Déjà Vu
Story Sunday by Kathryn Silver-Hajo
The new students skip, twirl, and whoop across the green, buoyant with excitement at being together, away from parents, on the brick-and-ivy college campus. They put the fresh in freshmen, you think, as the wind tosses their hair around their wide-open faces, all lipstick and smiles. You’ve just finished preparing a lecture for your women’s studies class and as you come out the library door they cross your path and you catch a random snippet of conversation, one of them laughing and saying, did they even have diapers in the ‘70s? and whoosh you’re back in time to when you were in high school and some kids would meet behind the gym to kiss or smoke weed, others too shy or sheltered to. You were a junior then, already serious with Joe for two years and there was a bulge in your belly and no Roe v Wade yet and later that year Joe would move in with your family and come fall you’d know all about Pampers and strollers and thank god for your parents so you’d be able to finish high school. Now, all these years later, it’s hard to imagine that these carefree girls with their bare knees in the breeze would have to become experts on diapers any time soon, their heavy backpacks and cell phones already pulling their spines into stoops.
Author: Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s work appears, or is forthcoming, in Atticus Review, Centaur Lit, CRAFT, Emerge Literary, Ghost Parachute, Milk Candy Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary, The Phare, and others. Books include award-winning flash collection, Wolfsong, and YA novel, Roots of The Banyan Tree. You can find out more about her on her website, Facebook, X and BlueSky.
I remember those days—several friends were trapped in early marriages, early divorces, single parenthood. Women’s rights even to their own bodies are still in peril.