Joy For Beginners by Erica Bauermeister

open.
    There was an almost literary irony, she thought now, in how Jack had gone rampaging through his life this year, cleaning the shelves in one sweep, when the reality was they were already emptying, quietly and efficiently, on their own. Searching for a clean slate, he had chosen a woman at the beginning of her adult life, who would want to fill shelves again with children and diaper bags and strollers, more baggage than you could ever carry on. He had jumped out of the cycle only to go back to the beginning, filling his hands again.
    Marion’s thumb moved to the inside of Caroline’s left shoulder blade, following the line of the bone, reaching in to the muscles below.
    “Too much?” Marion asked.
    “No,” Caroline answered. Behind her the last rays of the sun reached into the living room, lighting the walls blue and gold.

DARIA
    O ne time, almost two years ago, Daria’s older sister Marion had given her a gallon-sized Ziploc bag filled with off-white goo. The over-Xeroxed instructions called it “Amish Friendship Bread.” It was so easy, the instructions declared—mush the bag, mush the bag, mush the bag. Add some water and flour and sugar. Mush again. Make more starter, give new bags of goo to three of your friends, and bake your bread. Stunningly simple. You can do it, Marion had said supportively; you might have fun.
    It was a chain letter camouflaged as food, Daria could see that. It even came with a peppy little note like all the chain letters in junior high: “Pass this on to three friends. If you do, your dearest wish will come true. If you don’t, you will fall to earth in a plane crash/suffer a heart attack/lose the love of your life.” Those letters were always threats dressed in smiles, the epistolary equivalent of a head cheerleader. Daria hated them, deeply and viscerally—their cheerful theft of your time, their assumption that you had three friends.
    Daria had taken the goo-bag home, held between two fingers like a wet diaper, and pitched it onto the kitchen counter. In the morning she noticed that bubbles had surreptitiously formed in the bag during the night, lightening the humorless quality of the starter. Bubbles. All on their own, without her help. She mushed the bag, feeling the goo beneath the plastic give under her fingers, a bit like clay, but smoother, looser. The next morning the same, and the next, opening the seal and letting out the air each time, then closing the bag, gently and firmly, like a mother tucking a reluctant child into bed. Maybe there wasn’t so much to that baking thing after all.
    On the fourth morning she walked into the kitchen, flicked on the switch for the coffeepot and looked over at her burbling little friend. The edgy, fecund smell of yeast tickled the air, mingling with the earthy aroma of the percolating coffee. She reached over and gave the bag a squeeze, an affectionate foreshadowing of mushing to come, at which point the seal, not entirely secured from the previous release of air, popped open and goo vomited across the counter, trickling over the edge, oozing into a partially opened drawer and dropping onto the floor in round, soft splats.
    Shit, thought Daria. She scraped the goo back into the bag, wondering what fermentation aids were lingering on the average kitchen counter, and stored the whole mess on top of the refrigerator. It sat there throughout the day, morose, guilt-inducing, occasionally emitting a small, pathetic bubble to call her attention to its fate. She’d had boyfriends who were subtler. She was about to go on a trip, anyway, a weekend with a man she barely knew, the excitement of the date enough without adding the guilt bread. Maybe she could let the stuff die now. It couldn’t possibly live through such a traumatic experience.
    What was the point, anyway? She wasn’t Amish. She liked cars and bread from the store, and the way a zipper could slide open down your back in the right man’s hands. She wasn’t her mother, the