The road map is also red, and it will cost me if I’m late for my presentation. With two boys in college, I’m counting on the promotion and raise. We need a larger apartment and a car worth more than the gas in its tank.
Needing to Feel Thankful
Little Ray Takes a Break
“I never did understand what you saw in that boy,” she began.
The Giant of Abilene, Texas
The house, a simple box nailed to a concrete slab on the flat surface of West Texas, had fallen into disrepair in the years since he was a boy. A window on the side was punched out and the jagged center was patched with cardboard; the masking tape had released its hold long ago. The window had once been the window to his bedroom. He got out of his rented red Ford and went to look. The houses on the left and right were close; the rock fights had been in earnest. The cheap siding, a dirty white vinyl, was cracked in places, probably from the hailstorms that came every summer. There were broken children’s toys in the yard. No one was home.
Predestined – Editor’s Pick
Hadrian attempts to silence me, but I continue. “You are a Greek trapped in the body of a Roman, in a time not meant for you."
Beklemmt
Mama never told me how to do anything. She modeled. She said if I was anything like her, I didn’t need anyone to tell me what to do, because when that happened with her—and people were always telling her what to do—she did the opposite.
Mississippi 8 & 1
11:56 pm and the concrete felt like a griddle. The sweat on June’s feet hissed steam against the broken rock, not that you could’ve heard it over the racket coming out of the river bottom down the way. Crickets and frogs, mostly. Full moon shining like a streetlamp - only light out there, shone the stars out.