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This Year as a Compilation of Short Films I Can’t Decipher

June 5, 2022/ Quinn Forlini

My friend sends a video of her newborn opening and closing her mouth, testing the length of her tongue in air and then resting it back inside its wet, warm spot. Her spit and lips make soft sounds, the closest she could get to language. I want to come closer to how she must feel. It’s snowing. This baby was the piece of cloud that became a tiny frozen thing, part of her mother just a few days ago. And somewhere inside me is an egg encrypted with genes from my ancestors that’s waiting to become its own body, that someday could come out of me like snow from a winter sky.

***

I think of single-celled organisms squirming like goo, no spinal cord, no vertebrae. The clarity of their existence, like sunlight, how little they have to decide. They grow tired. They die. The newborn opens and closes her mouth. She doesn’t know her own mouth or the shapes it can make. She doesn’t know her eyes blink open and closed like her mouth. Doesn’t know that whatever she sees she is seeing with those eyes. The baby shifts her eyes, looks up and down. She can’t stand how much there is. She cries, and now her tears distort the world. But she doesn’t know that change is because of her tears, saltwater droplets made by her own body.

My mother taught me as a child that when you paint snow, you don’t use white. You use blue. If I knew how to paint, I could paint this: shadows on the snow blue as the veins tangled beneath our wrists, blue as our fingers in the cold.

***

As I cut mushrooms for dinner, I examine their undersides, little fans tightly strung together like slots in a projector slide. I stop chopping and stick my finger in to feel, soft as a velvet dress. But my finger is too large and cumbersome, and the mushroom breaks apart like a clump of dirt. I run my finger over the top and belly, texture almost like skin. Like the cheek of a lover, the way you can stroke it and something ripples inside you.

***

I have foot x-rays taken to check my bunion. The nurse puts the x-rays up on the light screen and leaves. I sit in the blue patient’s chair covered in flimsy paper like the patient I am and stare at my foot bones. The toe bones, the long bone along the side. A diagram on the wall tells me it’s a metatarsal bone. I don’t know what the x-rays are saying. That’s what the doctor is supposed to translate. I look down at my foot, my real foot, still bare. Toes wriggling like a sea anemone. I stare at the blue veins and red, protruding bunion. This foot is alive and attached to me, and inside this foot lies those bones, the ones glowing on the light board like a ghost. No, like a skeleton.

***

The baby is looking at herself in the glass of my friend’s phone screen, but the baby doesn’t know it’s her. The baby looks at her own face lit up and doesn’t know how to decipher it, the way I can’t decipher my own bones on the light board. How could she understand that she is the movement in the small glass rectangle if she is also inside herself?

***

An older man—maybe my father, but at the very least, somebody’s father—is distinguished looking in his glasses. He drinks a cup of tea every morning while he contemplates the changing color of the sky. He loves his children—he is a father, maybe even mine—and was there for them their whole childhood. I’ve known him a long time—maybe my whole life—and today I realize he is getting older, his skin less defined around his face. Then the man takes his glasses off to wipe the smudges on the bottom of his shirt. His face laid bare, I’m aware that in this moment his world is a blur, boundaries suddenly blended. And I’m aware that someone could come along and knock his glasses out of his unsuspecting hands and someone—maybe even me—could step on them and crack the lenses before he’s realized what’s happening. Just like that, the man would not be able to see. I am aware now that this man, though a father—maybe even mine—is only an imperfect body and his hands have a little shake and his eyes haven’t worked well in decades without these glasses. And now, this distinguished-looking man becomes delicate as the film on the underside of a mushroom.

***

It’s warm now, but the snow will come back. It always does. We’ll look out the glass panes of our window and see the shadows spreading across stretches of snow. My mother taught me as a child that when you paint snow, you don’t use white. You use blue. If I knew how to paint, I could paint this: shadows on the snow blue as the veins tangled beneath our wrists, blue as our fingers in the cold. By the time it snows again, who knows what the world will look like. By then, who knows what the baby will be doing with her mouth, what her eyes will see.

Quinn Forlini

Quinn Forlini earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia. Her writing has been published in Catapult, Longleaf Review, The Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. You can find her on Twitter @quinnforlini.

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Friday Lunch Blog

Friday Lunch! A serving of contemporary essays published the second Friday of every month.

Today’s course:

Behind the Eight Ball: How to Become Homeless in the Richest Country in the World

June 13, 2025/in Blog / Valerie Nyberg
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Meeting My Child Self at the Trauma Play

May 9, 2025/in Blog / Gale Naylor
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Products of Our Environment

March 14, 2025/in Blog / Mitko Grigorov
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Midnight Snack

Take a bite out of these late night obsessions.

Tonight’s bites:

Dig Into Genre

May 23, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Lauren Howard
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The dreams in which I’m (not) dying

April 25, 2025/in Midnight Snack / paparouna
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On The Map

March 28, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Ariadne Will
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Amuse-Bouche

Little bites every third Friday to whet your appetite!

Today’s plate:

Tale of the resistant apple tree

June 6, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / Tahar Bekri, translated by Patrick Williamson
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/TaharBekri.jpg 512 340 Tahar Bekri, translated by Patrick Williamson https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Tahar Bekri, translated by Patrick Williamson2025-06-06 11:00:072025-06-17 18:56:48Tale of the resistant apple tree

Talyshi Wall Graffiti and other poems

May 30, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / Ghazal
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we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish

May 16, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / translated from French by Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/headshot-translator-Gabriella-Bedetti.jpg 400 400 translated from French by Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png translated from French by Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes2025-05-16 11:00:362025-07-08 07:33:51we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish

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School Lunch

An occasional Wednesday series dishing up today’s best youth writers.

Today’s slice:

I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

May 12, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Brendan Nurczyk
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A Communal Announcement

April 28, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Isabella Dail
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Seventeen

April 14, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Abigail E. Calimaran
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Word From the Editor

The state of the world breaks my heart every day. Broken hearted, I stay online. I can’t log off. Because my career and schooling are all done remotely, I tend to struggle with boundaries regarding screen time, with knowing when to break away.

Like many of you, I have been spilling my guts online to the world because the guts of the world keep spilling. None of it is pretty. But it’s one of the things that, having searched for basically my entire life, I found that tempers the chaos that lives rent free inside my head.

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