yes. I can see that.”
Any minute now the glass is going to slip from my sweaty grasp. “So…” I begin, in an ill-fated attempt to get a grip.
There’s a pause of not insignificant length.
“So,” echoes Nick, grinning. It occurs to me that I’ve never really thought of dimples as being sexy until now. “What are the chances, I wonder?”
“That what?”
“You know, that we both…” He makes a gesture that encompasses us and the room.
“Oh! Right,” I say, imagining the emojis that Elle will respond with later – probably fireworks, and the little yellow face with hearts for eyes, and almost certainly the water sploosh. “Yeah. I wonder.”
Obviously I can’t be bothered to work out the actual probability, but the more I look at him, the more I’m starting to realize that the chances I’m a complete moron are pretty fucking high.
I take a slug of wine and try to sound casual. “So does this place actually help?”
Nick shrugs. “I mean, the city’s still overrun with diseased, shit-eating vermin. But I guess this is about finding a way to live with it.”
I consider this. “Do you think that’s a good thing?”
He frowns. “I don’t know. I used to think it would make more sense to get to the root of the actual problem. But I guess—well, to be honest, I just got so tired.”
“Yeah. I know what you mean. Maybe that’s what happens with everyone at some point. But it just feels a bit like giving up, you know? Like, I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do. I mean, the people who talk about it say that it’s intolerable. But they do tolerate it. Life goes on, for them—and I don’t know how they can do it. I guess I’m just not like that. Maybe it’s naïve or delusional or whatever, but I keep on thinking there must be another way.”
Nick is nodding, but with a look that makes my stomach lurch with the horrible feeling of having done it again. My mother used to warn me about this, as though her lucrative divorces made her the expert in male taste. Elle does a great impression of her, lying back on the sofa with a heavily jeweled hand pressed to her forehead and nailing that languid, mid-Atlantic drawl. That’s enough now, darling. I mean, really! Is it any wonder you don’t have a boyfriend?
I suddenly realize that I don’t miss my mother at all. In fact, I’m glad she’s dead.
“Nicholas?”
“Sasha.”
“Do you want to go for a drink?”
Nick raises his eyebrows. “Right now?”
“Right now.”
“Well, yes,” he says. “I think I do. Have you got somewhere in mind?”
The tangle in my stomach loosens a little. “We could see what’s on Wisconsin, maybe?”
“Sure. Sounds good.”
I can’t help but smile. “Okay then. Great. I’ll call a cab.”
“No need,” he says. “It’s only a couple of blocks. I think it might be cooler out by now.”
I feel my pulse quicken. “There’s actually meant to be a storm coming.”
Nick just grins. “Then I guess we’d better make a run for it.”
He puts our drinks on the table, calls goodbye to Garvin (too busy disinfecting the corkscrew to notice), and leads the way upstairs, ass indecently shapely in his jeans. When he opens the front door, the sky beyond the frame throbs with huge, violet clouds.
“Wow,” he laughs. “That does seem kind of ominous.”
I watch him, silhouetted against the glow. He looks back over his shoulder, one hand on the door. “Are you okay? Did you forget something?”
I’m gripping the banister, a few steps from the top. The corridor stretches infinitely between us.
I can’t go forward.
“I’ll be right with you,” I say. “Sorry. I’ve just got to—” I try to turn around but my hand won’t let go of the rail.
“Sasha?”
My vision tilts strangely. The air feels unbearably hot. “Just give me one second,” I say, the words loud in my ears. “I think I—I just need—sorry. You go on ahead. I’ll be with you in a second.”
Ali Wilding is a writer of short stories and flash fiction. Originally from the UK, she now lives and works in New York City. She was selected as a finalist in The Iowa Review’s 2019 Short Fiction contest and semi-finalist in American Short Fiction’s 2019 Flash Fiction competition. Her stories have appeared in Pif Magazine online and The Fiction Pool, and further work is forthcoming in The Write Launch (November 2019). More at aliwilding.com.