Ea Anderson

Short Fiction

Later that year it started to hail. From out of nowhere, hailstones as big as ping pong balls. I was only a block from the flat, walking along the sidewalk with my bike, but the weather got so wild, I had to seek refuge in a shop. The nearest one was a luxury second hand shop where I have bought quite a lot of things, though I don’t like the woman who owns it. She follows you around the shop as if you’re going to steal something and if you ask her to see something in the locked glass cabinet, she looks at you as if she thinks you couldn’t afford anything from that cabinet anyway, which might be true but still, you just shouldn’t do that as a shopkeeper.

Many other people had sought refuge from the weather in the shop that day and the woman didn’t like it but what could she do. At one point a young man came in carrying an older man in his arms. The old man had been hit by a large hail and then fallen off his bike. He was bleeding from his forehead. People stepped aside and the young man put the old man down on the floor. We need to put something under his head, someone said. Everybody looked at the woman, the shop owner, but she just looked back without doing or saying anything at all. I grabbed a jacket from a hanger behind me, one that was for sale, rolled it up and with help from the young man, put it under the old man’s head. The young man smiled at me across the bleeding body of the old man, looking at me satisfied, knowingly. I smiled back, the old man grunted and panted. Someone had called an ambulance. 

The weather cleared up, the clouds parted, blue sky appeared. Everybody looked up from the floor where the old man was lying, to the large facade windows, up to the sky. Oh, people said and nodded at each other, agreeing it was safe to go out again and better to leave before the ambulance arrived or it would be too crowded in the small shop. People started to leave. Everybody had forgotten about the shop owner and she didn’t say anything. The young man stayed with the old man, kneeling beside him on the floor. Outside people said how strange it all was, the sudden wild hailstorm and now this clear sky, sunshine and the old man, hope he will be okay. And people parted. I so wished we could all have stayed together a little longer, maybe gone out for coffee and wine together, all of us sitting at a large table outside. I walked my bike home. 

The flat seemed particularly quiet that day. After closing the door, I stood in the hallway for a while, listening, and there was just nothing to hear. I walked into the living room and there, I had forgotten to close the windows after my routine airing out of the flat in the morning. The floor was full of hailstones; a large pile under the window, reaching halfway up to the sill and more spread out further away. The hailstones started moving a little as they started melting. What were they doing in my living room? Why had this foreign element forced its way in?

I took the dustpan and a bucket and started sweeping them up. When I had filled the bucket, I emptied it out in the bathtub. I don’t know how many buckets I filled but it was more than you would think. Then I wiped the floor dry as best I could with a towel. After that I went to the bathroom and stood looking at the tub with the hailstones. Without really thinking much about it, I undressed and then stepped into the tub with the hailstones and sat down in them. I gave out a little surprised gasp. I sat there for quite a while, while the hailstones melted against my body. When I got up, my legs and stomach were red.

---

I wasn’t at all sure we would get the flat. There were many prospective tenants. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to get the flat and then live there with him and sometimes his daughter. But we did get the flat and I felt relieved. I had viewed it at first by myself with the letting agent and then I went to see it again with him and the letting agent, after I had already signed the contract. He turned the taps on full in the bathroom and asked about the water pressure. He said he liked a good powerful flow. And I thought, don’t do that, thinking it might cost us the flat but of course it didn’t and why would it? Maybe it could have, if the letting agent thought we were weird then, if the letting agent hadn’t been nice and elderly.

The first time I used the washing machine in the bathroom, water started rising in the sink and the drain under the sink. I couldn’t get the washing machine turned off, and just had to stand there and watch the water slowly spreading over the floor. When the water almost reached the doorstep, I closed the door and got a lot of towels and built a towel fence in the small opening between the door and the floor. And then I waited. I went into the ‘study’ and unpacked a few things while I now and again listened for a sound of damage. I sat for a while on the kitchen worktop with a cup of coffee and looked out the window, down to the courtyard where a young woman was lying on her stomach with books and papers open in front of her, probably studying. The kitchen was next to the bathroom and I could hear the washing machine working away in there. I really had to pee but I didn’t want to open the door to the bathroom. I considered peeing in the sink in the kitchen but our flat was in the corner of the building and I thought that the people in the flat next to ours might be able to see me from their kitchen window and it’s not a good way to present yourself, peeing in a sink, the first time you see somebody. I found a bucket, the same bucket I later used for the hailstones. I went into the corner of the kitchen, away from the window, next to the kitchen stairs leading down to the courtyard. I pulled down my trousers and crouched over the bucket and peed in it. It made an awfully loud noise and I hoped nobody would walk down those kitchen stairs at that moment and I believe they didn’t. I laughed at myself pulling up my trousers, I could see the funny side of it. I emptied the bucket in the sink and then washed the sink and the bucket with a detergent spray and a sponge and threw out the sponge. Now and again, I laughed.

