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Jackie gets onto the elevator from twelve. She says hi to Barbara from sixteen, already on board. Sixteen is the penthouse but no one calls it that anymore, that’s elitist, although the Art Deco button panel still shows PH. 

Barbara gives Jackie a bright smile and points to her head. Jackie shakes her own head No and raises her eyebrows. She’s not sure what’s happening. Barbara fumbles at an ear, removes a white earbud, and says, “Pardon?” 

“Oh, no, I was just saying hello. Listening to anything good?” Jackie is considering adding podcasts to her media consumption, now that she can no longer bear the news. But podcasts—everything—mean research, choice paralysis, impending disappointment, actual disappointment. Still, everybody else manages. 

Barbara nods. “I’m putting together a playlist for my grandchildren! Songs from our era! Remember this one?” Barbara offers the earbud to Jackie, who hesitates. It feels rude to decline, but she thinks it’s weird of Barbara to offer the earbud, which has been in Barbara’s ear. She takes it and inserts it into her own ear. 

The song playing is “Muskrat Love,” Captain and Tennille, Jackie recognizes it immediately. She was in her senior year of college when it came out. A song about muskrats doing it. She does realize that all these city-dwelling years later, she doesn’t know what a muskrat is, exactly. She listens to a little bit of the song and pictures rats doing it instead. 

Barbara says, “I loved this song! 1976! It was all over the radio! I was already married! Pregnant with my first! You don’t remember?”

“I don’t know it!” Jackie lies. Barbara is older. Jackie wants that established. She takes the earbud out and hands it back. Thank god they are almost on one, the lobby. “I was in college,” Jackie says, to shut down any age alliance. The elevator door shudders open in slow motion. It’s an old building. 

“I’m a few years after you. We were more New Wave.” Jackie pretends to speak for an entire non-generation, three years younger than Barbara. “How old are you?”

“Seventy-two! Our era was the best for music!”

Jackie babbles a joke as they exit the building, in case Barbara tries to reverse-Uno the age question. She doesn’t want to say her actual age, sixty-nine, out loud. She uses Barbara’s own words against her. “I guess I missed out on the ‘Muskrat Love’ era! Hopefully your grandkids don’t ask too many questions about those horny muskrats! Haha!”

Barbara gives Jackie a quizzical look and a wave and turns to go south on Riverside. Jackie sings out, “See you!” and walks north although she needs to go south, too. Jackie realizes she pretended not to know the song, but obviously knew the song. Another thing that annoys Jackie about Barbara, besides the penthouse and the icky earbud and the age thing and yes, the grandchildren, is that everything she says has an exclamation point at the end. Maybe it’s something to do with having grandkids. You’ve scored the consolation prize for getting old. You’ve got something to be excited about. 

Jackie doesn’t have grandchildren, which would be a decent distraction from what she can increasingly see is a puny future. She can’t go near the topic with the daughters, grown and flown and boundaried up the wazoo. The expectation of grandchildren—the very hope of a future—is elitist, too, like penthouse. In fact, one of the daughters, after a twenty-two-dollar  gin drink, recently confirmed that it’s privileged to expect grandchildren, something to do with climate change and/or the global housing crisis. Jackie is certain that’s true and that it can be traced back to the 1950s—the postwar glory days, glorious for the lucky few who fit in and didn’t think about anybody but themselves. Jackie has low-grade, free-floating anxiety about being a boomer, deserved. 

Last summer, Jackie and the daughters played a wine-fueled mind game, Who Would You Recruit? The task was to recruit the ideal core caravan—leaders, medical types, carpenters, mechanics and cooks, fertile women and non-rapey men, and a few people with cold-blooded killer tendencies—who could survive the zombie apocalypse. The daughters rummaged Jackie’s desk for paper, pens. They made lists, attached roles. Family and chosen family and friends, neighbors and shopkeepers, even celebrities who had the potential to help keep them alive and also, ensure humanity would continue. Everyone on the list was under fifty. The daughters even calculated the age of Jonesy the dog, who did not make the cut. The daughters—Jackie too—laughed hysterically at that, heedless of faithful, old Jonesy snoring under the table. When it came time to evaluate Jackie’s chances, one daughter argued Yes, because every community needs wise tribal elders. The other more practical daughter countered No, that with actual survival at stake, they couldn’t waste one scrap of food on wisdom. 

