"The Arctic," flash fiction by John Brantingham

Joyce, who likes to watch, lives above the liquor store her parents run. Her bedroom overlooks the parking lot, and in the evening when she is doing her homework, she stares at the people chatting with each other, saying hello as they pass. They park under the amber lights in the evening.

On days like today, the snow makes the three o’clock sun so dim the street lights trigger on. She’s just walked home from the high school, just sat down, taken out her math textbook and paper and pencil, and when she looks out, she sees Mr. Montgomery and Ms. Anzio, who everyone knows are seeing each other, outside talking. He’s holding a bottle of Jim Beam, and she has wine, and he’s making her laugh, and she touches his shoulder with her index finger, and she blushes, and Joyce wonders about alcohol, and that world of adults.

Ms. Anzio teaches science, so when Joyce sees the snowy owl here for the winter, down from the arctic, glide silently over her teachers and land to perch on the edge of the roof, she wants to tap the window with her fingernail and point at it. Ms. Anzio talks about them so often, what a special thing it is to see them from the arctic in the winter and the bobolinks from Argentina in the summer, and she would tap and point, but she thinks the two are wrapped in a kind of bubble of adulthood that pushes her to the outside. So she leans back in her chair and watches the owl instead of people.

The owl sits there and then glides away into the coldness of the blue-gray sky, and Joyce watches it in her imagination swirl into the clouds above into the realm of wind and ice. In her imagination, Mr. Montgomery and Ms. Anzio call each other Phil and Dede, and they mix complicated drinks and speak of complicated things and chuckle at their own wit in Ms. Anzio’s living room. She would have potpourri. She would play jazz or classical. Joyce can see the owl floating into space. She can hear the adults talking. She wonders what it is like to live in a world like that.