What We Talked About in the Women's Locker Room, May 2013
Felix Kent


We talk about the weather, about allergy season, our gardens. We talk about climate change. We talk about our immune systems, about local raw honey (one tablespoonful every night), antihistamines, bee colony collapse. We talk about the new restaurant. We talk about how we have no time to do anything. We talk about our trip to Hawaii. We talk about the new soap in the shower. We talk about the rash we developed after too much time in the pool. We talk about the class we just finished, how we liked it better than the class we usually go to. We talk about how sweet the substitute teacher who took over Pilates is. We talk about making time for ourselves. We talk about our shoulder injury. We talk about our training, about our upcoming triathlon and the half-marathon we completed last week. We talk about cutting out: sugar, gluten, soy, milk, coffee. We talk about our hair, how difficult it has been to keep it looking nice since we stopped dying it. We talk about our yoga pants. We talk about our daughters-in-law with disapproval or wry amusement. We talk about our sons-in-law with admiration. We talk about our grandchildren humorously and with a swift undercurrent of joy. We talk about our aging parents, about their care and their incontinence. We talk about our surgery and our friends' surgeries. We talk about our jobs. We talk about the budget crisis. We talk about the new Malcolm Gladwell book. We talk about how we don't read fiction, or very rarely read fiction, or don't read non-fiction. We talk about the well-known Buddhist monk who gave a recent talk. We dispense information. We talk about getting older, and we talk about death. "Just put me out on the ice floe," we say, as we stand naked in front of the mirror, applying lotion to our tan lines, and our muscles ripple under our hands.






Felix Kent lives in California. Her work has appeared in Spork, The Toast and McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

Detail of pochoir on main page: from "Tete de Femme," by Fernand Leger.





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