The next Weekly Rumpus features fiction from Cynthia Romanowski. Here’s an excerpt:
It’s November which means you’ve been stable on medication for exactly five years, sixty months, though it’s not something that people really celebrate. It’s not like remission from cancer or sobriety. Nobody celebrates not being put in a mental hospital. People might celebrate getting out of a mental hospital. Maybe. But after being out, most people try to pretend like it never happened.
The new boyfriend wants to know about your day. If you like spicy food. Do you follow sports? Politics? Have you watched Mad Men? Do you ever smoke meth? Just kidding the new boyfriend would never ask you that. You wonder what the new boyfriend’s meth equivalent is, what he looked like at his lowest point.
Cynthia Romanowski holds an MFA in fiction from UC Riverside’s low-residency program in Palm Desert. She is a former prose editor of The Coachella Review, and her short stories have appeared in or are forthcoming MARY: A Journal Of New Writing and The Whistling Fire. She has been a featured reader for Dirty Laundry Lit (a reading series sponsored by PEN/USA) and was recently selected to participate in the 2014 Emerging Voices Show for the New Short Fiction Series in Los Angeles. She lives Huntington Beach and is at work on a collection of linked short stories.
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