Jackie was shocked to be left off the recruit list for the caravan. It was only a game—but still! Jackie said, “If you let me come, I promise I will always know where the Band-Aids and tissues are.” 

Why was she pleading her case? She’d been left to clean up their lives after Randall’s fuckup, faked it for years at a corporate job she hated, mothered those two and was still mothering them as adults—a whole other skill set where you had to pivot, topic to topic on tiptoe, and parent who they actually were, not who you’d expected. Yet, she’d reduced her worth to the super-nonessential role of Band-Aid and tissue carrier. Although she was drunk and in her feelings, she breathed into a conscious-pause moment, formerly known as “biting your tongue.” She did not remind the daughters that the whole effort to survive the zombie apocalypse, to hope for the future of humanity, was elitist, if she remembers correctly. 

The morning after Who Would You Recruit, as she made her coffee, daughters on their way back to Brooklyn, Jonesy still snoring, Jackie pictured herself waving bravely at the caravan from her kitchen window as it headed north on Riverside Drive into a future without her. 

Jonesy had to be put down a month later.

Now walking the wrong way on Riverside, dodging strollers, Jackie thinks about babies. She remembers when the daughters were tiny humans looking up at her for an interpretation of the world. She was so careful to answer their questions in a balanced way, a way that made them want to be productive members of society. The daughters would surely scoff and eyeroll the phrase productive members of society. She can hear the chorus: “Exactly whose society, Mom?” She was reprimanded once for using the phrase common sense. Common to whom? Sense is a value judgment, duh. She remembers: nobody says “duh” anymore.

The choice to be a mother itself was suspect, possibly even the dreaded t-words: toxic, triggering. She recognizes that motherhood was, for a woman of Jackie’s era, its own kind of power-tripping, in the parlance of her day. Not to mention, Jackie admits, what sweet and selfish relief to have a legitimate reason, in her late twenties, to shake off what her father—dead too young, too fast—called navel-gazing, long before it became self-care, a term she, a card-carrying member of the Me Generation, detests. 

When the coast is clear of Barbara, Jackie course-corrects south, goes shopping, and buys black vegan leather pants. In bed seven hours later, she thrashes and ruminates over the elevator ride with her neighbor. She had obviously lied about not knowing “Muskrat Love.” Then throwing around horny in conversational proximity to Barbara’s grandchildren. That was not nice. 

Jackie isn’t nice and is getting less nice. At least she can see it, which is a kind of growth. Barbara had knee surgery early in the year, Jackie remembers, and spent a few weeks walking with a cane and now walks with an almost imperceptible hitch, about which Jackie could not bring herself to commiserate. She pictures herself at Pilates if she went to Pilates, which she doesn’t, where her own knees would groan and protest and remind her she needs another doctor on the roster. 

The year 2025 feels like science fiction. Jackie and Barbara and Randall were born in the 1950s. The 1950s! 2025 is almost one hundred years later. Obviously there’s a quarter century to go, and the daughters would tease her about Mom Math, but a quarter of a century—twenty-five years—is nothing. They have no idea. Randy was, is, three years older than Jackie when they married all those years and tears ago. She sees him cycling through the park now and then, and he looks small. He wears a bike helmet that doesn’t sit right. Randy has a new wife, younger than Jackie, of course. 

She is inexplicably furious. It’s ten-thirty, the middle of the night. She should be winding down! Why is she stewing over Barbara and, especially, Randy! If twenty-five years is nothing, why is she still traumatized by the divorce? Another damned t-word!

Growth is hard. Jackie is beginning to understand why admirable older-woman role models, Helen Mirren et al., have no fucks left to give. The whole growth thing has no finish line; you start too late and never get there because you run out of breath. It’s excruciating, so why worry about figuring things out? Jackie has lost interest in growth, and that’s what’s making her less nice. Maybe Helen Mirren feels the same way. She googles Helen Mirren’s age and almost falls out of bed. Seventy-nine! It’s either fabulous or tragic.

She can’t sleep so she watches a Criterion movie from the olden days, which really does look like one hundred years ago. The white and black and gray of everything, the dress-up clothes and the cartoony cars, young people oddly mature, the nice manners that blurred whatever mid-century evil was incubating then and is alive in technicolor reality now. She hasn’t clicked on a headline in a year. Left, right, virus, viral, who needs the details?

