A Flag on the Play

They cheered nonetheless. A flash memoir by Jill Bronfman.

Photo by Blocks Fletcher on Unsplash

We were on the roof of our sorority house last week after the game, facing the way most people would, looking at the city with its arms that had embraced us and had pulled us away from Berkeley. But what we wanted to look at was not West of us where the sun was flattening our invincibility but in the other directions where we were still visible and men who used to be boys would call at us from their open fraternity house windows on all three sides of us. We were the sunbathers. We laid face up and then face down, fingertips touching on the small roof deck. Take off your tops, they’d boom, like cheerleaders for a game that they’d have no chance of winning. Like the game in fact that had just been played and lost in the fourth quarter as reliably as gin fizzes and best wishes were served before the first quarter. Such a reasonable outburst because girls did it in the movies and we had strings that would pull themselves like wishes. And once we did pull those strings for ourselves and for our sisters and we stood and waved the flags above our heads. All they saw were whips of color, red and yellow and tropical prints, not us girls as we stood behind protective fences of wood and confidence. They cheered nonetheless, joyous for their collective victory and defeat because who were they anyway but collectors of stories and Christmases. When they met us again at what we still called Cafe Roma for coffee, they told us we looked the same, the same as ever as if they ever saw us.

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Jill Bronfman placed second in the Joan Ramseyer Memorial Poetry Contest, was named a semi-finalist for both the James Applewhite Poetry Prize and The Waking’s Flash Prose Prize, and received an honorable mention in the Storm Cellar Force Majeure Flash Contest. Her work has been accepted for publication in five collections and twenty-nine literary journals. She has performed her work in The Bay Area Book Festival, Poets in the Parks, The Basement Series, Page Street, and LitQuake, and had her story about a middle-aged robot produced as a podcast by Ripples in Space. She is a reader for The Masters Review, and a Poet-Teacher for California Poets in the Schools.