Fiction

Abby Frucht is the author of two short story collections, Fruit of the Month, for which she received the Iowa Short Fiction Prize in 1987, and The Bell at the End of a Rope (Narrative Library, 2012). She has also written six novels: Snap; Licorice; Are You Mine?; Life before Death; Polly’s Ghost; and A Well Made Bed (Red Hen Press, 2016), which she wrote with her colleague Laurie Alberts. Frucht has taught for more than twenty years at Vermont College of Fine Arts and serves as a mentor to the writers of the Afghan Women’s Writers Project. She lives in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Photograph by John Iwata.

Bride

A Story

by Abby Frucht

If you had told her when she was a girl that on her wedding day Ellen would be locked inside the pantry in the cellar below the church, she would have believed it. So would everyone else. She had been that kind of child. She sat on her own birthday cake once, and on Easter one year she ate a robin’s egg off the path in the park where the annual egg hunt was taking place, mistaking it for a leftover Cadbury. It was funny that the pantry door had locked itself behind her, funny in all ways. Strange and ha ha. And a little bit creepy, like déjà vu.

Déjà vu! is her very first thought. And then, No, wait, this hasn’t ever happened, at least not to me, only maybe in another life, like when I was the ill-fed servant girl.

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