Fiction from NER 32.4.
Meredith was a good person. She had been young once, but now she had entered the age of entropy, and the great media machine of American culture gunned past her, its probes searching out juveniles. Movies, music, TV shows, like bathing suits and bras, were not created for a person like her. Sixty and beyond, it was the age no one wanted to be reminded of, except of course the other women who had reached it also. They were an army that is no longer needed yet still wanders the countryside, doing all of the things they were taught to do despite the fact that no one was watching.
Megan Staffel is the author of two novels, The Notebook of Lost Things (Soho, 1999) and She Wanted Something Else (North Point, 1987), and two collections of short stories, including the recently published Lessons in Another Language (Four Way Books). Her stories have been published in numerous journals including New England Review, Ploughshares, and the Common. She teaches in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.