Tag: creative short story
the mother in me
“What time is it?” His voice makes me scratch at my skin, my filthy nails leaving trails like I’m trying to scrape him off me. I can almost feel his breath on my neck—warm, invasive—his tongue flicking in his mouth as if it’s mine, pressing against my teeth. “What difference Read more
Smoke Break
Patrons had been bustling all this Sunday morning and Danny was made to wait for his smoke break. There were elderly people who’d known him as a kid and children with their parents. Old Mister rested on the stool behind the cash register, a hefty man everyone called Old Mister Read more
The Cross
The air smelled of exhaust, of snowfall, of woodfire stoves. Julie held herself stiff, breath appended in her lungs, as she raced into the swirl of snowfall, the shavings sharp and virgin as diamonds, the shavings lashing the air, as the old Ford spat and chugged, coughed and spat and Read more
After Hours
I’d arrived in Los Angeles two years earlier, on New Year’s Eve, 1979, after completing graduate work at the University of Minnesota and deciding that I wouldn’t survive another midwestern winter. So after a three-day road trip in my ex-husband’s Chevrolet Impala that included striking a deer in South Dakota, Read more
Thinking In/Feeling In
Baltimore, Maryland July 1985 I curled two fingers under the chin of my mask and tore it off. I chipped away at myself with the tip of a syringe when no one else would do it for me. The nurse’s assistant, the friend of a friend’s cousin from the suburbs, Read more
Races, Rules, and Ringlets
The trouble started the day she was born. Before that, really—as soon as the sonogram showed up. She was a she, and he couldn’t register that. He was proof that even some of the smartest gator-poaching hicks remained fluent only in the language of macho: talk of bullets, ballistics, and Read more
The Shipwreck of the Ispolen
For one hundred and twenty-five years, I’ve been nothing more than a watery whisper, dissipating in shifting waves, crumbling to shadowy fragments, perpetually washed upon the sandy shore. My fingers are ghosts stretching longingly and painfully back to Norway, where love was once known. Cruelly, my spirit is trapped here: entrapped Read more