Free Perfect Reader by Maggie Pouncey

met her, so it’s hard for me to say.”
    “I know, I know. And I don’t like to trouble you with any more than what you’ve got on your plate already. But I thought you should know. Just keep your eyes open.”
    “Okay,” Flora said. “Thanks.” She was suddenly exhausted. Leave me alone , she wanted to say, she almost said. Leave me .
    “Like I said, I’ll be stopping by, checking in, seeing if you all need anything.”
    “Thanks again, Mrs. J.,” Flora said. She felt she needed to say more. “It’s a comfort to know you’re nearby,” she added.
    “I know it is, sweetie. I know.”
    Back inside, Flora headed for the guest room. Her father’s television was nearly as old as she was, and if there had ever been a remote, it had long since vanished, so flipping the channels required standing by the box and stooping to press the tiny up or down button. Flora stooped; she pressed. America was obsessed with rejection. On one channel, there was a show where, one by one, girls were rejected from a career in modeling. In another show, each week a new family got the ax for not having quite a miserable-enough life—almost, but not quite. In a third show, young women were gradually and systematically rejected by a man they had just met who did not, it turned out, want to marry them.
    Did Flora share in the national fervor? She had rejected her father, not visiting him in Darwin, and then not reading his manuscript of poems when first he gave it to her over breakfast at the diner—wandering the papers, instead, around the desert of her apartment, from bedside table to desk to drawer, simultaneously fussing and neglecting, handling them like a fetish she must be cured of. Even now, she rejected him by not wanting to read them, exiling them to the body bag, rejecting her role as his chosen reader, the one he trusted, his executioner. She’d rejected her mother, and her friends, and her work—everything she left behind in the city so hastily, as if she’d been waiting for the chance to leave them all along. And now she’d rejected Cynthia, whom she had just met, regardless of whether she could be trusted or not, by saying no, there was no room for her in the memorial service, or her father’s house, no room for her in life or death.
    On the shows, the moment of rejection was stretched out to the most awkward extent possible and saved for the very last minute of programming, as though it were a reward held out to viewers for getting through all the optimism and pluck of the previous hour. The rejected one usually cried, his or her face crumpling into wrinkles of injury and despair, but so did the ones who had been narrowly spared from rejection for one more week—whether out of malice or relief, empathy, love, or fury, it was hard to tell.
    Flora, watching, cried, too. She had a hard time not crying when she saw other people cry, as if her face were a mirror. Was that all she was? The thought was troubling. But then, it was a relief to cry, to in fact weep. To sit on the floor beneath the blue daze of the tele vision and weep. “Did you cry?” her father had once asked her after some insignificant childhood mishap, some bike or tree unfooting. “Did I cry? I weeped!” Flora had told him indignantly. It had become a family story. She did not cry; she weeped. She cried so hard, her mouth grew dry, her tongue hurt. She cried as she’d cried as a child, alone in her room at the President’s House, making ugly, desperate noises, her face hot and wet, the dog standing above her, slowly wagging his tail, watching her with interest, head atilt, waiting.
    Later, sapped and waterlogged, she retreated to her little room with the cordless telephone and the phone book—her links to other human beings, but also, each in its own way, a reasonable weapon against the skull of an intruder, should the need arise. Her city cell phone, now permanently off, received spotty service in her father’s house anyway—service was spotty