Read More: A Q&A with Gail Upchurch
I.
You leave Khalil because he hates your body. Khalil hates your body because it can’t hold on to babies. He’s too nice a guy to say it outright, but every night he leaves a gulf between his body and your own, in the same bed that for three years was the site of your joint orgasms. So, you make the decision for both of you and announce that you’ve accepted the job in Poughkeepsie at Lisle College.
He grabs the edge of the counter with one hand and literally leans in to you, eyes squinty. You sit at the Formica counter, sorting files, deciding which to pack, which to toss, keeping your hands busy and your eyes—mostly— away from his face. His nose flares. Ropy dreadlocs threaten to drown his face, something he calls his Jesus look. On any other day, the unwieldy hair that springs from his scalp endears him to you. Today, it only adds to the pall of the conversation. The death of your relationship—like your two babies—is inevitable.
“Let’s try to figure this out,” he says, breathing deeply through his nose. His chest heaves, reminding you of the heart that beats beneath it. You care. Just not enough to stay in that broken apartment anymore.
“I’m sorry.” You look at him. The Vaseline you applied to your lips earlier makes a cheesy line right inside your lower lip which you scrape with the ridges of your teeth. “I don’t think I can see it.” Your voice holds a dismissive lilt—too light.
“Can’t see us?” He crooks his face to the side.
“It’s the flying back and forth. There aren’t any direct flights from Stewart to O’Hare.” You sigh. “Maybe we ought to just face facts—a long-distance thing isn’t tenable right now. I’ll be starting a new job, launching research for the third project. I just won’t have the kind of time you’re expecting and— deserve.”
Khalil makes a noise with his mouth, something like a clicking of his teeth, before taking your face into his hands, forcing you to look him directly in his eyes. “Don’t tell me what I deserve.”
You struggle from his grasp, not because it hurts, but because you don’t like it—and he squints again, like you had become blurry or something. His years as a photographer make him a master at seeing you.
Khalil shakes his head. “I can’t believe the first chance you get, you run off hundreds of miles away.” He paces the floor, making big round movements with his hands. “I don’t know. Here I am thinking we were making a life together. Was I alone?” He touches your arm when you look away. “Don’t you think we should have talked about this before you made a decision to move to . . . Poughkeepsie?” Then he lowers his voice to a whisper like you aren’t the only two people in the 1980s kitchen with the beige backsplash and matching stove. “We can try again, you know.”
You stop fiddling with the files, blink hard. You see from the look on his face that he knows he’s gone too far. You get up and go to the bedroom. A few open boxes in various stages of fullness lay on the floor. Some with only a few shirts and pairs of pants inside.
He’s fast on your heels, obviously remorseful. “Sorry,” Khalil says as he walks. “I didn’t mean to bring it up like that, but it’s true.” He runs his hand over his hair, holding a few locs on top of his head before letting them cascade. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I don’t know what to say. Anything, but please don’t run away.”
Clutching beneath your navel, you will yourself into a thick wall of ice, thankful to be leaving Chicago—for good.
You scoff. “I’m only taking a job,” you say with your back to him.
He stuffs his hands in the front pockets of his jeans, hurling his set of keys on the nightstand, the clatter of metal startling you. “This is ridiculous,” he says. Your hands shake even though that’s not what you want them to do.
After Khalil slams the door, you wait a few minutes before running to the front and think of telling him why you can’t stay. But you don’t because you’re afraid he’ll say you’re right. Anyway, his car has already made it to the corner. It hovers for a few minutes before turning.
II.
The day before the movers come to haul away your life, the phone rings.
“It’s Paul,” he says. “From Howard.”
The deep baritone that so often woke you up on the dorm’s extra-long twin mattress is indelibly etched in your memory, but you don’t want to seem presumptuous, reveal that the previous joining of your bodies might have meant more to you than it had to him. Your stomach tightens.
“Don’t be a dick. I know who this is,” you say.
This will always be true.
You used to love Paul. Desperately. You used to have extremely responsible, clumsy-at-
first sex which turned into lazy and amazing, pull-out sex— the latter resulting in a pregnancy Paul never even knew happened, one you did away with so you wouldn’t miss out on that yearlong Fulbright Fellowship to Ghana. You rationalized how you could always have babies later, when you were established in your career.
Flumping on the faded orange twill chair, you take a sip of tepid coffee— Sanka. You already packed the Keurig and you’re desperate. You think about how you and Paul used to sit in the West Towers and drink Sanka and smoke cigarettes and talk about Bush’s shitty rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction and an even shittier Iraq War when poor black communities continued to suffer. You lick the front of your teeth and think about his teeth—round, crooked on the bottom—his rose-colored gums, his cigarette stained lips. You both thought you were so cool, smoking those fucking You’ve Come a Long Way Baby Virginia Slims when neither of you had gone anywhere yet.
“Same. It’s been a while,” Paul says.
“A few years, anyway.”
“I think it was that African Diaspora Conference in Madrid.”
