Flash Nonfiction by Lauren Woods
SPILLING OVER

The time I drunk dialed my grandmother, I was twenty-three years old and just out of college. My sister and I had been drinking in our new apartment in Washington, DC, a small two-bedroom with a long window overlooking a leafy street—a place to live while I tried to find work and figure out what my life would look like. Margaret was nearly ninety then, born at the tail end of the First World War. She was living across the country with her own sister, in Fort Worth. Another leafy street, a fifties-style house with the smell of old wood and polish. She and her sister sometimes asked us if we liked to go out dancing (we did). I called her too late, past her bedtime, and told her my sister had tried to take a drink and instead bit straight through her margarita glass. I tried to describe to her the chunk of plastic in my sister’s teeth, the yellow liquid spilling to the floor, but I was laughing so hard, I could hardly get the words out. Then came the pause, the not-yet-sober tilt toward regret, before I heard the sound—and each time I think of it, though she’s been gone a decade, I can’t help but echo it—my grandmother’s own uproarious laughter in response. 

Lauren Woods is the author of The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe, a short story collection that won the 2024 Autumn House Fiction Prize. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband and four children.

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