The washing machine had started its spinning circle and the whole room was shaking; the plates and glasses I had already unpacked clinked in the cupboards. Then the washing machine clicked as it does when it unlocks the door and the wash was done. For a while, I stayed there in the kitchen as if I had to gather courage before going into the bathroom. I poured the last of the cold coffee into the sink and washed and dried my mug. Then I went towards the bathroom. The towels of my fence were soaked and some water had spilled out onto the floor in the hallway in front of the bathroom. I went and got more towels before opening the door. Luckily the door opened in the way so I could leave the towel fence in place for awhile. There was water all over the floor. In some places, the water had a grey bubbly substance on the surface. I took off my socks and went in.

I started soaking up the water with more towels, then wrenched them out in the tub and then went over the floor again. It took a long time, there was a lot of water. When I was done, I went over the floor with a fresh dry towel. Then I was out of towels and would have to wash them all.

I put on a pair of plastic gloves and went to work on the drain in the sink. I stuck my fingers in and caught something right away and pulled it out. It was a daily contact lens case. I went in again. I fished out four in all. Then I went to the drain under the sink, it had a kind of net to trap crap in. It was hard to get it out but I managed. I got a newspaper and emptied the contents of the drain-trap on it. There were more contact lens cases, bobby pins, plastic tooth pegs, a fake blue nail and numerous blister packs for pills. Most of them still had the foil on the back and I could read the name of the pill. Sertraline, Fluoxetine, Olanzapine, Benzedrine. One of them I knew but the other ones I had to look up to find out what they were. The place had been done up before we moved in; the walls had been painted and the wooden floor sanded down but they clearly hadn’t been everywhere, not that you could really expect them to.

I felt the apartment change character. I went from room to room as if I expected to find something there. I stood in the middle of the floor in the living room and then in the study and looked around me. Looked at the air and the walls. “Yoo-hoo,” I said, as if I was calling somebody, trying to get someone’s attention, though as far as I knew, I was alone in the flat. My voice echoed a bit because the rooms were still fairly empty, we were not done unpacking.

When he came home at night, I had washed all the different things I had found in the drains and lined them up on a tea towel on the dining table.

“Look,” I said to him and pointed to the things. I told him about the flood in the bathroom.

“Look,” I said again and picked up the fake blue nail, held it between my fingers in front of his face. Then I picked up one of the blister packets.

“But who lived here?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said, “someone who doesn’t like glasses,” he said and touched the glasses on his own face, smiled.

“No!” I said.

That night I woke up at two am and thought I felt a presence of someone or something. I got up. I was naked. I normally sleep in a t-shirt but I must have taken it off in my sleep without knowing. I must have been warm. Without getting dressed I went into the living room and stood there in the dark. And now I felt cold. The cold air felt like a touchable substance.

“Hu,” I said with an almost silent breath but nothing answered me. For a while I felt as if I couldn’t move, naked in the dark, cold living room at 2 am. 

---

I have my parents over for afternoon tea, to show them the flat. There’s a humming silence in the rooms as I prepare everything. Each season has its own silence; winter is static and when spring comes, a humming sets in. I had considered sitting us outside in the courtyard but it seemed too troublesome carrying everything down there; we live on the fourth floor and there is no lift. Also, my mother doesn’t like direct sunlight for too long at a time and I don’t have a parasol.  I’m making cucumber sandwiches with soft white bread and butter. I’m not sure I actually like cucumber sandwiches but I love the idea of them and therefore also to eat them. There’re also two different kinds of pâte, one on a cracker and one on pumpernickel. I don’t like smoked salmon and not the idea of it either. And there’s a lot of different miniature cakes. I went to the best baker in town to get them this morning. It was a long bike ride. I could have got them yesterday, I’m sure they would have kept fine in the fridge. But I wanted them completely fresh and also had the thought that they might be contaminated with taste from onions and garlic kept in the fridge. I had to cycle slowly and controlled on the way home so as not to shake the cakes too much and get them all mushed up. So now I feel I don’t have quite enough time before they arrive. I have bought a coffee cream cake with crunchy nutty layers, a raspberry tart, something layered with nougat and my favourite: a passion fruit cake with the passion fruit as a kind of gel. 

