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Fiction
She Walked Out The Door
For some people life is effortless, like running as a child with no sense of the world turning beneath our feet. It is not that way for you. You will always be aware of the weight of your footsteps and the force of will required to move forward. Anger keeps you together, a mortar that begins to harden.
August 2012
Grimace In The Burnt Black Hills
After six states, 1,300 miles, and almost twenty-four hours, the iron tang of blood and bleach still hadn’t blown out of my truck. And that’s saying something because since the fire I can’t hardly smell dog shit if I step in it.
July 2012
On The Verge Of Extinction
From ten Saturday morning — when your father picks you up at the house you don’t want to live in, your mother’s boyfriend’s house — to eight Sunday night, when your mother retrieves you from the house you never wanted to leave but are now allowed to visit only twice a month, you have thirty-four hours for your father to prove to you that he’s not the man your mother says he is.
June 2012
Mr. Oleander
“Your move,” said Avior. “What will you do? How will you explain the pawns who are no longer powerless? There are so many. We have strength in numbers. We have power, you know. It is a capital mistake to think that small things do not have power.”
June 2012
We Will Sing All Six Verses
We pull into the driveway of the house where I grew up, or where I gave it my best shot. It’s cold outside, but it’s the kind of cold you do not recognize until you are back inside. So much of life is understood by comparison.
May 2012
Imagination
An inventive imagination was a gift of the gods — or a curse if you couldn’t control it. Elsie would sometimes start talking, telling a story, say, and get so carried away, piling it on so thick, flying off on so many tangents, that she might as well have been speaking in tongues. If you pointed this out to her, her response would be to clam up.
April 2012
A Castle In Outer Space
There was a flutter in my rib cage, a somersault of uneasiness. I hadn’t witnessed such concentrated weirdness up close since my parents were alive: my father’s conspiracy theories and colon-cleansing elixirs; my mother’s ground-up lithium in a locket around her neck.
March 2012
It Burns
All that fall and into the winter, bulldozers and cranes cleared away the wooded top of Ransom Mountain, knocking down trees and shoveling dirt and rock into dump trucks, leaving behind a flat, barren expanse. Come spring, we were told, the mountain’s top and back would be a landfill that three counties would pay to use, creating jobs in town for the first time since the mines had shut down. But no one I knew thought very much about that.
February 2012
I Just Died
It’s summer, and I’m hearing my landlady’s pets more than I’d like to. She lives upstairs and told me when I moved in that her animals were quiet. Clearly I was a fool to believe her.
January 2012
Buenos Aires, Dancing, December 1982
Day after day we write his memories. It’s harder for me to help with the ones from before we met, but still I write them. He tells me everything he can remember, and the rest I fill in from the stories he’s told me in the past.
December 2011
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