Sixty-nine is the age that her mother was when she died, also too young and too fast. When Jackie tries to picture her mother, long, Revlon Red perfect-oval nails are the thing that comes to mind. In the hospital at the end, where everything was pale gray and gray white, those nails flared. Jackie’s nails are square, like her father’s. She would rake them gently along the daughters’ scalps until they slept, heads in her lap. She would sit and stroke silky hair, murmur mother things and scratch a miraculous skull. They’d yawn. They’d close their eyes. So deep in sleep did each go that Jackie did not dare shift, no matter how long, no matter how uncomfortable she was. How could she move? 

Night brightens and Jackie finally sleeps. 

She wakes up late thinking, Here we go again. It’s becoming her negative morning mantra. She figures that soon this whole daily nothing thing—bedding aside, feet on floor, push off—will be a trial. It feels like a karmic insult, to come this far and have to will herself out of bed, drum up enthusiasm for the day. Without Jonesy’s help.

She goes into the bathroom. She does her regular business, thank god. At some point in the old house, her mother changed light bulbs above the bathroom sink from daylight to soft pink to flatter, even as her vision deteriorated. Jackie makes a mental note to stop at the hardware store. By the time she is at her desk, with her pen and notebook of lists, and pauses for the mental note to surface, it’s gone. She sifts through her thoughts like panning for gold, which is surely done by drones now, if there’s even any gold left. 

Jackie flips notebook pages back to the beginning of the year, her 2024 Resolutions list: 

 

carry notebook    lose weight    do weights    skin? hair? teeth?    Bumble Hinge Words with Friends    Headspace Calm Aura    get Wall Pilates    doctors/money guy/will guy   files    organize photos

 

There are a lot more resolutions on the list—hydrate more, open mail sooner, clean out expired spices (discovered by an appalled daughter six months ago)—but Jackie has lost interest in reviewing things not done. Organize photos has been on there since the early aughts. Now, the year is almost over. In what she thinks is a stroke of genius, Jackie makes a hyphen after the 2024 in the title of the list and adds 2025 right behind it. Voila! 2024-2025! She’s not fooling anybody, meaning herself; she’s just making space for things to take the time they take, or something. Self-care, but also optics, in case the daughters come across the list during the final clean-out. 

This is something that haunts her—the final clean-out. There are journals and documents and financial records and morning pages, even a couple of dirty letters and nudies from pre-Randy life, a trove of outdated incriminating evidence in rolling file carts under the desk. She wants none of it left behind to be added to what is undoubtedly a pretty extensive “jokey” recriminations review in the daughters’ group chat, the one from which she’s excluded. 

Jackie writes Swedish death cleaning on the 2024-2025 list. 

She googles “Muskrat Love” to verify the year it was released, yes, 1976, Barbara was right. Jackie was with Eddie in ’76, at school. Eddie, who called her Jack, the only nickname anyone ever gave her. She’s Jackie on her birth certificate, clearly some whimsical choice by her mother which Jackie never asked about and now it’s too late. Eddie taught her about music and sex and challenged every dopey thing she thought she thought. “Muskrat Love”—Eddie would never for one second have tolerated even a toe-tap for that song. Someone broke them apart; she can’t remember who.

They were in their forties when he found her on Facebook and sent a private message that said Jack? This you? They reunited and reignited and Jackie lit up again, after Randy. But Eddie lived on the other coast and had hep C and eventually his liver gave up. He asked Jackie to come to him for the duration, but the daughters were still in high school. With much navigating of time zones and medical appointments, they managed phone calls and chat sessions for a few months, expecting—or Jackie expected—that they’d land on the other side of this rough patch. And then one day, silence. Jackie told a daughter that an old, dear friend had died. “He used to call me Jack,” she confided. The daughter squinted. “He called you Jack? I don’t see you as a Jack.”

Jackie was offended by the squint and the comment, some contemporary inference in tone she couldn’t parse—and didn’t bother trying to—about one of her most treasured memories. Consequently, in the years since she has told no one about finding and losing Eddie. She has not said Eddie’s name out loud. He died and it happened as if it never happened, from afar. 

On her screen, Jackie makes a mistake that will send her to a tele-otolaryngologist. She clicks the arrow on the “Muskrat Love” YouTube video sandwiched between ads for too-expensive boots she already bought and other nearly-identical boots “they” want her to buy. (She knows the internet stalks her but suspects that some new technology thing now overrides human will and that resistance is futile.) 