I set the table; a very bright yellow tablecloth with rose-coloured flowers I got from my mother that looks just like spring, and a coffee and cake set that used to be my grandmother’s. There’re also glasses for lemonade, small silver cake forks, napkins that kind of match the tablecloth and a large bouquet of peonies at the end of the table. There’s champagne in the fridge should we want it even though my mother says it gives her a sore stomach. 

I have deliberately invited them when he’s not home. It’s not that they don’t like him but they seem to not really understand each other, literally; it’s like they don’t understand the words that come out of his mouth. My mother looks at my father whenever my boyfriend says anything, with a question mark on her face as if she wants my dad to translate, and my dad answers after a long silence but he seems to answer something else, something not remotely related to what my boyfriend has said.

It’s also a problem that I don’t really like any of them when they are together. So, I try to avoid having them around me at the same time. I have sometimes asked him what he thinks of them and he says, ‘you have to respect your parents, especially your mother, she gave birth to you’, and I don’t dig any deeper.

They are exactly on time; at three to the minute the entrance phone rings and I buzz them in and open the door. I can hear their muffled voices four floors down. My mother almost runs up the stairs with my dad behind her.

“Sorry we’re late,” she says.

“You’re not late.”

“We took the bus so we wouldn’t be late searching for parking but the bus was so slow, it stopped everywhere.”

“But you’re not late,” I say.

“Well, I always have my watch set a bit ahead of time to avoid that.” She touches the watch on her left wrist.

It occurs to me that they might not understand what I say either. Or maybe they just don’t listen.

I take them through to the living room.

“Well, look at that,” she says, turning to my dad.

“That looks very nice,” my dad says.

They are dressed in their Sunday best; my mother wears a sleeveless dress in a light material, viscose maybe, it’s red with small white and blue flowers, and my dad wears a short-sleeved white shirt and grey trousers. I picture them in the bus; my mother looking at her watch every time it stops, sighing. I smile.

I say I will show them the flat after the afternoon tea.

“Cucumber sandwiches,” I hear my mother say while I pour water in the pot in the kitchen.

“Cucumber sandwiches,” my dad says to me when I enter the living room again.

“Yes,” I say.

“It’s nice with the air,” my mother says and gestures towards the open windows.

I have opened all the windows in the flat to give an impression of being outdoors and I’m glad she notices.

They are still standing behind their chairs and I tell them they can just sit down. How strangely formal they behave today. It’s not like they have never visited me before other places I have lived. Maybe it’s the afternoon tea that does it.

“Uhm,” they say when they start eating.

I know my dad is looking forward to the cakes; he doesn’t get many sweet things and he has a sweet tooth.

“Try this,” I say to my mother after the sandwiches and give her one of the passionfruit cakes.

“Oh no, just half for me,” she says and I cut the already tiny cake in half. My mother is very slender. 

My dad has gone all quiet; he’s concentrating on the cakes. He looks at them with a fixed glare and chews fast but thoroughly. 

“Very nice, very nice,” my mother says fresh.

After tea, I show them the rest of the flat.

“We’re not finished unpacking,” I say gesturing at the boxes in ‘the study’. 

“No, no,” my mother says, “nice and airy, isn’t it?” She pats my arm. 

We end up in the kitchen. I haven’t told them about the blocked drains in the bathroom but I have saved something for my dad; I tell him we have a problem with the oven. He likes to fix things.

“When we turn this light on with the oven on, the fuse goes,” I tell him. 

We turn on the light with the oven and the fuse goes.

“Well, I’ll be,” he says.

We click the fuse back on and try again, the same thing happens of course as I knew it would.

“I’ll be,” my dad says.

We pull out the oven so my dad can get a better look. My mother makes herself comfortable on a chair in the kitchen and watches my dad.

“Champagne?” I ask them. 

“No,” my mother says.

“I’m having a glass,” I say.

“Well, okay,” my mother says.

