Synkroniciti is proud to welcome back poet and writer Tammy Smith with “STOP,” a flash fiction story of a teenage boy who went too far with his girlfriend one night.
“It’s been more than three months since the incident. I stopped counting after Mom threatened therapy twice a week if I couldn’t get a handle on myself.
“Charlotte is such a nice girl,” Mom used to say whenever I told her we were hanging out. The backyard had been my idea. Keep it simple. I remember the wind in the trees, the fire pit crackling as we kissed clumsily, lured by embers and moonglow. Two pubescent shadows learning each other’s shapes. Skin to skin. I didn’t ask because it never occurred to me that I needed permission.”
What makes Tammy’s rendering so compelling is the intelligence and tenderness she grants the narrator. He is not excused, but he is seen — a young man actively reckoning with the harm he caused, with the limits of his own understanding, and with the way desire can eclipse judgment, especially when no one has taught you how to navigate your feelings.
What “STOP” illuminates is a broader cultural failure. When we don’t teach the need for consent, we fail our young women, who bear obvious physical and emotional risks of encounters they didn’t choose. But we also fail our young men, who are rarely taught how to read desire, how to ask, how to pause, how to understand that intimacy is a conversation rather than momentum.
We know how powerful adolescent longing can be—how it can feel tidal, overwhelming, inevitable—and yet we leave our children to navigate it alone. Tammy insists that we can do better.
Read “STOP” in Synkroniciti’s Audacity issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Tammy Smith, a poet and a licensed clinical social worker living in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, writes at the intersection of creativity and mental health. Her work appears or is forthcoming in ONE ART, Paterson Literary Review, LIPS, The Stillwater Review, The New Verse News, Grand Little Things, San Pedro River Review, and elsewhere.