SmokeLong Quarterly

Anita is not married to John and wears neither the green nor the blue dress. June, however, wears one of those colors.

So we x in the boxes, begin dressing the grid, thinking June might wear green to flatter her name, wondering why John wasn’t good enough for Anita in her slutty red dress.

Zane did not exchange vows with the woman who wears blue, nor did he marry Zenza.

Therefore Zenza is not wearing blue and it’s probably a good thing she didn’t marry Zane, the impulse too great to christen their children Zoe and Zachary. A buzzing household of names and just think of the tongue-exhaustion, the nights of silent reading beneath lamplight. Zane and Zenza considering the kiss, perhaps wanting the kiss, but accepting instead the click into darkness, remembering a time their lips didn’t reverberate with complications from the day’s language.

Adam’s wife is not June and is also not the woman who wears red.

Okay, yeah, sure. But what happens beneath all that latticework? What if Zane was once married to the woman in blue? Can’t you see him walking past her, her great puffy swirls of sky-colored taffeta, and look, there he goes, past Zenza as well, who, with a name like that, I’m betting has a past involving the exchange of cash for non-material goods. No wonder the poor girl married Adam, a desperate grasp at the ultimate in purity. Adam: first little lump out of God’s hands. And it would make sense then, wouldn’t it, if Zenza was a born-again Christian? She might be kicking up her green dress in the aisle of some tiny country church at this very moment, while Anita and June stare on from the pews, aghast. They elbow their grinning husbands, snap the pages of their Bibles, and wonder about the dreams they’ve been having all their lives, the one where God’s finger is poised over them like a giant pencil, threatening to transfigure or erase or absolutely bungle everything.