decides the fate of every love story, even when a cloth is sodden with wetness. He and she ride to town on a noon bus, she, sitting on his handkerchief. They have been sent for groceries, he, one week new, friend to her father, under him at the Consulate. Packed in with peeling leather bags, chickens, goats, dark-eyed men speaking Spanish, not one seat bare. Bruised mango fruit, split. Sticky floor. Her blood, fed by the rules of (her father?) a different country. His heart beating, they must sit very close, a man at the front ordering all windows stay shut. Swollen clouds, his white shirt wet patched, sunned skin peeping through (him?). His arm rims their seat back, whisking her shoulders at each dip in the dirt road. Moss scent and she hears palm trees, feels green-winged birds about them, scattering (her?). The voice inside full-throated, nearly a sob. Air, thrumming with flies. Her tan skirt, it breathes if his bare leg leans. If the invisible (god?) hand—the gold chain, cross at her neck—unclasps.
Further Reading
One Who Was Not Devoured: A Review of Liz Kay’s The Witch Tells the Story and Makes It True
by Katherine Fallon
It is no secret we are supposed to despise the witch in the traditional fairy tale, but while brutal, this witch is not lonely, nor is she pathetic, and we question whether her violence is unwarranted.
Song
by Michael T. Young
The first sentence of a certain history is written near an estuary, in a building with no address, behind the last door, at the end of a hall lined with pinewood paneling. One of those panels, when it was a tree, held a robin’s nest, and one of that bird’s young managed to leap from […]
Cool Uncle
by Emmett Knowlton
This story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. All summer long Gideon’s nephews had been terrorizing him, waking him with wet willies, reminding him what a loser he’d become. “Do a flip!” they shouted at him in the mornings as he watched them by the pool. “Do some push-ups!” they barked whenever he came back […]
