In the Slip by Adele Gallogly

As my siren-haired daughter tells my nurses about her honeymoon cruise, she overuses this phrase for stopping in the thin channels between wharves — as if these exist only in her drowned father’s country — and I start saying how, as a girl, she sashayed beside my stone wardrobe in my whispery chemise — the one I wore for vanishing men who never berated me like her father did, not ever, not even for dreaming open-mouthed — but I keep waking up to the rough, unwanted song of his breath against me somewhere promised, somewhere still there, so I never really slipped — did I?

Adele Gallogly is a Canadian writer published recently in the Bridport Prize 2025 Anthology, 50-Word Stories, Flash the Court, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and Paragraph Planet. Find her on IG/Bluesky: @AdeleGallogly