“Right, and then only in passing,” you say.
Three years ago. You didn’t want to be in Spain or alive really, and you certainly didn’t want to see anyone, least of all Paul. You were still bleeding from the first miscarriage. You saw him, not at the conference itself, but in downtown Madrid, eating tapas with a woman who looked like a frog.
“Hey, Audrey,” he called, half standing, the cloth napkin on his lap falling to the ground.
The sight of him made your uterus cramp—you passed another blood clot. You waved, clawed at your jacket and ran toward the hotel. You must have looked a fright in your brown tweed blazer and gray Champion jogging pants, carrying a cup of gelato in a brown paper bag, moving past an Asian baby girl in a stroller pushed by a Spanish abuelita.
“Audrey, wait,” Paul yelled.
Out the corner of your eye, you thought you saw him jogging to catch up with you or maybe you made that part up. All you know is you left the square faster than a communion disc on a sinner’s tongue.
“Right.” Paul pauses. “I had just gotten the job here at Lisle.”
“Um hm. And I guess I must have just gotten the postdoc at Chicago.”
“We landed well.”
“You landed well. I landed safe,” you say. You had parlayed your postdoc at the University of Chicago into a permanent-like, scholar-in-residence situation, putting off getting a real professorship.
Paul lets out a jaunty laugh. “Now look at us. Did you ever think we’d be at the same
school again, working together this time?”
“No,” you say. You’d be lying if you said you didn’t know Paul was at Lisle when you accepted the job in the Political Science Department. You’d followed him quite a bit through the years—two articles in the African American Review, his talk at MLA in Los Angeles. The internet is wondrous that way. Stalkers barely had any work to do anymore.
The other information you learned second hand, rumors from academics you’d met in passing that no one was touching his book on account of its pedestrian analysis. A shame really, but it was typical of the Paul you knew in undergrad. Smart but not inspired, an intellectual lightweight who barely managed a mastery of his field. It was a miracle he was still on faculty, only a matter of time before he was denied tenure. Lisle was the kind of institution that cancelled you, even if there was a flicker of promise. And then he’d be on to a tenure-track at some four-year, teaching a four-four load with no start-up research funds if he was lucky—sunk in a vat of adjunct teaching at community colleges for the rest of his career if he wasn’t.
You’re a better academic than he is—already working on your third book. Lisle offered you the position, courted you—you didn’t even have to apply. But that’s not why you took the job. And you didn’t agree to move to God-awful Poughkeepsie, New York because Paul was there or because you wanted to gloat. You took the position because you had to leave Chicago, the apartment, Khalil, and the ghosts of your dead babies. Khalil was right. You were running away.
“So when are you and your partner coming to Poughkeepsie?” he asks.
You feel a pang. Paul is fishing, seeing if you’re attached. The finality of your decision
to leave Khalil behind settles in. You think about Khalil hoisting those keys at you like daggers.
“Um . . . it’s just me. Movers come tomorrow. My flight is on Sunday.”
Paul jumps right on it, a lightness in his voice. “Why don’t you come here for dinner then? You’ll probably be bushed with all the travelling and we’d love to have you over. Save you a little on food.”
A deluge of old emotional garbage from undergrad mushrooms in your throat. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That’s nice of you, but I couldn’t possibly impose,” you say.
“Nonsense. I insist. Plus—,” Paul says, pausing, “I’d love to see you. I know Lila would too.”
You burst into a laugh-cough. This is his angle. For you to see that you hadn’t killed him when you broke up right before you left for Ghana. That he had a life and in it someone loved him—that light-skinned girl he started dating after you, that girl who was as deep as cotton candy, frothy, weightless. You could still make out her heart-shaped face with the small glossed lips (how did she manage blow jobs with those things?), strolling on the yard in wedge sandals and a halter top with a relaxed, shoulder length bob. You had forgotten her name until he mentioned it. Lila. Lila. Lila. Her name made you play games with the tip of your tongue like an idiot.
“What’s funny?” he asks.
You concede with an imperceptible sigh. “Sure. Why not? It’d be great to catch up.”
“Great.” Paul seems relieved. “We’ll see you Sunday, say six? Is that good?”
“Um-hm. Thanks,” you say, though you can’t stop your uterus from aching, the tug from some otherworldly place. […]
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Gail Upchurch is a writer of young adult and adult fiction. She is a 2025 Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, a 2022 Kimbilio Fellow, a finalist for the 2022 Pen Parentis Fellowship, and a 2021 Tin House YA Scholar. Besides this, her short story “The Cottage” was nominated for a 2024 O. Henry Prize. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University’s program for writers and an MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in fiction from Chicago State University. Gail has recent short stories published in The Missouri Review, Obsidian: Journal & Ideas in the African Diaspora, Tupelo Quarterly,Torch Literary Arts, and Sequestrum and is currently at work on a young adult novel and a linked short story collection.
“Broken Thin” originally appeared in Taint Taint Taint Magazine.
Read More: A Q&A with Gail Upchurch