Although the song is as dumb as she remembers, so pop-cringey that she disavowed it to ostracize Barbara, she is infected. Tennille’s melty Velveeta voice does a relentless, slow, sticky flow through Jackie’s brain over and over, the same damnable chorus: Looks like muskrat love. 

Jackie has an extreme earworm. Hours and days and then ten days later, she is literally pulling at the hair on the sides of her head just above her ears, thinking maybe some light pain will make it stop. She is walking along or chopping something for dinner or doing texts to and from the daughters, minding her own business and feels, like breath, like heartbeat, the song inside her. She is going mad. There is only the song trying to kill her with electric keyboard cheeps and chitters that supposedly mimic the sound of the muskrats doing it. 

Jackie’s earworm has a medical diagnosis: stuck-song syndrome, which does not sound medical to Jackie at all. The treatment options are the usual blather: avoid stress, get exercise, don’t listen to the song. Don’t listen to the song! The song is part of her central nervous system! Another theory holds that she needs an OCD specialist who will make her listen to the song over and over in a safe environment. Exposure therapy. Which is an immediate no. Why should she pay for that? It’s not covered by Medicare and anyway, it’s already happening. 

Google suggests a prescription. She gets it from a “doctor” via her computer screen. During the week that she is waiting for the drug to do its thing, Jackie takes to her bed with a Bloody Mary or two, desperately humming along to her internal, infernal soundtrack. She visualizes ways to kill Barbara. She visualizes Randy seeing her in the park and falling off his bike, finally knocked down by losing her, their family. She has a serious one-sided convo with the gin-drinking daughter, wherein Jackie delivers Heather Cox Richardson–like historical briefs on postwar policies that spawned her greedy generation. On behalf of her younger selves, college Jackie and also newly-divorced Jackie, she holds a secret, dignified grudge against the Jack?-inferring daughter. She apologizes to Eddie, somewhere in the vicinity of her ceiling, but the truth was, she could not abandon the kids and attend to him on his deathbed. She apologizes to Jonesy for not insisting he be on the caravan list. She speaks sternly to her father who, it turned out, was sicker than he let on, and tells him that if she could go back in time, she would convince him that a little navel-gazing, at least to the point of admitting he was fatally ill, would not have been a bad idea. 

Jackie thinks about her mother, starting with the usual red nails. But this time, something distant and known rises within her. Jackie remembers distinctly, her early twenties, coming home from debauched city life into the old house, nothing new, nothing changed, same claustrophobic paneling and carpeting and love that held her up and tamped her down. Except there was a new piece of furniture, a walnut cabinet with a color television inside. The little family sat together on a rare evening and watched The Toni Tennille Show. Her father sang along with Toni, her mother clapped. Jackie was embarrassed for them and proud of them. Fifteen years later Mother dropped dead of a heart attack one month after Dad died. Thirty-one years on, Jackie continues to be awestruck by their monumental love and angry at them for leaving so abruptly. She’ll never get over it. 

Growth is hard.

The next morning, a few hours and some discreet wine-sips into her day, she notices the song is gone. Once she does, she’s afraid to confirm for fear of bringing it back from the dead, so to speak. She tests things out while, slightly buzzed, she chops vegetables. The earworm has disappeared. She feels pretty good. She wonders if it’s because of the drug that the song is finally gone and her clarity is restored and decides it doesn’t matter, whatever works, including Big Pharma mind control. 

Absorbed in her thoughts, Jackie forgets she’s letting a cast iron pan get hot and leaves the kitchen to futz around in the bedroom. She rolls a file cart out from under the desk to maybe start on Swedish death cleaning. After a couple of minutes, the apartment is shrouded in acrid smoke. The smoke alarm, which she has cursed and swatted a million times for wrongly sounding off, is silent. “Goddamn it,” she yells, and runs to the kitchen. She remembers to grab a pot holder. She opens all the windows, no easy feat in a charming prewar. The old-age early warning signs are coming in hot, literally, including the big red flag, forgetfulness. 

