Patricia Engel’s “Dia” explores the tension that can exist between “just friends” of the opposite sex.
I find him sitting on a plastic lounge chair by the hotel pool. I give a little wave and he stands. We kiss on the cheek. He tells me I’m taller than he remembers.
“Sit down, sit down,” he offers just as thunder rolls in, so we find a spot on an iron bench under a flaking white gazebo.
“It’s been a long time,” he says.
Engel’s stories appear in Boston Review, Slice Magazine, Harpur Palate, Nimrod, Driftwood, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Florida Artist Fellowship in Literature, a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship, and the Boston Review Fiction Prize. (I should say that Patricia and I were Bread Loaf waiters at different times; I don’t know her at all.)
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