WHAT HE GAVE HER — MONICA FRIEDMAN
/She was five-one and weighed one hundred twenty-three pounds when they fell in love. He was five-eleven and three-fifty. After about three months, they moved in together and went halves on the grocery bill, except he ate about three quarters of the food. She felt cheated. She began to overeat to get her fair share, but she could never eat as much as he could.
When they broke up six months later, she weighed one thirty-eight. After ten years, she still couldn’t get rid of the extra pounds. She ran into one of his old friends at a party.
“You were really good for him,” the friend said.
“We made each other miserable.”
“No, he was happy. He lost fifteen pounds while you were together.”
She said, “That I didn’t notice.”
Monica Friedman's short speculative fiction has appeared in Bards and Sages Quarterly and NewMyths.com. Her nonfiction publications include 30 entries in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 2006) and the young reader’s biography, Rosalind Franklin’s Beautiful Twist (Learning A-Z, 2010). In 2003 and 2004, she served as fiction editor for Third Coast Literary Magazine; she also edited nonfiction at WW Norton. Since earning her MFA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University, she has lived in Tucson, Arizona, running a copywriting business, volunteering in a local elementary school library, and studying the stark and spiny splendor of the Sonoran Desert.
