Bliss Miss

She’d made herself quite a pile selling chocolates with a moral center, but she’d tired of her customers who, once they’d acquired the taste, were loyal to a fault, and predictably righteous, addicted to the point of constipation and shall we say, not good company, till she couldn’t bear it anymore and the day came when she walked away from her success and everything she’d built in order to spread her wings and discovered, after a false start in law school, her talent with words and the excitement they generated and she became a poetry tycoon on the free verse market, speculating from image and image, leaping across enjambments and always landing on her feet with a freewheeling sense of rhythm that was truly marvelous to witness even as, more discreetly, she also trafficked on the side in villanelles and sonnets which, despite regulation, enjoyed a steady demand that, while unable to compete with pornographic cat videos (what could?) generated a faithful following although, truth be told, when she was at home by herself at night and looking back on everything she’d accomplished in life, in chocolate and poetry (and yoga, too, which she’d taken up after hours to unwind and soon developed her own idiosyncratic fusion of hatha and pranayama which led to the startling discovery of her knack for levitation), she wondered what it all meant, what had been driving her all these years, why she was up in the air and still felt lonely.

CHARLES HOLDEFER is an American writer based in Brussels. His stories have appeared in Bridge Eight, New England Review, North American Review, Chicago Quarterly Review and in the Pushcart Prize anthology. His collection IVAN THE TERRIBLE GOES ON A FAMILY PICNIC was published in 2024. Visit Charles at www.charlesholdefer.com

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