She cancels a periodontist appointment. Who goes to the periodontist on December 30? She’d better carpe diem. She calls her friend Sharon for lunch. She must do something festive-adjacent so she can wear the new black vegan leather pants; they are close to giving her buyer’s remorse. It’s weirdly mild in New York so she pairs the pants with her fancy clogs, has three glasses of white wine and a Niçoise salad with Sharon, hugs goodbye after lunch, and says “I love you,” to her friend because it’s the eve of New Year’s Eve. Sharon shakes her head and laughs a little which hurts Jackie’s feelings and makes her question their friendship level. Is Jackie B-team for Sharon? She makes a mental note to think about it later, sober. 

A block later, Jackie gets tripped up by a pothole on Broadway and falls on her face in a crosswalk. It seems like the whole city stops and looks. Vehicles honk. A young man stands near Jackie and holds his hands up to halt traffic. A kibitzer Jackie’s age cheerfully insinuates herself: “Lady, don’t move! Don’t move!” Another passerby steps in and bends low to talk softly to Jackie, who sits on the street in the crosswalk, quite dazed and bleeding profusely from a spot above her eyebrow. Jackie blinks back tears, although she can’t identify the pain.

“You’ve been drinking,” the woman says, without judgment, like a data analyst. 

Jackie is beyond mortified so she points to her feet. “They’re clogs!” 

The woman says, “May I touch you?” 

Jackie doesn’t understand what that has to do with anything but is in need, needy. The woman puts her strong forearms under Jackie’s armpits and sets her on her inappropriately shod feet. The woman says to Jackie, “I’m a trauma specialist. May I come closer and look at your injury?” 

Jackie is nodding away, now smiling too. She’s in mild shock with liquefied muscles, rattled bones, a cracked head, and no idea what to do. She is aware: she is a drunk old lady holding up westbound traffic in the middle of the 84th Street crosswalk. Her hand is covered in blood. A roll of paper towels and a water bottle and a folding chair materialize from the newsstand on the corner, and she is seated. The trauma specialist tends to her wound with a damp paper towel, lightly flicking away gravel. The trauma specialist shrugs and says, “Not too terrible, but I think you can take a couple of stitches there. Should we walk you over to the ER? Or put you in a cab? Do you need more time?”

Jackie laughs. Does she or does she not need more time, that is the question. Hard to know. She fears insurance won’t cover this fall, considering she’s drunk. She shakes her head. “Oh, no, no, I don’t need more time! I’m fine, it’s fine! Thank you! You’re a trauma specialist! It’s my lucky day! Only in New York!” 

Her kibitzer, standing by, says, “Lady, check your teeth!” Jackie’s heart squeezes inside her. Oh my god, my teeth! Dental debt, her constant fear, would ruin her. A full set of New York implants or even veneers runs $30k, not covered; she’s done her research. Jackie runs her tongue around her mouth. Her teeth are okay, no sharp edges or gaps. So lucky. Jackie’s mind chugs to its usual first stop on the accidents-happen train: Blameville. She is being punished for cancelling the periodontist. For the third sauvignon blanc, for Soho clogs rather than stable Upper West Side shoes. As if the faux-leather pants, now torn at the knee, weren’t enough! She says, again, “I’m fine! Really!”

The trauma specialist shrugs and says, “Take care! Get that looked at! You don’t need a scar on your face!” and goes on her way. Of course, the kibitzer sticks around and watches Jackie try to reclaim a shred of dignity. Jackie fumbles to clean up after herself. She staggers to the newsstand to return the paper towel roll. She goes back and tries to fold up the chair, but the kibitzer and the newsstand proprietor give her the whaddayacrazylady? look, so she gives up. She says “Thank you!” and walks like Frankenstein’s monster west, toward Riverside. As she goes, the kibitzer advises, “Check out Merrells! They have a nice selection by Harrys!”

As soon as she is out of view of witnesses to her humiliation, she stops and takes off the clogs. She drops them in a trash can and then thinks twice, pulls them out, sets them neatly alongside the can, in case an unhoused person needs $400 silver clogs. Jackie limps along, not looking at the sidewalk. She doesn’t want to know what’s down there, she just wants to get home, where she’s got Epsom salts and booze, her good old bathtub, and a cabinet that is fully stocked with wound care items from the Duane Reade. 

People glance warily, but she doesn’t care. For the short, liberating walk home, Jackie doesn’t care. She thinks about her 2024 list, how her crafty little revision is leading her into 2025. She makes a mental note to add Post-its kitchen to remind herself about the burners. She makes a mental note to add Harrys. Brain games. Rx refill. Call Sharon, she mentally writes, and then mentally strikes a line through. Sharon is off the list. Instead she adds senior dog.

