Post-undergrad means this: you wake up, unfortunately. You make sandwiches for 

moms with grabby fingers at the drive-thru window, while wearing the ugliest baseball 

cap you’ve ever seen. It doesn’t fit on your head right. Then you get in your car in the 

parking lot, let out a brief scream, and drive home. You think about quitting, but don’t. 

At home, you take a weed gummy, masturbate, and fall asleep with a video about the history 

of Trident gum playing. This is what each day looks like. Don’t think about how badly you 

hate all this, how badly you want something different, or you won’t do it again tomorrow. That can’t be. 

Some days, you have to do the opening shift. It’s too early to eat anything at all, and 

you closed last night, since Joe can’t make a schedule to save his life, so you go through 

your shift like a zombie. You slide your sneaker on and off your foot during your last half 

hour, counting down the minutes until you can leave. You also count the number of times 

your coworkers looked at your ass today. Eight! At home, you pass your father, who 

kindly tries to ask about your day, and you mumble something about a nap before knocking 

out in your bed for two hours. When you wake, you have the bright idea to sit on the beach

and look at the ocean, but you forget the following: it is March in New England, you live 

nowhere near the actual ocean, and it is raining. You ignore all of that. You walk to your 

car and put in directions for the state park overlooking the Long Island Sound. 

Okay. You realize this was a mistake. You can’t find the hoodie you keep in your 

trunk for moments just like this, and your glasses need windshield wipers of their own. 

You’re fighting against the saturated sand, breathing hard enough to fog up your glasses, too. 

The rain beats over you like when you sit in the shower with the lights off, but this isn’t 

by choice and you can’t turn the water heat up. You don’t want to be here, but you have to 

prove something. It’s not certain to whom: no one is here, and you sure don’t give a shit what 

you think. Still, you walk to the water and look out for a moment. You touch it, and it’s freezing 

and almost slimy. The air smells like sulfur and dung. You walk back to the car. 

You’ve proved nothing. 

Well, almost nothing. Certainly not anything good. You’ve spent twenty dollars 

at the expensive beach town gas stations because you were almost on E, and that 

charge on your credit card is all you have to show for your adventure today. You 

don’t know why you do these things. 

—

The next time you open the sandwich shop, you don’t go to the beach again after 

work. See, your mother can’t say that you never learn, after all. You drive around the

roads of your childhood hometown, taking random turns down backroads. Your 

father told you to never drive without a purpose, gas is expensive, and if you use

 drives to think, you won’t focus on the road. You never listen.

There’s a hill right above where they light the Christmas tree in town. When it’s 

not those three weeks in December, the tree simply sits there and no one gawks at it. 

You think it deserves some attention, so you park and walk up to it. But a Christmas 

tree in March isn’t interesting, so you impatiently go up the hill. In the years you’ve 

been here, you’ve never paid attention to the cemetery back there. It’s dry today, the 

grass brown with yellow, dead pine needles carried by the wind strewn about. 

You’ve never been the one to do this. You weren’t a poet in high school, the ones 

who wore long sleeves in the summer and wrote with gel pens in leather notebooks 

at the cemeteries. You were the one who made fun of those kids. But never to their face. 

You pace the haphazard rows like a domesticated dog who has gotten loose and 

doesn’t know what to do with itself. All the tombstones are the same: dirty, damp, 

and old. You randomly sit by one; there’s no extraordinary draw to it. You simply sit 

and read.

Dorothy Wornos

1913-

You can’t make out the death year, like one of those franchise movies where they have 

lost control over what year it is and strategically hide the year on the graves. You didn’t 

think a grave could be so worn. The few optimistic parts of your mind left think someone, 

some maintenance man, would be looking after these things. It doesn’t even have one of 

those phrases after, like “lovely wife and mother.” Not even a RIP! Poor lady. Minutes 

pass while you simply look for some sign that somebody liked her. When you give up on 

the search, you crack your neck and walk back to your car. 

—

You drive to your boyfriend’s on the weekends. He doesn’t want to drive after his commute 

to work all week, and he says it’s good that you get out of the house. You like the drive, and 

he’ll fill your gas tank when you come up. You sit on the couch and watch serial killer documentaries.

One good thing, at least, is that he makes you climax. Sure, it’s after he does, but it’s something. 

