Caroline Bock

Nonfiction

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In the future, I’ll be naked. I’ll be cooking my own red sauce, peeling garlic, chopping it fine, even though I’m not hungry. I’ll be listening to a death and lamentations song, and it’ll be Leonard Cohen, who does death better than anybody. I’ll be giving the sauce a taste off the end of a wooden spoon, adding more fresh ground pepper, and a dash of sugar, and it will drip from my lips to my breasts—I was always a messy cook, and in the future this won’t change. On the AM/FM radio, his death-and-erotica song will feature a Hallelujah riff that leads into a whale song. And why am I naked? Because you were one of those I should have slept with, and in my future life, I will, and I’ll be hungry after the sex, so as a salve, then I’ll make us pasta with red sauce; the garlic cloves fried first in virgin olive oil. The lure of garlic will entomb us, and the dream of the ancients’ wail will beat, and I’ll say, “taste this,” and you’ll say—I’m not sure of what you’ll say, because this is a future life. Replay: I’ll bring the wooden spoon to my lips and taste. Red sauce. This is the thing I do despite it all, despite knowing this isn’t my future—I’ll never be naked with you. My mother cooked her own, as did my grandmother, not naked, but they cooked their own sauce. At the end, they were alone, too. Still, Leonard Cohen does sing about death better than anybody. Whales sing. And now I am hungry. Hallelujah.

Carolne Bock is the author of THE OTHER BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE, forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in June 2026. She’s also the author of CARRY HER HOME (short story collection) and the young adult novels LIE and BEFORE MY EYES (St. Martin’s Press). Her micro fiction has recently appeared in The Hopkins Review and SmokeLong Quarterly. She’s the co-president/prose editor at the Washington Writers’ Publishing House based in Washington DC.

Photo Credit: D.W. White