Word Problems (You Do the Math)

• Facebook
• Instagram

Christina Tudor

__________

1. If you walk down Fletcher Avenue instead of Adams Lane every time you walk home because, although it’s .3 miles longer, Fletcher Avenue has better lighting, more witnesses, how many extra miles do you walk in a year, in a lifetime, looking over your shoulder, following the sound of approaching footsteps?

2. At the college bar, women get in free on Thursdays. Rail drinks cost $5, PBRs are $1. Heels catch on floors sticky with spilled orange juice and vodka. The drinks most likely to give you a hangover look like melted Jolly Rancher and cost $7. Weave in and out of the crowd, feel unfamiliar hands on your skin, under your shirt, around your waist while a stranger’s breath lands on your neck like mist. They step on the backs of your sandals, back you into a corner, not hearing over the music, or maybe ignoring, the word no. No, no, no. No. How much did you spend?

3. You make just under $50,000 in a year in a city where the average one-bedroom is $2000.

4. With insurance, your co-pay for therapy is $20 per session. If you go to therapy once a week to deal with what the stranger did to you on the corner of Fletcher Avenue, how much does that add up to? What is the overall cost?

5. If on a good day, you can run a mile in 10 minutes and 41 seconds and on a bad day you can run a mile in 13 minutes and 33 seconds, on average, how fast do you need to run to feel safe in this world?

__________

Christina Tudor is a writer living in Washington, D.C. Her fiction has been featured in or is forthcoming from matchbook, HAD, Flash Frog, Litro Magazine, Funicular Magazine, Stanchion, Best Small Fictions 2024, and more. She has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and was a 2022 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow in fiction. She can be reached on social media @christinaltudor.

__________

<< Back Next >>

To learn more about submitting your work to Boudin or applying to McNeese State University’s Creative Writing MFA program, please visit Submissions for details.