You’re eighteen and have just finished your first semester at an expensive liberal arts college in Vermont. You’re back in Minnesota for Christmas. Your parents are sixty miles away at the outlet mall, buying discounted Gap hoodies for your many cousins. You refused to go, claiming a sore throat. It’s twelve fifteen. You have just…
Tag: Fire
Third Party, Fire & Theft
The car burns as I sleep fully reclined in the driver’s seat. The acrid plastic smoke wakes me. The smell of burning dolls. A crowd clatters out from the cliff top café next to the tourist car park, the cook banging a thick fist on the driver side window. The smoke curls its heavy weather…
Fire Flowers
“Fire Flowers” first appeared in Rattle In Japanese, the word for “office” is a character composingtwo smaller characters meaning “enclosed space”and “slumping corpse”. Outside, a soft rain’s falling on what was once the corner delibut is now an immense pileof pipes and bricks, chips of cement, and crumpled menus.I used to eat there with my…
Melting
The house is burning down around me and I never wanted to be the mom that tears through my son’s things, covering my tracks as carefully and pathetically as he does after going through my liquor cabinet, but here I am with my hand in his top-right desk drawer being poked by an army of…