Sometimes he likes to hold your hand during missionary. You think it’s weird. When he finishes 

and tells you that he loves you at the same time, you think that’s weird, too. The sex is fine and 

you are both fine. Sometimes, you don’t know if you’re a bad person. You think about the grave 

you saw this week. Maybe you can go back after you open the store on Monday. 

You spend the night and he rolls in his sleep and snakes his arm around your waist. You squeeze 

your eyes shut and try to lay as still as possible until your body gets bored and you fall asleep. 

—

It becomes a habit. It’s easily rationalizable, too. You live ten minutes away, you get out of the 

house like your old therapist used to say, and the gas is cheap. What you can’t rationalize is 

how much you think about the price of gas, given how much you work and how little you 

spend on anything else. But you find yourself here, even on the rainy days that used to mean 

you’d be locked inside during your afternoons. The gravestone somehow still looks dry amongst 

the wet, absorbing all the water like a thirsty neglected houseplant. You still can’t make out the date; 

you’ve decided it’s faded or scratched away by something, not just dirty. The rain proves that to you. 

You like to sit next to the grave, smelling rotting flowers from nearby stones. You don’t do the typical 

things; you don’t write or pray or cry. You just sit, and there’s something unidentifiable and soothing 

about sitting here. Too quickly, you feel a familiarity with Dorothy Wornos. You don’t know 

anything about her, but for some reason, you know somewhere in your gut that she lived. 

She lived vibrantly and unapologetically. You got that from a tombstone. You’ve found 

a companionship of some sort with Dorothy. 

