Carrie White Wonders What Difference it Would Have Made by Danielle Shorr
Nominated for Best of the Net
If she had been told about the blood before it came, or if it came
an hour late, or earlier in the day, or in a time when Google
could answer before she even asked
If she could read minds instead of move things with her own
If she had just worn her hair different, or shaved it off whole,
sold it for bus fare to get out of town and never come back
If she defied her mother’s orders, or listened to them better,
or kept a change of clothes in a bush a few blocks down
from her house to switch into and out of before school
If school had been gentler, if the kids had been softer,
if the principal got her name right, if she didn’t care
whether or not he did
If her mother had been someone else, or if her mother hadn’t been
at all, if her father wasn’t dead or elsewhere, if she had been
born from others or dust
If she had prayed harder, in a different language, to someone
or something else, if the cross had been a star
or the star had been a planet
If she read less, spoke more, touched herself less, touched herself
more, touched herself and liked it, touched herself and forgot God,
renamed herself so, used telekinesis to cum and for nothing else
If she fucked him in his car instead of going to the dance
If she stayed the same in every way but fucked
If the Internet could have taught her all the things her mother didn’t
If she had moved an inch to the right or gone to the bathroom then
If the blood on the floor of the stage lit up like a spotlight on humanity
If humanity wasn’t so human, if the good weren’t meant to walk among them
If fate were kinder to the faultless, there would be no story,
no vengeance, no sky raining stones, and no girl
grieving herself into flames
Danielle (she/her) is an MFA alum and professor of disability rhetoric and creative writing at Chapman University. She has a fear of commitment in regard to novel writing and an affinity for wiener dogs. Her work has been published by Lunch Ticket, Vassar Review, Hobart, Split Lip, The Florida Review, etc. and is forthcoming in The New Orleans Review, Permafrost and others.
Art by Five South