AFTER SEX, WE FIND A PRAYING MANTIS IN OUR BED — CORTNEY PHILLIPS MERIWETHER
/The first time we slept together in the new apartment, it had been five weeks since you last touched me. But they say moving is one of the most stressful things a marriage can go through, and back then we would have agreed—our lower backs aching, the shrieking rip of packing tape still ringing in our ears—so who could blame us for not feeling up to it.
Afterwards, I got up to go to the bathroom, like I always do, and you turned onto your back to reach for your phone, like you always do, and the moment felt instantly severed—during and after, then and now—and I wondered, like I always do, if you noticed it too.
Afterwards, I found my way back to you with the flashlight on my phone—the beam catching dust in the air—and then I saw it, perched lightly on the bare mattress where the fitted sheet pulled loose, overlooking you while you overlooked it.
Afterwards, once you’d gently corralled him into a Tupperware container and deposited him safely outside, I asked you what it meant—luck, maybe?—and you told me no, that was ladybugs and it probably didn’t mean anything, and then I said something about don’t the females eat the males after sex..? and you said well not always and reached for your phone again to Google symbolism, telling me soothing words: patience, peacefulness, grace.
Afterwards, we’ll both know it wasn’t that night—the timing just won’t add up, off by weeks, even—but we’ll tell the story like a fact, cleaving to the narrative of our family beginning under the watchful blessing of this uninvited party, because how could something like that not be a sign, after all, and how could we not fully delight in new life created alongside a divine messenger? Exactly, we'll say. Exactly.
Cortney Phillips Meriwether received her MFA in Creative Writing from NC State in 2012 and has been working as a writer and editor ever since. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, Monkeybicycle, and Minola Review, and she is a reader for Fractured Lit. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband and son.
