Category: Short Story
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Lights on the Farmhouse Table
Retrospect would have had me listen a whole lot closer when Dale Parish first told me about the lights. You know what they say about hindsight. Dale lived his whole life on his family’s farm. Ever since grade school, he’d start first period having already been up at least four hours. The rest of us…
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Visiting Gram
“She’s doing much better today, dear,” the portly woman behind the desk tells me as I sign my name on the guest registry. This marks my eighth time here in four weeks. I have signed and dated this page eight times, each time wishing it would be the last. You might think I wouldn’t have…
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Fruit Punch and Rotten Eggs
Each year, word of Miss Karen’s pool parties circled like buzzards at bus stops. It flowed through the halls of the elementary school like an unseen current humming through electrical wires. Third graders told incoming second graders who were lucky enough to have been assigned Miss Karen’s class about the end-of-the-year bash in hushed tones…
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Texting Harriet Greer
Jordan Gregg moved in about a month before the end of the school year. Mom found the timing of The Gregg’s move the sort of odd that borders on downright scandalous, what with enrolling two kids at Glenville just weeks before summer break. I’d been at camp for half the summer and up at my…
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A Deeper Shade of Blue
The only thing Lindsey wants is a big old stick of blue cotton candy. It’s all she talks about the whole car ride. It had to be blue. If any color had a biggest fan, that color was blue and that fan was my little sister. She keeps going off about how she doesn’t like…
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Running Home
Emma was in Boston the last time she’d ventured out for a jog. It had rained that morning and the puddles lay like landmines along her sidewalk-to-pond-and-back circuit. The mud splashed up to her ankles and had caked thickly on the laces of her running shoes. Now, in the living room of her parents’ Pennsylvanian…
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In the Absence of Swans
Boston, March 2015. The garden awakens from a winter deeper than any in recent public memory. The last in a line of four girls seated on the pond’s perimeter screams dramatic fury as winged bodies, en route to plunder the thawing earth, whisk behind her head. “Where do the swan boats go in the winter?”…
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Fodder for Retrospect
The limp expression on his face was nothing new, but it still tore gently into Monica’s chest each time she looked at her son. With each tear in the fabric of motherhood, she buried the urge to give up, to send him to another doctor, to admit to the nagging suspicion that she might be…
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Pushing Carts
He had his back pushed against the wall, his knee acutely cocked so the sole of his sneaker found support on the bricks. A lone plastic bench sat cemented in front of him and beyond that was the expanse of the supermarket parking lot. He was the only one out here now, which was rare…
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Knee-high by the Fourth of July
On the opposite side of the road passed the third pickup he’d seen that afternoon donning an oversized American flag waving in the blackened air behind the cab’s smokestack exhaust pipes. Patriotism, he thought as stomach acid warmed his chest, muddied and misled. The giant flag, strung from a 4’’X4’’ wooden post, flapped in animated…
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Observing a Sneeze
Leaving the country for the summer can be kind of a big deal for 15-year-old girls. While it is not always the case, a venture like this can be a game-changer, moreover, a life-changer; going to Rome for three weeks of the three months of freedom between academic years did more than alter her worldly…
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Street Parking Woes
Angelica hadn’t worked there but three weeks before she realized something was amiss. On Friday, she walked to her car during her sacred lunch break to find the all too recognizable florescent orange of a parking ticket envelope glaring from under the passenger side wiper blade. It was the fourth time the parking authority had…
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Fourth to Last Train Home
The hour was not incredibly late, but both parties were quite weary from their respective days’ toil. It had been a long, dog day of midsummer. They each carried aches in their bodies, but the weariness stemmed from elsewhere. There was a mental exhaustion at play, a soft drone humming on the part of the…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 