Jackie walks, almost home. She is steps from the office of their old vet, where Jonesy spent his final hour with Jackie whispering love under his silky ear flap. The PetWell door opens, and three men come out, navigating the weight of a big, black canvas bag. It takes a moment, but Jackie comes to understand that they are disposal guys. They are carrying what is clearly a body —but they’re struggling, so probably bodies—of pets who’ve been euthanized, over to a sketchy looking panel van idling outside of PetWell. Jackie stops to watch. She can’t believe it. Is there no back door? No basement exit? They’re just hauling a duffel bag with dead dogs right past her at four in the afternoon? The shock of the crosswalk fall has worn off, and Jackie is shaking uncontrollably. Her bare feet are numb from the cold. She should have asked more questions about Jonesy, about after. She just left him behind.

Her local newsstand guy is out front of his shop, organizing rows of candy. She says automatically, “Hi, Hassan,” and he looks at her in alarm. “Miss! Are you all right?” 

She says, “I am fine,” and points at a shelf. “Those, please.” Her newsstand indulgence costs twice what it used to. It’s been a long time. 

She goes into her building, built like a sentry to overlook the Hudson River. She steps into the elevator, and right behind her is Barbara, naturally. Barbara takes in Jackie’s wrecked appearance. She says, “Oh my god, you’re bleeding! What happened! You got mugged! They took your shoes?!” 

Jackie shakes her head No and points to her head, as if she has earbuds in and can’t hear Barbara. She gets off on twelve. The sun is low. The apartment is the city version of quiet, a busy, muted thrum, out there. She is in the hot bath with the Epsom salts and a whiskey. She closes her eyes and tries to reconstruct the many mental notes she made as she found her way home after the fall with no luck, no surprise. She tempts fate by trying a few bars of “Muskrat Love,” but can’t call up the melody. 

As the fog of calamity dissipates, Jackie realizes she has not touched or heard or, for goodness’ sakes, thought about her phone in what must be over an hour. The phone is out there on the street, far from her. What a feeling. 

In front of the mirror, bright bulbs show the vivid wound above her eye. She cleans and dresses it with excellent lighting. Another scar, whatever. She slides her clean feet into her old slippers, wraps herself in her old robe. She stuffs the faux-leather pants into the trash. 

Jackie goes to the kitchen window. Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, a couples’ holiday she has ignored since the divorce. Jackie sighs, big. Choices, decisions, disappointments. She takes the American Spirits from her robe pocket and unwraps the cellophane, a funny old pleasure. She finds the long Bic kitchen lighter and lights up. She gets dizzy, her heart speeds up, her lungs sting. In bed, she and Eddie took smoke breaks to stop time. She says “Eddie,” out loud. Jackie leans at the window overlooking Riverside Drive. She watches the cars speeding north, not fleeing a zombie apocalypse, just commuting home. 

But if it were a zombie apocalypse and Jackie were being left behind, she would need a plan. She makes a mental note to make a new list, American Spirits at the top. She mentally adds Gummies. She’s been meaning to try. She adds Petfinder!. She visualizes crossing off Swedish death cleaning, let them see it all.

She wonders how long it would take for the cable to go out. Bye-bye internet. She’s got books, she’s got pens and paper, the mess of files and photos, she’s got Epsom salts and a liquor cabinet and pandemic pantry items from a few years back. She’s got fucking Band-Aids and tissues. She’ll just sit in her apartment and smoke and wait it out, with her new senior dog friend, whoever he or she may be. Who knows? The zombies might pass them by. Or not, and then she can officially stop worrying about being left behind. 

 

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STEPHANIE GANGI is a poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist living and writing in New York City. Her day job is as developmental editor and book coach; work inspires her like crazy. Her debut novel at age sixty, The Next, was published by St. Martin’s Press, and her second at age sixty-five, Carry the Dog, was published by Algonquin Books. Her work has appeared in Catapult, LitHub, Hippocrates Prize Anthology, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, New Ohio Review, Oldster, NextTribe, The Woolfer, Arts & Letters and more. Her third novel, The Good Provider, is in progress. Find her on Instagram @stephaniegangi and Facebook @stephanie.gangi.3. 

Featured image by Jose Manuel, courtesy of Unsplash.