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Amanda Borozinski is a reporter/photographer for the
Keene Sentinel newspaper. Her work has appeared in magazines and literary
journals such as Positive Thinking magazine, Guideposts Magazine, The Oklahoma
Review, and The Northern New England Review. A story about her grandmother and
her grandmother's dog will soon appear in the Ultimate Dog Lover - a collection
of stories from the publishers of Chicken Soup for The Soul.
In March
Amanda was awarded a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She
will spend three weeks working on her book tentatively titled - To Make Our Joy
Complete.
"The
Ten or Less Aisle" is her first published piece of flash nonfiction.
The Ten or Less
Aisle
The girl looks at
the two bars of chocolate: dark and bitter. She has never had chocolate so rich
before. They are the first things she buys.
One bottle of Pinot
Nior goes in the hand basket with a muffled clink,
glass against red plastic. She buys the wine because she loves the sound it
makes being poured.
Five Roma tomatoes,
the ripest looking ones, come next. She didn’t come for these – a whim –
because seeing them standing on their heads nestled together in one plastic
container makes her smile and that makes her feel less lonely.
In her basket she
places one loaf of sourdough bread with sunflower seeds on the crust. The bread
is long and protrudes from her basket showing off the tiny gray triangles. The
seeds remind her of her husband 3,000 miles away. She misses him. He is a
gentle lover and an even better friend.
One container of
fresh mozzarella cheese, floating in liquid, looking like an alien embryo, is
next. The cheese has become necessary, necessary because of the tomatoes.
She adds one tube
of moisturizing shaving cream. Here, in this place, the heat requires her to
shave her legs more often.
Then,
one tin of licorice Altoids. The Altoids are for her grandmother. Or, really, a tin of
licorice Altoids bought for her living grandmother,
as a gift to show love and honor to her dead grandfather, the first man in her
life.
From the giant
freezer she extracts a pint of ginger gelato. It will be sweet and cold. A flavor that reminds of her of the Thai restaurant on a
The small container
of pesto, also from the freezer section, will taste nothing like the homemade
kind she has in her own freezer. She is proud of the way she grew the tall
basil plants last summer. Collected the leaves ground them, added garlic, pine
nuts, olive oil and Parmesan cheese.
To Joseph, the man
behind the register, she says, “You have a wonderful voice.”
“Yes,” agrees the
one-item-man behind her, “A wonderful baritone.”
She pays with a 100
dollar bill.
Joseph holds it up
to the light.
She leaves with a
brown paper bag, the kind with a handle on each side.
Walking out into the sunlight, the city around her, the girl
feels the weight of ten things at once.
The
Chickasaw
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