Kathryn Kulpa
Why Jessie Was Turned Down by the D.A.R. (1916)
It wasn’t only the divorce.
Though divorce was bad enough, goodness knows.
Jessie had all her Drakes in a row. Melzar begat Francis begat Laban. And old Melzar Drake had marched with the Minutemen, sure enough.
But Jessie’s numbers didn’t add up. The months between her first marriage and her first child. Between the divorce and that hasty second marriage.
That Jessie! Sitting in church with her children by two fathers, pretending to be a respectable housewife, legs crossed, a loose thread peeking from her too-short skirt, a thread all the men longed to pull.
A loose thread could unravel a stocking.
Could unravel everything.
And there was the incident of the bowler hat.
Jessie in the back seat of a jalopy parked out on Reservoir Road. Mabel Bennett’s husband had seen them. A gentleman in a bowler hat, Mr. Bennett thought, until that gentleman turned around and he saw it was Jessie. Jessie, wearing some man’s bowler hat.
And not a stitch else.
And the worst thing was, Mabel Bennett said, that Jessie didn’t scream or cover herself. She looked at Mabel’s husband, bold as brass, and laughed.
And that was the reason, when Jessie’s application came before the board, not one lady present contested the red stamp that said REJECTED.
Kathryn Kulpa is the author of the flash chapbook Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted (New Rivers Press, 2023). Her stories are published in Flash Boulevard, HAD, Milk Candy Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Trampset, and other journals and have been chosen for Best Microfiction, the National Flash Fiction Day anthology, and the Wigleaf longlist. She teaches writing workshops through Cleaver magazine, where she is a flash editor.
