The pizza delivery guy would always laugh at us, as he was delivering pizza to the upstairs apartment of a different pizza shop. That year our new year’s resolution was every time we ordered a pizza, we’d order an extra pizza to put directly into the fridge, so we’d always have leftover pizza to eat. It was so brilliant I felt like I deserved an invitation to MENSA. Our favorite place would give you a chocolate chip cookie the size of my head, free with every order, but only if you got it delivered, not if you came in, so there was no reason to leave the house for it, unless you didn’t want to be laughed at. That was the smallest island I’ve ever lived on. It was connected to land by two bridges, and the island flashed by so fast, it seemed to be part of the bridge. That year went by so fast, I wish I could stretch it out, like the pizza cheese, stretching on and on. The second smallest island I ever lived on was my favorite, where the pizza was only okay, but on my birthday someone popped out of a trash can to sing me an Oscar the Grouch song, and it’s just so nice when people get you, when they really, really get you.
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Melissa Saggerer has work in JMWW, HAD, Milk Candy Review, Coffin Bell, a speculative parenting anthology, and elsewhere. Her prose has been nominated for Best Microfiction and a Pushcart. Her pieces are collected at melissasaggerer.wordpress.com and you can follow her on twitter @MelissaSaggerer.
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image: MM Kaufman
Rejection Letters 