thing impossible

by Kate Forbes-Riley

Otis Redding pops up on her Spotify as she’s driving home from dropping her daughter at school. So, of course, she starts thinking about T, the NYC performance artist who was artist-in-residence decades before at a college where she and her husband E—then boyfriend—were newly lecturers. Being an art department Christmas party in the early 2000’s, they were all drunk and loose. Standing near the stereo, bodies close, they’d overheard T overheatedly telling J, an assistant professor, that Otis Redding was far superior to the blatantly appropriating Allman Brothers. She winces now recalling how she’d peeled, “Oh, I love Otis Redding!” How scornfully T had regarded her, his silence pregnant with subtext. He’d quizzed her on her favorite Otis song. Put her on the spot. She feels again her flush of pleasure at his surprise—because she hadn’t said “Dock of the Bay” or “Stand by Me”—even then she’d understood that much. He’d turned to the stereo and put on the song she named. Another test. She feels it still. The rest of the night is lost to her now, but she sees, as if through blurry film, her own head tilted back, eyes shining back the Christmas tree light, hips stilling to move as the song slowly builds, lips parting for Otis’s booming croon. They’re all watching her; she knew it then too, E, J, and even T. Inside the time capsule of her car, she’s awash again in surrender to the thing impossible, at once incredibly powerful and full of tenderness.

Photo of Kate Forbes-Riley

BIO: Kate Forbes-Riley is a writer and computational linguist. Her writing was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and appears in many peer-reviewed academic and literary venues, including the Wigleaf Top 50 list. She teaches in the Writing and Rhetoric program at Dartmouth College.