Ian wakes up one day with music in his head. He hums the tune to Anna, and then sings the chorus: “Watermelon sugar pie, watermelon sugar pie, watermelon sugar pie.”
           “High, not pie,” Anna corrects him.
            “What does it mean?” Ian asks. Neither of them knows. He looks up the lyrics to the Harry Styles song and watches the video several times, looking for clues. The floppy-haired singer eating and caressing a slice of watermelon at a fully set table on the beach. Women in bikinis eating slices of watermelon, humping whole watermelons, watermelon juice dripping down their chins.

Bio:

MARIA KUBACKI was born in Warsaw and grew up in northern New Brunswick. She received an MA in English literature from the University of New Brunswick and then worked as a newspaper writer and editor at the Telegraph-Journal in Saint John and Canwest News Service in Ottawa. Her fiction has appeared in the Fiddlehead and the Quarantine Review, and she is the author of A Plague of Frogs, a chapbook with illustrations by the Montreal artist D. Boyd (Frog Hollow Press, 2022). She lives in Ottawa.