Prose
Shattering
The man becomes a dolphin in her dreams. Only briefly, he is a shining silver arc above her, and then, when his hips push down between her legs he’s a man again. The air is bright around him. His shoulders are rounded, his eyes closed, his mouth is open, gasping. She had thought he looked …
Coming To: A Lexicology of Fainting
1. vein From Old French veine, from Latin vena. The earliest senses were blood vessel and small natural underground channel of water. See also: blood, artery, channel, the channeling of the dead. It’s a wake, we are told, my cousin and I, but we hear it like one word: awake. Who is doing the waking? …
Lost and Found
Falling into step with the boy, Thisman draws close and whispers in a voice only for him. Says, “I wish I had a little boy just like you. I wish you were my own,” and the boy believes it, every single word. He is lost, but not in the way he has been taught to …
Pie and Whiskey
I love Connie to death, really I do, but sometimes she takes things too far. Other times she won’t take things far enough, depending on the thing at hand, but mostly it’s too far she takes everything else. Her cold remedy includes a pound and a half of raw beef tenderloin, eight to twelve shots …
Eleven Stories of Water and Stone
Winner of the 2014 Prairie Schooner Summer Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest, selected by judge Judith Ortiz Cofer The aim of water treatment is to produce and maintain water that is hygienically safe, aesthetically attractive and palatable, in an economic manner. Manual of Water Supply and Treatment, Ministry of Urban Development, New Delhi, India 1. Maybe …
The Beast Room
The woman unlocked the door and pushed the child ahead of her into the attic room. She held the candle just above the child’s head. "You will sleep here,'' she said. At first in the dim light the child could see only the bed. It was a large bed, like a heap of gray wool …
Cimex Lectularius
Whenever I see an exterminator company's vehicle on the street I think what a boon such a service would have been to the set tlers of the Rosebud Country of South Dakota. Mass exterminations were unknown in those days. They were an individual or a family matter, carried out painstakingly by hand. There were no …
Homecoming
He watched the car turn and dip away through a wide stretch of houses that crowded a smudge of far smoke streaming above a slow-fading curve of tall factory chimneys. To the left the downtown heights towered, remote and faint, over the smoke-pennoned river. The city trembled before him like a creation out of his …
The Right Hand
The boy stood tense, holding the post steady and straight in the post hole his father had dug to fill the broken line in the fence. He was a young boy, twelve or so, with light blond hair, like his father's where it had not turned gray, and with eyes the color of smoke, holding …