You’re aware it’s not a normal ritual. It’s fine, though. 

~~~

Your college major was math. This was not the wisest decision you’ve made. Thing is, you 

don’t want to teach. You make jokes about punting children that no one at family Christmas 

laughed at, maybe because nobody is sure they’re jokes, including you. Maybe that makes you 

bad, but the parents who smile when their spawn projectile vomit on them are boring and weird. 

They will do anything to believe that the choice they made to have this kid was the right one. 

Even if that means smiling through the shitty diapers and scream-crying. Still, knowing that 

you would hate teaching, maybe you should’ve used some of that critical thinking the gen-ed 

classes taught you to realize there weren’t many other avenues. There were three concentrations 

in the math major: primary education, secondary education, and general. You were general. 

Still, the classes let time pass okay. You weren’t bored, unlike now. It was literally problem solving 

all day. Your brain had to be moving. It distracted you from everything else going on, little as it was. 

You didn’t do the problem solving well when it came to figuring out post-grad plans. Maybe you 

should’ve spent a little more time thinking about the other stuff. 

Maybe math is one of those “soft degrees” they’re always talking about at those liberal arts colleges. 

Maybe you can do a ton of different stuff with math because it’s not about the quadratic formula, 

but about how you knew to use the quadratic formula. You feel like the useless career counselors at 

your university, but deluding yourself is a necessary effort. 

Hey, there’s always the sandwich shop. Joe said you can maybe get a two dollar hourly pay raise in 

six to eight months. So that’s good. 

—

On your visits to the cemetery, you like to think about the lives Dorothy could have led. The 

possibilities seem endless: the latest she could’ve died was probably the early 2000s, and when 

you really think about what happened between 1913 and then, there’s quite a lot of options. 

You think about what happened in your lifetime. 9/11, you suppose. That’s probably the only 

big one, and it’s not like you remember. You were six weeks old. 

Dorothy might have been alive for that. She might have remembered 9/11. Or, maybe she had 

dementia at that point and couldn’t remember the planes hitting after they did. Hell, maybe she 

was the most shocked of everyone when the second plane hit, because she immediately forgot 

that the first one had already hit. To her, it was like the first one hit all over again.

Note to yourself: don’t tell that joke out loud. 

When Dorothy was your age, it was 1935. There’s nothing that stands out about that year. The

Great Depression, apparently, when you quickly google what happened then. Everyone was too 

depressed to make any important history. But, when you think about it, you’re not involved in 

any history in your life. Sure, things have happened, but you were doing something else. Maybe she was too. 

You think about the research project you did in high school on gay bars in the 1930s. They were 

really fun, apparently, but all you were allowed to talk about in the presentation was prohibition 

and raids. You know that these kids in the bars weren’t drunken criminals. They were just drunk. 

But that was apparently a secret that couldn’t be revealed to the rest of your class for fear of 

something Mrs. Mackey couldn’t explain. So you talked about prohibition and raids. 

Maybe Dorothy went to these bars. She gazed through silted clouds of cigarette smoke and licked 

sweat off of exposed collarbones. Maybe she owned these bars, singing jazz with perfect vibrato 

on stage as a fur coat slipped off of her shoulder. She wore a negligé as a dress, scandalizing the few

men and having the eye of every woman on her. Misplaced husbands tried to pull their wives’ attention 

away from her, telling them “She’s no good.” This was to no avail: Dorothy may not have been good, but 

she was a glowing star with her own gravitational pull. People loved her anyway, they couldn’t stop themselves 

if they tried. She drank flutes of Dom Pérignon and took ladies by their slender hands into the back room 

of the bar. She gently pressed her mouth under their ear, whispering meaningless words that won’t be recalled. 

A kiss here, there, lips touching, teeth clacking. 

Maybe nobody turned their head at Dorothy taking up her space here. Maybe people truly 

were “friends of Dorothy” around here. Maybe she was allowed to simply be. Maybe she found 

love with one of the faceless women, her features slowly coming into focus, and they lived as false 

roommates for sixty years until they passed away days apart from each other, peacefully in their shared bed. 

Or maybe there were traces of tragedy woven throughout. Maybe one of those few deaths you didn’t 

want to talk about that happened during those raids belonged to Dorothy. Maybe after she fled all 

the way from home, she found herself returned back to the ground where she was born. All that 

circle of life shit. Maybe the second date on that tombstone is 1935. 

But you don’t know. 

—

You know you’re supposed to look at Zillow every now and again. Your boyfriend took your 

hand a week after graduation and asked if you’d think about moving in together. You had to 

find a place, of course, and he had to save up, but you two could build a home together, he 

said. A millisecond of calculations on your part indicated that you had been dating long 

enough to move in together. Seemed right, and rent’s expensive. You don’t want to live with 

your parents forever. You told him okay. 

That was a few months ago, and you two haven’t really talked about it again. Not for lack of trying; 

he asked every few weeks and you said it was hard to save. He nodded, and you both let the lie sit, 

but he told you a week after you started dating that if you were to ever break up, it would be you 