I pour three glasses.

I have found the sparsely equipped toolbox and my dad has gone to work. He has switched off the electricity, then he fiddles with some wires behind the oven and tests the system again. He does this over and over. 

My mother leans back in her chair in the kitchen and breathes out comfortably. I sit on the worktop with the window behind me. We sip our champagne. 

“Have you met any of the neighbours?”

“Not yet,” I say.

I say it’s a nice courtyard, that I will use it in the summer. My mother gets up and has a look out the window.

“That’s a rhododendron,” she says satisfied and sits down again.

My dad works.

This is exactly as I had imagined it. I’m very happy.

“Well, it works now,” my dad says, “but if something happens again you should get the janitor out. There must be a janitor here.” He looks around the kitchen as if he expects to see him there. 

“I didn’t have all the tools,” he says.

They leave at six. 

“Five past six,” my mother says looking at her watch as we stand in the hallway in front of the door.

I kiss my mother and then my father lightly on the lips and they leave. I stand in the doorway and listen to their descending steps. Then I close the door and from the window in the living room, I watch them walk down the street hand in hand towards the bus stop. 

---

I meet up with a girlfriend from university times. She’s trouble. You can’t blame her, I guess; she’s got borderline or something like it. The diagnosis is not clear yet. Her father is dead long ago from schizophrenia, if that’s something you die from, and her mother is insane. She mostly grew up at her grandmother’s.

It’s summer. We meet up at three. We sit outside a café close to the flat. On the same street as the luxury second hand shop where I sought refuge. They only have a few tables out and they take up the whole sidewalk, people seem annoyed when they walk past. 

At first, we both order a cappuccino. She used to live in this neighbourhood and often went to this café. Soon she’s moving to a flat not far from here again. I’ve never been anywhere she’s lived and she’s never been to my place either. It’s not that kind of friendship. In fact, I’m not sure it’s a friendship at all. I’m not sure I like her, but I still like to meet up with her around town. She’s very tall and skinny, she has a prominent nose, small dark eyes and full lips. She could have been a model apart from the fact that she seems to have problems controlling her limbs. She moves with long, loose floppy steps and her arms fly towards her coffee cup almost knocking it over every time she wants to drink. She’s talking about packing, how everything in her flat is a mess, it just won’t go into the boxes, there’s clothes and knick-knacks everywhere around the boxes but not in them.

“Maybe it all jumps out when you’re not looking.”

She stares at me, considering, as if that’s a real possibility.

“Oh,” she says, remembering something.

She’s very animated when she tells me that she’s read an essay by one of our former fellow students who has directly copied something from an essay I had published last year and put it in hers. Did I know that? No. She gets her phone out, finds the essay and starts reading. And right enough, almost word by word, this passage is exactly the same. She’s outraged by it. It’s very nice of her and I’m outraged for a moment too and then I don’t really seem to care. But I keep acting outraged and ask more about it. But really, I’m not going to have a career anyway, so it doesn’t really matter, does it? That’s all behind me. 

She doesn’t like this girl and I don’t either. We don’t say it but I think we both know, if we would just admit it, that it’s because, well at least partly because, she’s very ugly, she’s supposedly very smart but also very ugly. We don’t say it but I’m not afraid to admit it to myself anymore. You just can’t help but look at her, almost as you would a very pretty woman. She has an enormous jaw and her teeth stick straight out, both the upper and lower ones. I don’t think it’s only an advantage being pretty, I think it can be an advantage being very ugly, as if the people around you have to compromise and show the world they don’t mind ugly people though they do. I’m just averagely pretty myself, nothing you would turn around on the street to look at, but pretty. 

We have moved on to wine as we always do and knew we would without agreeing it. It’s very nice sitting here getting tipsy in the sun in the late afternoon while rush-hour traffic slowly increases on the street right next to us. There’re two options: that I go home after the next glass or that we just continue until we in one way have gone too far and have had way too much.

It’s nice in a way that our friendship is not important; we don’t have to worry so much about it. It doesn’t have to be perfect or even really very good. It’s relaxing, freeing sort of. 

Later on, when we have gone too far, she gets a little sharp with me. She’s annoyed with me for not being angrier at the woman who copied from my essay. She also says she doesn’t like my boyfriend. Not many people do. But she’s only met him once. 

“You don’t really know him,” I say. 

