Grace has a bedroom that we admire. Lotions and potions and when Grace comes out of her bedroom she looks like one of those girls who is a majorette. We hate Grace because of her pink bedroom. Pink covers, pink chair and pink sheets. We hate pink. We hate Grace for her pink bedroom.
Grace is medium height like us, but we don’t have pink bedrooms. She has a good figure just like us, but we have a better ass.
Grace goes to school just like us. We ignore her, we hate her. She’s too pretty for us to like her. She gets good grades like us, but we are better at math than she is. We might become a mathematician or a chemical engineer. Who knows what we will become. One of us is related to Grace, which makes one of us dislike her intensely.
Grace takes pills. We don’t. We are free to dislike Grace. Maybe Grace is Anne? We don’t know. One of us asks her parents. They say her name is Grace Anne. We hate that name. We hate everything about Grace because she has a pink bedroom with lotions and potions.
We get married but Grace doesn’t get married. She has become a teacher at a private school. We go to the private school and mock Grace. The kids mock her too. She is now heavy and we are thin.
We are so thin our men can’t see us. We run and we bike, we walk so our bodies are thin. Grace doesn’t do anything but teach and eat. We hate Grace for teaching and eating.
When we get older, we lose track of Grace. We may be dead. Or married. Or single. Who knows? Grace Anne is our cousin. We hate our cousin. We hate Grace.
Sue Powers’ fictions have appeared in numerous publications, including Saturday Evening Post, New Millenniums Writings, Blue Earth Review, Micro Monday, R-KV-R-Y, Funny in Five Hundred, Blue Lake Magazine, Adanna Literary, Dying Dahlia Review, Off the Rocks, and others. The News was on stage at a Chicago Theater. She was a recipient of a fellowship and grant from the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Prose, and two of stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. A book of her stories was published by Atmosphere Press.
