Cruel Choices

by Alexis Rhone Fancher


When my husband’s two grown daughters are in town, the three of them go to the movies, or play pool. Share dinner every night. Stay out late. I haven’t seen my stepdaughters since my son’s funeral in 2007. When people ask, I say nice things about the girls, as if we had a relationship. When people ask if I have children I change the subject. Or I lie, and say no. Or sometimes I put them on the spot and tell them yes, but he died. They look aghast and want to know what happened. Then I have to tell them about the cancer.

Sometimes, when the older daughter, his favorite, is in town, and she and my husband are out together night after night, I wonder what it would be like if that was me, and my boy, if life was fair, and, rather than my husband having two children and I, none, we each had one living child. His choice which one to keep. 

Lately when people ask, I want to lie and say yes, my son is a basketball coach; he married a beautiful Iranian model with kind eyes, and they live in London with their twin girls who visit every summer; the same twins his girlfriend aborted with my blessing when my son was eighteen, deemed too young for fatherhood, and everyone said there would be all the time in the world.


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©Alexis Rhone Fancher, 2016, "Cruel Choices" was first published in Askew and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Hobart, Verse Daily, Plume, Tinderbox, Cleaver, Diode, The American Journal of Poetry, Spillway, Nashville Review, Poetry East, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. She’s authored ten poetry collections, most recently, Triggered, 2023 (MacQueen’s Publishing); Brazen, 2023 (NYQ Books); and Duets, (2022) an illustrated, ekphrastic chapbook collaboration with poet Cynthia Atkins, published by Harbor Editions. Alexis’s photographs are featured worldwide including the covers of The Pedestal Magazine, Witness, Heyday, Pithead Chapel, and The Mas Tequila Review. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, you can find her at: www.alexisrhonefancher.com