In Short – Issue 3 (Spring 2025)

May 31, 2025

“Broken Frame” by Tytti Heikkinen

The Long Road Out Of Eden

By Sue William Silverman

One late afternoon after work, as a college intern on Capitol Hill, I sit on a sunny porch in a house off Wisconsin Avenue with an older woman, a friend of my parents. A spotless white cloth covers a patio table. Yellow dishes match the pitcher of lemonade. Silverware gleams. I’m too young to know the diplomatic language of adults, so I’m unable to tell the woman about the worm in the beautiful strawberry plucked from her own garden. I’m holding the strawberry in my fingers, about to take a bite.

Must I eat the strawberry? Is there a delicate way to tug the worm from the red, seeded flesh without the woman noticing?

I’m fraught with indecision, especially since the woman, single and in her forties, seems to live with no indecisions whatsoever. She never wanted to marry, she’s told me. She bought this house on her own. She’s an assistant to the secretary of the Department of Agriculture.

“First job out of college,” she says. “I started at Agriculture as a receptionist. I worked my way up the ladder.”

The woman had invited me to dinner to help guide me on the ins-and-outs of a career in government.

The woman’s cotton blouse and skirt are starched and fresh. Her hair appears sculpted with hairspray, her fingernails coral. After taking a DC Transit bus from Capitol Hill, I feel wrinkled, my hair a wild, ambiguous frizz.

In addition to my indecision about the worm, I’m uncertain about my future (unlike the woman). I’ll graduate from college in one year. Should I return to Capitol Hill and work my way up the career ladder? Buy a house? Marry? Children? Should I plant my own garden but beware of worms in strawberries?

I consider how the woman, who works for the Department of Agriculture, should know about pesticides. But pesticides are poison. And the worm, were it not in the strawberry, just inches from my lips, would be innocently worming between blades of grass.

Back then, did I eat the strawberry? I don’t remember. Nor do I recall if I ate the worm, or if I told the woman about it.

Yet I long for that moment of possibilities, my future undecided. Sitting on that porch, listening to the woman, I couldn’t foresee how I would marry, would, in fact, have too many ex-husbands, how I would never work my way up a career ladder, never have children, or plant a garden.

What I remember, now no longer a girl, is the sun-warmth on my young, bare shoulders on a late-afternoon porch. And what I will miss is that one almost-perfect strawberry. Or was it perfect, anyway, even with the worm?

(Excerpted from Selected Misdemeanors: Essays at the Mercy of the Reader by Sue William Silverman by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. © 2025 by Sue William Silverman. Available for pre-order wherever books are sold or from the Univ. of Nebraska Press 800.848.6224 and at nebraskapress.unl.edu.)

Sue William Silverman (she/her) is an award-winning author of nine works of nonfiction and poetry. Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul is the 2024 IPPY Silver Award Winner. How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences won the gold star in Foreword Reviews INDIE Book of the Year Award and the Clara Johnson Award for Women’s Literature. Other works include Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, made into a Lifetime TV movie; Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, which won the AWP Award; and The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew. Her flash essay collection, Selected Misdemeanors: Essays at the Mercy of the Reader, is forthcoming September, 2025. She co-chairs the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her media appearances include The View, Anderson Cooper-360, and PBS Books. www.SueWilliamSilverman.com.