dumping him. What you took from that was that it didn’t matter what you said or if you lied, 

you were going to be here until you left.

So you look at Zillow. You put in his job and set the radius to thirty miles, think about how these 

prices don’t have utilities included. You scroll while looking at dust stuck between the six and 

seven on your keyboard. 

Before Christmas, you found a diamond appraisal document underneath his bed when you 

dropped your birth control pill. That was one of the few times you felt panic since graduation. 

A rare occasion you felt an emotion that went above a three on a scale of one to ten, in fact. But 

the holiday came and went, and you both stayed either upright or on two knees, never one, and 

you consciously chose to try and forget about it. It didn’t work well, but you’re still deluding yourself. 

You open another tab on your computer and go to a flight searching website. You put in Ibiza 

and then Boulder and then Yazd. You don’t know what you want. You close that tab and send a 

link to a six hundred square foot studio to your boyfriend, wipe the dust off the 

keyboard, and close your laptop. 

—

Dorothy had developed the ability to ignore the smell of bright ocean water and sun through 

countless summers, even the ones outside of her memory, spent leaning out of third story mansion 

windows. She’d run past Newport’s finest, the Breakers, the Elms, the Marble House, and the 

unnamed residences known only by the names of their wealthy inhabitants. Her family was one 

of many that fled to the ocean, away from the smell of city sweat and industrial smog, 

each time the sun heated the ground. 

She was part of a tradition, yes, but she wasn’t really. She danced with boys at debutante balls and 

drank Coca Cola on lounge chairs and ran through the ocean waves at sunset, but she didn’t sit 

with her father at business meetings or plan cocktail parties like her mother. She was at her core, 

a young woman. She was in that odd period of transition: not a wife or mother, but still 

experiencing those queer feelings for boys that she hadn’t felt before.

She’d felt those queer feelings and many other sensations with Bobby in the past few, fleeting 

weeks. Their mothers hadn’t noticed, with Dorothy’s giving constant instructions and tasks to 

Bobby’s, striving to plan with all of her maids at her side. That had created opportunity to sneak 

down beachfront paths and marina docks, where things had completely changed and 

promises had been made. 

But promises aren’t always meant to be kept, despite what Dorothy believed when 

Bobby told her he loved her. Yet, her heart still broke and her monthly came uncharacteristically 

late, so now she had to walk herself to the midwives she hardly knew except in passing. 

Her visit was late and filled with fear, but they’d take care of her, and take care of her 

situation. She was sure of it. But she had been sure of Bobby, too, and she knew what 

had happened with him. Even the greatest faith in someone is likely wrong.

She sometimes wondered if she was a bad person. Or if that even mattered. 

You snap yourself out of your daydream, sitting before Dorothy’s grave. That last part 

might have been more you than her. Maybe you’ve gone off the deep end. You’re zoning 

out and considering if a random woman in a coffin six feet underground might have died 

of a back alley abortion. Who does that? You know nothing about her, not even when she 

died. Remember: you don’t know. Why do you keep forgetting that? Snap out of it.

She’s not your friend. She’s not even alive.

—

When you were in college, your roommate ran a club on campus that no one would 

ever show up to, try as she might. She bought herself a subscription to a design software, 

trying to make the flyers look as enticing as possible. You’d tell her that people would come 

if she gave out free booze, but she never laughed. Still, you felt bad for the girl, clearly trying 

as she was, so you’d log into her account and help her out with the flyers. Sometimes you’d add 

in some text effects to improve the images she put in of White women holding hands 

and shouting “UNITY!” 

Despite both of your attempts, no one really came to the club, but helping her out made 

you feel better about yourself. And you never logged out of her design subscription on your laptop. 

When you’re bored, you like to make fake wedding invitations out of the provided 

templates and send them to rich and famous people’s PO boxes. You’ve seen those blog posts 

where someone sent their wedding save the date to Bill Clinton and he wrote back, wishing 

them a happy marriage. You laugh at this, but scrolling the comments seems to reveal that 

you are the only one who sees the irony here. 

Still, you’re hopeful that one day some rich snob will have their secretary get everything off 

his desk so he can cheat on his third wife with the accountant downstairs, laying the accountant 

down on the desk. The secretary will shove headphones in to drown out the obscenities, 

and maybe she’ll take pity on you and your fake Mr. No Name Fiancé. She’ll stamp her geezer 

boss’ signature on a check for ten thousand dollars, and send it your way with a congratulatory note. 

That may be ambitious, but you’ll take fifty bucks. 

The name you put on the envelope today is for the festive nuptials of the future Mr. and Mrs. Peter and 

Lois Griffin. This is another moment where you are probably the only one who will laugh. 

It’s something to do. It’s creative. You wonder if Dorothy ever got married, licked the envelopes 

of all of her invitations. Maybe she died like that lady on Seinfeld, poisoned from licking all the envelopes. 

You never tell your boyfriend you do this. Which is okay, because no one ever writes back anyway. 

—

Arrive at the cemetery. Stay calm. 

No one else your age is ever here, especially not by your grave. Not your grave, no, Dorothy’s grave. 

A young woman sits on the grass by Dorothy, holding a bamboo handled brush with a bucket of 

