The house’s front door bangs shut, clipping out the evening sun. I listen from a narrow half-hall on the second story. I recline at the foot of my parents’ bedroom door—an idiosyncratic delicacy much missed this past month—rocking my knees together and flexing my jaw, attempting to relieve air pressure the thirteen hour plane ride stuffed in my ears. I hear socks sweep over carpet...
The afternoon sun has the cowboy squinting his eyes. A woman stands next to him, twisting her hips and smiling into his leather face. Both recline against a gray wooden cow fence. A warm breath lifts from the heat-soaked dirt and grass. The cowboy breathes in the prairie. His scent is rude and distinct; hard-labor and brine; a spicy, musky cologne from his button-down; he scowls. It disfigures...
The diner was a long, yellow train car, permanently set into a cement slab, with a little caboose at the back where the cooks worked and white smoke rose from a tin-hatted vent on its roof, perfumed with grease, salty warm breads, and rich sauces. The middle-aged mother and teenage son tilted their heads to read the crooked railroad sign out front that read, ‘Velma’s — Home of the world’s...
I need to write something . . . I don’t have anything to say. I’ll ask a couple of questions, but I may have reached the limit today; there’s nothing but dim dusty-space stirring in my mind. Oh here’s something, coming along, but it’s just a dream that I said goodbye to already, before I knew what was bad. I’m talking to myself because I need to write, I need to get words on the computer...
Years ago, before PlayStations and Xboxes, iPhones, Android’s, tablets and streaming TV, when a young boy would play with no more than warm stones or thrown-out processed food cans, this young boy, our young boy, the young American of our story here, found a feather. He said, “Ah-hah! here I have a token of the angels,” then he turned his baseball cap and stuck the feather in the plastic snap...
It’s been three days running in the hot sun. My supplies were set for a five-day journey, but I passed the fifth day a fortnight ago . . . I can’t fail my people. The beast is quick— bounding and arching from left to right like my son’s plastic ball on cobbled roads. To be quick, isn’t it conventional to be slight? lightly built; to give the laws of physics some credit? Even the first people...
The horizon slowly dips; spilling the sun’s rich purples and orangish-reds over the turbulent waves; warming the morning sea. The girl stands on the edge of a cliff from which a low-hanging bridge spans eighty feet of open water to a small island of jagged rocks. A brown tendril of hair flaps against her cheeks. Her taut skin peels and shines in the mist. She bends with spread legs under the...
The gray stone steps jutted in odd angles, irregularly shaped and sized, and without clear separation from the mountain’s natural features. Were they built in, or carved out? thought Ulrik. It’s just the same to my legs, he supposed. The smell of rotting wood and sod-berries in the humid forest air made his lungs feel heavy and he thought he might rest and share water with his small companion: a...
Prompt: Write a scene in which a boy asks for new shoes. His mother’s home was always kept clean and warm and bright; but those days were many months gone. . . Tonight, the house was all shadows and sawdust and the sugary stink of moonshine. The boy peeked out from behind the molded door jamb and eyed his father wearily before entering the kitchen; he held a pair of red shoes with canvas tops...
In a land long from here at a time far before, lived Sally O’hare who thought life was a bore. Her only interest? a device in the palm of her hand. It glimmered like ice and it spoke on demand. Each night when she arrived home from her day, before she would sleep and before she would pray, she’d consult the device in the tenderest way. It told her all that one needed, she thought...