EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

I Have Absolutely No Family

September 26, 2026—Stamford, New York (Mom’s House)

Now that I’m forty-seven, I have decided that whenever someone makes me sufficiently angry, I’m simply going to say, “Fuck off,” before walking away. I have spent forty-six years considering alternatives. This seems more efficient.

I put on Simon & Garfunkel’s The Boxer while I made coffee and got ready for the day.

While I was at Solinsky’s buying $124 worth of meat, some woman from out of town looked at me and said, “Move!”

“Nope.”

I matched her character count precisely. Nobody puts Dark Horse in the corner.

Nobody seemed particularly concerned that her $7 potato salad acquisition encountered a delay.

The past few days I have been receiving texts in a group text that I never signed up for. Someone in Middletown Springs is having difficulty with their hearing aids. Instead of logically blaming the cheap hearing aids from Amazon, they blamed the Meshtastic project I’ve been working on for months.

There are very few moments in life when it takes an enormous amount of restraint to prevent me from saying exactly what I want to say. Apple made my response easy. I simply clicked the button to leave the conversation. If people want to have a go-nowhere conversation, they are welcome to do so, but my participation in the nonsense is not going to happen without compensation. I don’t make change, either. That’s the responsibility of the local bank.

Nora came over and we spent the afternoon in my bedroom. The one-year anniversary of Mom’s death is slowly approaching, and yet I’m still stuck in the habit of storing all of my belongings in my bedroom when essentially I now own Mom’s entire house flat-out and keeping everything contained in my room is no longer necessary. I’m slowly adjusting.

I went to the Bel a little after six in the evening. Nora met me there later.

While it was slow, I spent a little over an hour in the pouring rain getting a campfire ready. Mary, the owner, came out to tell me how she was impressed by my fire-making skills and asked me how I did it. I told her that the secret is to concentrate your accelerants and fuel load low, center-middle, with the fuel essentially trapping the heat.

That evening some old man started talking to me. He asked about my parents, since I had mentioned staying at Mom’s house while I was visiting.

And so, he asked how my mom was doing. I said she died last October. He then said, “Surely you have brothers, or sisters,” to which I said no, I have absolutely no family. None.

My family consists of Maddie, Makayla, Nora, Amanda, and Amelia. And yet, aside from my marriage to Amelia, I have absolutely no legal or biological ties to anyone.

In all these years, none of my closest friends have ever said, “Stop. If you cared about our friendship, you’d stop.”

They have told me when they thought I was wrong. They have questioned some of my decisions, laughed at others, worried about me, disagreed with me, and occasionally pointed out that whatever I was about to do was completely fucking ridiculous. Then they encouraged me to keep being me anyway.

I have never had a friend like Maddie in my life. Ever.

I've since stopped waiting for someone to return my calls.

He found this to be the outrageous claim. Surprisingly, he accepted all the other facts about my life, such as my late father being Scientist 23 at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.

This man thought he was being funny when he compared me to Superman, who came from another planet that crumbled, leaving the family all dead. The only joke that was made during the conversation was when I said that my father had died from cardiac arrest to get away from my comedy.

He accused me of lying. Nora arrived just in time to verify my claims.

He walked away, back through the bar, then out the front door of the Bel.

I told Nora that Amelia seemed to be happy and content in Buffalo, and, “It looks like it’s just going to be me from now on.”

The bar closed at midnight, sharp. Mary, the owner, said that she was tired and was heading home. She decided that I would be the most logical person to elect to make sure the doors were locked when we were finished. I assured her I’d take care of it.

She gave me a hug and thanked me. I thanked her and said that The Bel had been a huge part of my childhood, and that coming here in the evening felt like summer camp. She smiled. I went on to tell her that my parents and I always got dinner here on the weekends growing up, and that the place held so many memories.

She thanked me again, reminded me that all I needed to do was make sure the place was empty, then push the door shut. Then she left.

I purposefully neglected to let her know that my mother incessantly complained about the place since the day we moved to Stamford, yet my father would get drunk at the bar there, and we ate dinner there regularly.

So Nora and I stayed at the Bel while the DJ continued playing music for himself and an audience of his two friends, one of whom was a Japanese native named Go who lived part-time in New York City and was visiting the area for the summer. He was one of the nicest people I think I’ve ever met.

We listened to music and finally left the Bel a little after one in the morning. I made sure the doors were closed and the fire was out. Nora and I then decided to go to John’s for an hour.

John’s was packed with customers because they were celebrating someone’s birthday. One thirty in the morning comes around, and half the patrons suddenly leave. Moments later, Go arrives with the DJ and their mutual friend from the Bel.

Go comes over to me at John’s and comments about how the Bel is incredible and John’s is a bit of a downgrade. I said that’s a poorly understood part of American culture—the dive bar—a place where you anticipate it to be awful, and yet when your expectations are met with reality, there is a strange satisfaction in that.

Nora and I are then at the bar, and a young man comes over to ask us a question about lesbian relationships, and is the term U-Haul Lesbian actually something that happens.

As soon as Nora and I start giving him the answer, he starts talking over us. Nora and I raise our volume to compensate. By this time, it’s nearly two in the morning, John’s is showing no signs of closing anytime soon. After a few minutes of this, I say, “Hey shut the fuck up—you ask us a question then compete for volume as you talk over the answer.”

So at two-something in the morning, I crawl into my bed, only to realize that none of us were successful at locating the light switch at The Bel as all the outside lights were still on. All twenty-something of them. At forty-seven years old, the lights from The Belvedere Country Inn kept me awake at night. I hope Mary doesn’t get mad at me. I tried.