In Short – Issue 2 (Winter 2025)
January 31, 2025
Dartmoor by Sean Bw Parker
How to: A Love Story
By Allison Field Bell
[Trigger warning: This piece contains reference to sexual assault.]
I.
Don’t eat anything for three days. This is an essential part of the grieving process. You are mourning a relationship of course—your first. High school. And you’re embracing the cliché: lost appetite. The last time you ate anything? You crumbled off a few bites from a muffin your friend ordered at Coffee Catz. That was three days ago.
II.
Attend the annual Hannukah party. Wear the tight turquoise shirt that you thought would never look good on you because your stomach always squished out over your jeans—not much, you’re only 17—but enough to make you self-conscious. And now, three days without food and you feel like you could wear anything. So you wear the tight turquoise shirt with the high neck and you think you look good. Amazing what an empty stomach can do for self-esteem.
III.
Drink the lemon drops that your friend’s mother prepares for you. A traded promise of spending the night and not driving. Your friend’s mother is cooler than your own. In front of your own mother, you could never drink. But this mother shakes lemon juice with vodka and rims your glass with sugar. The lemon drops go down fast and smooth and straight to your head.
IV.
Convince this mother to let you all attend a party in town. Daniel will drive—he hasn’t had a drop to drink—and he promises to be responsible, to take care of you and your friends. The mother—cooler by the minute—allows this. You leave and you’re already drunk. You roll down the window and hang your head out in the cold night air like a dog.
V.
Drink more. And you do.
VI.
Make out with a Titus twin. The right Titus twin. Not the one who dated your friend, but the one known to be a slut. But he’s stoned and drunk, and you don’t really like him much anyway. You don’t like how he looks at every girl like she’s available. This is where you stray from your plan. Because the other twin—the one who dated your friend—shares a bottle with you.
VII.
Follow this wrong Titus twin back to his room in the guest house. Take off all your clothes.
VIII.
When Daniel comes knocking on the door, telling you it’s time to go home, reminding you of your promise to your friend’s mother, refuse. Tell him to fuck right off. I’m having fun, you giggle through the door.
IX.
Let Daniel and your friends leave without you. And when your father finds out you’re still at the party—your friend’s mother called of course, making her not that cool after all—when he drags your friends back to the party, telling them it’s either them or him who retrieves you, refuse to leave again. Tell them to fuck off. Tell them this until they’re sobbing at the locked door, begging you to come outside. Then finally, throw your clothes on—forgetting your underwear—and stumble out.
X.
In the car with your father and your crying friends, tell your father what you really think. Curse him like you can’t stop. Tell him that for once in your goddamn life you were having fun and why the fuck did he have to ruin it? Make your friends uncomfortable until he drops them off. When you get to your house, your father silent and maybe a little scared of you, vomit all over the driveway.
XI.
Crawl into bed alone with your clothes on, vomit on your turquoise shirt.
XII.
When you wake in the morning, don’t apologize. Your father will do that for you. He’ll say he doesn’t want to punish you because he believes your hangover is punishment enough. And when you return to the party house to collect your underwear, the twin tells you he wants to see you again and here’s your underwear—balled up under his bed, he points to it with his shoe. Don’t see him again. Except you do.
XIII.
And this isn’t where a story ends but where it begins. Not eating. Drinking, vomiting. Thinking you know what intimacy is. What loving is. Making a love story of a boy you got drunk with at a party. A love saga that will continue into your twenties. A man who will call you into your thirties. A story of alcohol, a story of mental illness, a story of: he shot heroin into his leg once, almost died. A story of a trailer in an apple orchard and the sex you didn’t consent to have with him. A story of what you’re willing to tolerate.
Tell yourself a better story.
Allison Field Bell (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from New Mexico State University. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, WITHOUT WOMAN OR BODY, forthcoming 2025 from Finishing Line Press and the creative nonfiction chapbook, EDGE OF THE SEA, forthcoming 2025 from CutBank Books. Allison's prose appears in Best Small Fictions 2024, Best Microfiction 2024, DIAGRAM, The Gettysburg Review, The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Smartish Pace, Passages North, THRUSH Poetry Journal, RHINO Poetry, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.