Mandy Lange
Instructions to Launch Your Redemption Arc
Toss over your Hermés Birkin, your saffron-tinted pillboxes, the key fob to your Porsche. Add that new Armani Trenchcoat from Raúl to the pile of clothes collecting snowfall on the metal rail of your 35th floor balcony. Approach the wine lattice rack, grip the neck–cold, stiff, no pulse– of the 2008 L'Evangile. Smash it. If a shard of glass grazes your cheek: the better, the better.
Leave the caked blood–shouldn’t there have been more blood–under your shellacked nails. If it bothers you, suck the corners like your hangnails in 4th grade when pale Ms. Sneedle caught you stealing from her drugstore purse, demanding an explanation because What could a girl who has everything possibly have left to take? Breathe the answer onto the windowed balcony door, breath rushing from your lungs to fashion your mask, a defense. Imagine Raúl announcing to a sallow-faced judge, It was an accident. An accident years in the making, painted pretty by tears careening down your surgically hollowed cheekbones, bitten-off shellac on whitened teeth. She wishes–
Swipe the condensation away. Wishes never sated you. Only action.
Strip off your silk kimono. Step into the February flurry. Embrace the spatter of goosebumps on your neck and ask yourself, out loud, so the question slowdances with snowflakes onto city-dwellers crawling from one rapture to the next: when was the last time I allowed myself to suffer? Picture yourself as that fourth grader again, but she’s forever changed; she will always look like a bloodstained department store jacket, whitewashed in the Porsche's high beams. She will always sound like jeans scraping concrete and the felt-smothered thunk of a body in your backseat. Your innocence–if you ever had any–is lost to the poisonous adrenaline coursing through your barre-whittled biceps; strength you discovered at the worst time, for the worst reason.
Send your coat over the ledge. Watch as it squirms in the squall, sleeves frantic and grasping for atonement that sinks out of reach. Decide whether you can live with it.
Mandy Lange writes short fiction from her fixer-upper farm in Michigan. She's been nominated for Best Small Fictions 2026 and is a past winner of the Writer’s Playground Short Story Competition. Her writing has been published in magazines including Fictive Dream, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and wildscape literary, and is forthcoming in Uncharted. Read her work at mandylange.com.
