In Short – Issue 4 (Winter 2026)

January 31, 2026

Image credit: John Repp

A Toast to Impossible Futures

By Lauren D. Woods

T loved to hold court in his kitchen, to raise a tall, stemmed glass with declarations of love and intentions for the year ahead. As though, after a year, on his next birthday, any of our guests would remember them. Or the shapes of the glasses, or the way we arranged the cheese on the cutting board, or the pressing of his fingers upon my shoulders.

Far from our old home in Virginia, there is a five-thousand-year-old tavern, unearthed in southern Iraq, with an open-air kitchen, an oven, and a clay refrigerator. Years later, when I come across an article about its discovery, I will think of T. 

To say that every part of T is gone now denies the truth of what remains with us after we pass. The stains on our old counters, for example. The memory of a year that was meant to be no year in particular but turned out to be his last. And meanwhile, I thought his drawers full of unpaid bills to be the marks of foolishness.

The tavern was in an urban neighborhood in southwest Asia around 2700 B.C.E., so say the archaeologists, who might someday classify our old place as an urban neighborhood in Northern Virginia. They too had refrigerators, of an ancient kind, which meant they too planned for impossible futures. 

And T had a son, and so they too, presumably, had children, and who is to say who the fool is or where the future stops or begins? T must have felt, that night, in the shouts that rang out, in our arms around each other, the feeling of some future already realized. 

What was it he promised? Who can say now? Intentions are the purview of the living. I remember too how our sliding doors caught on a broken track, so we had to lift them as we pushed to get onto the deck after T’s toast. The landlord said all year he would fix it. 

Lagash was the name of the archaeological site—an industrial hub in southern Mesopotamia. I only met T after his return home from fighting in Iraq. What came before and how it all changed him is a mystery he held tight. What remains is only conjecture. 

And kitchens, through all time, contain stories. But T was impatient with long ones and preferred quizzes or questions. 

Like this one: What were my intentions for the coming year? For the life of me, I can’t remember. I remember the music and the crowd, a neighbor and her son who stopped by, a sink full of dirty dishes neither of us would get to until later. The pause before the speech he gave. Something about T’s love for his son and for the world. Expectant eyes, and when we toasted to another year, a great cheer, the clinking glasses, the feeling of resolution, heaping Tupperwares full of leftovers. 

In Lagash, archeologists found the remains of another last supper: conical bowls with the remains of fish. I imagine the occupants, their leftovers, how they too must have left it all too soon. The archaeologists called the tavern a place for fish stew and a pint. 

T would’ve liked that. 

Lauren D. Woods is the author of The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe, a short story collection that won the 2024 Autumn House Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the PEN Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collections. She lives and writes in Washington, DC.