But she points out things I have said about him recently and in the past. It’s like she doesn’t understand the code; you tell each other things that annoys you about your boyfriend, things he has done, but you don’t, so to speak, use that against each other or him, at least not until you’re not with that boyfriend anymore and even then, there’s a limit. Now this might not be a good thing when you really think about it, it could even seem unsupportive and not compassionate but it is nevertheless how it is done and how it has to be if you want to keep a friendship going, unless there’s direct evidence of violence or threats. But she just doesn’t seem to understand that, she doesn’t get the code. Also, she doesn’t know what to do with people who are not attracted to her, and he actually isn’t. 

I keep trying to steer our conversations away from him and the essay woman. To focus our attention on the things we see around us; the hot but hopeless waiter, the women at the table next to us, the summer, the wine, even her move, ‘we can visit’, I say.

“But I just don’t understand why you don’t leave him.”

I sigh and after finishing my third large glass of wine, I say I have to get home. Shade has started falling over the sidewalk too.

“Can I come?” she asks and she reminds me of a small child.

“Not today,” I say, “I’m quite tired.”

We get up and leave together. She’s going to the bus. When we stand by my front door I point up, ‘up there’, I say. She waits for me to go in but I have planned going to the supermarket, the one on the ground floor of my apartment building, just next to us, to get a bottle of wine for myself and I don’t want her to know. 

“I’ll just see you off,” I say, “to make sure you get to the bus okay.”

“Okay,” she says and smiles at me. We hug and I watch her for a while walking down the street with her strange floppy steps. Then I go into the supermarket. 

All I need is the wine. I chose a quite expensive red and wait in the queue. It’s cold in the supermarket after sitting in the sun. People on their way home from work buy sweeties and ready meals. It takes a while before I’m out on the street again. When the automatic doors open, I see her standing in front of the door to my building. She must have seen me go into the supermarket. I should have waited longer. There’s no way around her.

“Can I use your toilet,” she asks when I get closer.

“Of course,” I say, trying not to sound as exasperated as I feel.

“Nice flat,” she says when she comes out from the bathroom.

“Thanks,” I say.

“You got wine,” she sticks her head into the kitchen, the wine is sitting on the worktop and of course she saw it in my hand walking up the stairs, don’t say she didn’t notice then. “I thought you were tired.”

“I am tired and I wanted another glass of wine.”

“Would you like a glass?” I ask her matter of factly, not kindly.

“Thank you,” she says.

I pour us two large glasses, more than half of the bottle. I want this wine drunk and her out of the flat before he comes home. We walk from room to room in the flat. She walks ahead of me. I don’t like her in our bedroom.

“And who sleeps here?”

“This is his daughter’s room.”

“Seems a waste,” she says, “When she’s hardly ever here.”

“It does,” I say.

She fingers some of the knick-knack on the table in her room.

We settle down on the couch. We don’t say anything. I take large slurps of my wine and so does she and I fill her glass again. She doesn’t say anything, her face has turned white, she doesn’t look well at all. Suddenly she gets up and runs towards the bathroom. She doesn’t make it. It looks like somebody has spray-painted the wooden floor in the hallway and part of the wall, Bordeaux red. It’s almost completely liquid, she can’t have been eating much today. She looks at me then it comes over her again, she runs the last few steps and into the bathroom. I hear her vomit again. I know I should probably go in there and comfort her, but I don’t feel any compassion, I want to get these floors and the walls cleaned. I fill a bucket with water and soap, take a brush and start scrubbing. It won’t fucking come off. The vomit has been sucked right into the floor. I wet the wood and put salt on the stains. Then I wash the walls. 

She comes out of the bathroom after a while. I think she looks better; less white in the face. 

“It’s my new medication,” she says.

I don’t say anything, I just look at her.

“What the fuck can I do about it?”

“Well, nothing,” I say.

We go into the living room, she takes her bag and I walk her to the door. We don’t hug this time and her beautiful features look too much now, distorted and too large.

“Bye,” I say.

“Bye,” she says. She raises her hand and walks slowly down the stairs.

I will miss her, or I won’t miss her but I will miss sitting with her sometimes, drinking wine. She won’t call me and I probably won’t call her. For a good while anyway. I will miss her but there’s just too much disturbance with her and I just don’t want it, I can’t take it at the moment.

