What They Meant to Keep

She asked how I knew so many words: climb, swallow, floorboard, forever, window, trash. I told her I had done a lot of listening, found traces of what people had left behind, what they didn’t mean to drop, what they meant to keep: sequence, milk, choke, elbow, floss, devotion.

Later, I said the thing about words is that when they disappear you can still remember. She said the thing about remembering is that you’re bound to forget.

David Cotrone is from Plymouth, MA. His work has appeared in Fifty-Two Stories, The Rumpus, PANK, elimae, >kill author, Dark Sky Magazine, and elsewhere.