This table, the wine, bread and cheese—that’s nonfiction; calling it “dinner” is, perhaps, a fiction.

Your silence, my tears, these trembling hands: nonfiction. Our last meal together: fiction.

Your attraction to someone else—OK, we’ll call that nonfiction. But the idea you no longer love me… must be fiction.

Nathan Alling Long lives in Philadelphia and can be found at blogs.stockton.edu/longn. His collection of fifty flash fictions, The Origin of Doubt, was published by Press 53 in March 2018.