Tag: creative writing
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The Driving Southbound Rain
There was more rain than he had seen in one place. It was less like driving through rain and more like driving while a five-gallon bucket emptied over the windshield over and over. The wipers thudded in sloppy rhythm as he reached for the final inch of coffee waiting cold in the styrofoam cup. About…
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A Mass Engraving
Requests come in daily. They are from loved ones wanting a rubbing from the Wall. A rubbing of the engraving they have requested be mailed to them. Loved ones who are unable to make the trip to the capitol. Loved ones who will not see their own eyes staring back from the glassy black wall.…
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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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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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Invoking the Blank Page
I am looking to you, Blank Page, for help. I awoke today with Worry. While I was able to slough off the morning blanket, Worry persisted its shroud about me. An invisible source secures a tight hold around the top of my head. It clamps the innards of my chest. The cinches have been there…
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Our Complicated Public Union
Walk beneath my canopy, aerial assaults pinging as you find a pace. In April’s warm mist your cheeks I keep dry. Hold me and I hold you, the infant wrapped in the folds of her mother’s arms. On clear days you hide me and I take comfort in the act. Hidden on the floor of…
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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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Overcrowded Consciousness
You lay down just past dusk, your back on a forest floor. You are surrounded by tall trees. Eyes are open, skyward. You listen. Before long, you become aware of a warm, static humming originating from the recess of your mind. Concentrating on the hum, you realize a mash-up of songs you have memorized, rendered…
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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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Nature’s Farthings
An unending summer is as rare as a winter wont never to cease. Spring grasses are ever wet and a phantom chill assails autumn gusts. To live where we lived for our sole year, where nature endows ample and nearly equal time to each of the quarterly climes indeed molded the memory of how the…
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Undeveloped Film
When you take a picture, be aware of what it leaves. In the years before taking a picture was as simple as pulling a thin, rectangular device out of your pocket and tapping a certain spot on its glass, people would buy these little plastic cylinders that housed this stuff called film. Those canisters were…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 