About the girl I love, whom I’m leaving when this song ends by B. Kari Moore

She tests my parenting skills, as if she and I will have a baby together. The fish on the coffee table must be fed everyday by me. It’s blue and red and she named it after my father, which is disconcerting because I mostly think it’s a fish, though my father was always a very quiet man. William. William the fish is toted around dinner parties until she’s finished with him. Then I put him back. The people at the parties laugh and say we’ll be great parents and she agrees. “We never argue in front of William,” she tells them, “and I tell him goodnight every night.” “What about you?” they ask, “do you tell him you goodnight too?” “No,” I say, “but I tell him I love him.” And it isn’t funny and she looks at me strange, but they all laugh anyways. William the fish takes distilled spring water once a week, and his food is eleven dollars at the local Whole Foods Market.

B. Kari Moore is a 23 year old, second-year MFA Fiction candidate at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, LA. Originally from England, she moved permanently to the United States in 2004. Moore received her Bachelor of Arts in English Language & Literature in 2009 from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, TX. Her work has appeared in publications such as Black Words on White Paper, and eFiction Magazine, and she is the 2010 recipient of the Robert Olen Butler Award in Fiction.