---

In the morning, I smoke on the back stairs by the kitchen door. I don’t smoke in the flat. Only sometimes I smoke out the open window in ‘the study’ or sometimes late at night under the extractor fan in the kitchen if it’s cold or if I’ve had too much to drink. 

A man comes down the stairs while I’m standing there smoking. He’s my age, he’s wearing a metallic blue suit.

“Oh, hi,” he says, as if he hadn’t noticed me there.

“Hi,” I say.

He’s stopped on the landing in front of me.

“So, you’ve just moved in.”

“Yes, three weeks ago,” I say.

“Three weeks,” he says.

He looks like he works in a bank or an insurance company maybe.

“Do you know who lived here before?” it occurs to me.

“I didn’t know them. An Asian woman and her teenage son. He used to smoke here as well, standing there. Joints.”

“Oh,” I say.

“It goes right up to our flat.” He points up.

I hadn’t thought anybody lived up there, though I know there’s another floor above us. I’ve even passed the door going to the storage room in the attic that came with the flat, with boxes. There’s never a sound from up there.

“My wife’s pregnant, you know.” I hadn’t noticed the slightly annoyed look in his eyes before now, and around his mouth, tight, tense in something that’s not a smile. I look up.

“Oh, sorry,” I say. I look around for somewhere to put out my cigarette. There’s nowhere. I look at him, he looks at me, still annoyed. He’s waiting for me to do something. I dump my cigarette into my coffee cup, the stump hisses in the liquid. 

“Okay,” he says, satisfied now. “I’m going to work.” Emphasizing I’m, indicating at least one of us is working, that some of us have to work. Then he turns and continues down the stairs.

“Have a good day,” I shout after him when I can’t see him anymore. He mumbles something from further down, intangible. 

I should have asked if they wore glasses, the Asian woman or her son. I go back into the flat, slamming the door behind me.

Later I go out to smoke again but I don’t enjoy it. I had planned on putting a small foldable table and chair out here. I only smoke half my cigarette before I go back in.

---

I do most of the shopping in a larger supermarket about seven minutes’ walk behind the flat, away from the main street. I don’t like the supermarket on the ground floor, it’s dirty. Behind the flat, the area becomes more industrial; open with strange low ramshackle buildings. Who knows what goes on in there? I have to walk past a Shell garage. I have bought cigarettes there sometimes or a newspaper, early or late, when the other shops were closed. It’s always been the same old woman serving me when I’ve been there. She looks sick; she’s grey, her skin is thick, her hair is greasy as if she hasn’t washed it for weeks. I’ve stopped going there, I don’t want to think about her life. But I see her when I walk to the supermarket, there’s no way around it. She’s standing outside the garage smoking. She’s standing smoking. It’s crazy, she’s smoking, a petrol station. The ground under her is filled with gasoline, the fumes rise up, you can smell it in the air from away and there she is, standing smoking as if nothing. 

Every time I go to the supermarket, I hurry past if I see her there and I’m anxious before going. I picture the whole damn thing blowing up: the explosion, bits of buildings, cars and human beings, shot up high into the air and then the flames licking the apartment building. I hurry.

Sometimes when I sit in the flat, it shakes slightly when a large truck passes on the street below, and for a moment I will think, that was it, that was the Shell garage blowing up, before I come to my senses.

I have a shopping list; milk, eggs, coffee, mince, broccoli, dishwashing soap, wine. I always buy the same wine, it costs four euros and often I buy two. Sometimes I buy things that’re not on my shopping list: pork scratchings, an orchid. I carry it all home, it’s heavy. I hurry past the Shell garage.

Sometimes in the supermarket I see an Asian woman and her son. She’s maybe 45 and he’s around 20. And I want to warn them, I want to tell them to go a different way home, to watch out, to not walk past the Shell garage if at all possible.

I don’t tell him about these small things; meeting the man from upstairs, that his wife is pregnant. I don’t tell him about the woman at the Shell garage, that it’s going to blow up soon. And he doesn’t ask me where I go shopping and I guess it’s not important.

---

Ea Anderson is a serial expat, originally from Denmark now living in France. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in L’Esprit Literary Review, West Trade Review and Westchester Review, as well as several Danish literary journals and anthologies. She is the author of She Slowly Cares for Dogs (Hun Bryder sig Langsomt om Hunde). Find more of her work at ea-anderson.com.