In Short – Issue 3 (Spring 2025)

May 31, 2025

“The City of Eyes” by Alexis E Jacobson

Night Walk

By Elizabeth Rose

I am aware of the risk, that when I use my fingers to wipe my eyes, I may unintentionally extract one of my good long eyelashes. I find one clinging to the pad of my index finger and grieve the loss of something small that might have made me beautiful. I wonder, in my bereavement, how much less attractive I’ve just made myself in diminishing the length and volume of my lash line.  

I continue to walk the bridge on Connecticut toward Dupont Circle and wipe my eyes with cold hands—even knowing the risk—because it is night, and I am in my pajamas, and it is the city, so I get to stop being a woman for a little bit. I can bawl unabashedly in public, and the few cars and bikers who witness my walk will think nothing of an anonymous weeper on the bridge.  

I try very earnestly to focus on the feeling of cool night air, to hold the breeze tight to my skin, to appreciate the movement of my muscles, and notice how much more at ease I feel when I can see over the tops of trees—how satisfying it is to take in Rock Creek from this height. I try to release the weight of the last hour, the past few weeks, several unspeakable years, into the gray-blue ocean of a cloudy and moonless sky. I’m in the middle, genuinely, of this exhale, letting it fall upward into the sky-sea above me, watching it roll into the momentum of a wave and let loose, release, be lost in the chaos of the crash, each thought, each feeling, fleeting, dissolved, particles in air I dismiss from my lungs when no longer useful to me—I am trying, truly to let go and feel good, but I can’t quite because I am suddenly, startlingly aware that it is night, and I am in my pajamas, and it is the city, and I am still a woman, if lashless and unbeautiful.  

I hurry to find light and a locked door so that a shadow or a passerby may not witness my weeping and take it for weakness and take something from me. I have little left. I hide at home and sigh instead into this page and hope it’s enough. But it’s so much smaller than the sky. 

Elizabeth Rose (she/her) was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but has lived in the Carolinas, Turkey, Spain, Thailand, California, and Washington, DC. Her academic work on eco-anxiety, ecofeminism, and the history of women in higher education has been published by Duke University, Georgetown University, and The Herald-Sun. She won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story competition while serving as a Lannan Fellow for creative writing at Georgetown, where she also taught graduate-level writing workshops. She is currently working on her first novel. Find her on Instagram: @elizabethrosewrites