soapy water next to her. She sits there, a tripod filming her sudsy swipes. She’s one of those assholes 

who film cleaning videos. You didn’t know the grave-cleaning content creators existed outside of the 

weird internet videos, but here one is. 

You go through a list in your mind. 

Cemeteries are public places. 

Why is she over there? 

Anyone can go to anyone’s grave. 

How can she use this just for content? 

The woman has just as much of a right to be here as you do. 

She doesn’t even know her. 

Neither of you know her. 

Dorothy’s not for her.

Dorothy is not your friend. 

“She’s my friend!” you screech like a banshee, throwing yourself across the damp spring ground. 

You sound like a record scratch. The camera topples, the woman drops her brush. 

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” the woman shouts as you lay on the ground, blocking 

Dorothy as if a barrage of bullets is imminent. 

“Leave her alone!” 

“Is this your grandma or something, kid?” 

“I told you! She’s my friend!” 

“Whatever,” she exhales, packing up her bucket and removing yellow gloves before snatching 

the camera set up away. Maybe you’ll help her go viral, you think. 

You look at Dorothy. She doesn’t look how she should. The stone is brighter, the letters unevenly 

saturated with black specks of unremoved dirt. You hold her in your arms. 

“It’s okay,” you tell Dorothy aloud. “We’re okay.” 

—

You’d think that lonely people would have empty phone screens. You find that this is not the case. 

You are constantly bombarded by fast food deals and psychiatry appointment reminders and 

Facebook friend requests from relatives you’ve never heard of. It’s a weird thing when it’s hard

to ignore and it’s hard to take in all at once. Nothing stands out when you over consume 

because you can’t be bothered to look. 

So it’s certainly odd when you get a news notification and it actually catches your attention 

through mindless scrolls of AI generated videos. “The Potent Grip of Obsession” catches your eye, 

and you feel smart when you read a news article instead of social media posts. 

You open the article and read what the experts have to say; the generational differences, the phone 

addiction, all the normal things that you see and hear from all around you all the time. 

You ignore the next section, titled “Obsession: Part of Your Diagnosis?” 

What your psychiatrist diagnosed you with in college doesn’t matter. It was some sort of mood 

disorder. The thing that you have learned over time is that whatever mental health thing you 

have going on doesn’t matter when you’re alone. If you don’t talk to anyone, you have no 

problems, so you have no mood swings, and viola! No therapist needed. Just take your Prozac, 

twenty-five milligrams at nine pm. All good.

If you had to come up with a phrase to describe your “obsession” it would be Lazy Dedication. 

You wonder, you think, yeah, of course. Maybe you get a little defensive, sometimes. Everyone 

does when they care. That’s normal. But you don’t sit and intensely google about random histories 

or try to decipher ancestry and family trees. That’s the kind of effort that would make this weird. 

If you made that effort, maybe you’d be obsessive. But visiting each day, rain or shine, being 

defensive, and having a friend is not. 

You try not to think about that. 

—

Not thinking about it didn’t work. 

You’ve been to the town hall a few times. In college, you had to turn in your absentee ballot 

there. When you were seven, you went with your father to get a permit for your lemonade 

stand in your driveway. Random shit like that. 

This is different. 

You’ve never been near the records offices. You didn’t even know that this would be the place to 

find out what you were looking for until you google “how to find out how people died.” It didn’t

 seem worth the effort before, but now you have to know. 

You pay a small fee. The charge will show up next to your gas on the credit card statement. You give 

the receptionist all the details you can: Dorothy Wornos, born 1913, death year unknown. No, you are 

not family. Yes, it is for research. No, you don’t need a copy of the death certificate for your records. 

No, you don’t know the year of death. You want to scream at the receptionist to stop asking you 

questions. You try to keep your composure. It could be anything. Gunshot wound. Old age. Renal failure. 

Stabbing. Spontaneous human combustion. The options are endless. 

“Scarlet fever,” the receptionist tells you, her voice shattering your internal hurricanes. 

“What?” 

“Scarlet fever was the cause of death.” 

“What is that?” 

“It’s an illness. Very common in children in this time, so it makes sense.” 

“What? What makes sense?” 

“Date of birth: February 18th, 1913. Cause of death: scarlet fever. Date of death: January 9th, 1914.” 

The world falls off of its axis. The planet is hurtling through space, destined to crash into 

something and burn us all. You freeze. You speak. 

“Thank you. Goodbye.” 

—

Here’s what will happen. 

When your boyfriend pushes the idea of moving in together again, you will say yes. You will be 

enthusiastic, and he will believe it is real. 

You will call your doctor. You will have your Prozac increased. You will feel even less. 

When your boyfriend shows you an ugly, gauche diamond ring and tells you how much he loves you, 

you will squeal and tell him “Yes! Yes! A hundred times yes!”

You will quit the sandwich shop. You will enroll in graduate school. You will become a teacher. 

Most importantly: you will never visit the graveyard ever again. You will never go sit by that tombstone 

with the unspeakable name ever again. If that person wasn’t able to live, there is no chance you ever will. 

You will push down the fact that your heart has been broken by someone you have never known. 

You will remain unknown. You won’t like it, but it’s what’s right. What you crave is not. You will never 

wonder how it is that you will die. There’s no point. The best lives go unlived.