Category: Writing

The lilacs were wilting in their little vase.

She’d only cut them from the bush yesterday. The stem at an angle with a sharp scissors, like her mother had taught her. When the window was open, they filled the kitchen with the scent of freedom and boredom and first love. She’d only wanted to bring a small wisp of that feeling inside, to keep the memories in the air when the window was closed.

And now the flowers were dead.

Continue reading “Wilted”

The day was sweating-lemonade-glass bugs-swimming-through-the-air thunderstorm-building hot. And yet they sat there on their plastic lawn chairs, eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells into the grass.

“It’s too hot,” he said, but didn’t move.

Continue reading “Pink Bedroom Door”

Every time it rained, she would lie on her back in the middle of the street. The water drenched her black hoodie and gray sweatpants until their shadows clothed her. It pooled in her sneakers and soaked her socks. But she stayed there, gazing up at the lightning, with a thousand droplets anointing her eyes and street lights sparkling on the asphalt all around her. It was as if she’d flipped the sky, so that she was floating in a sea of stars.

Continue reading “Rainmelt”

The long marble hallways of the museum echoed with a disorderly line of squeaking sneakers here to look at the bones. They pointed their fingers at the glass displays of rocks and minerals. Ancient rainbows. Who knew those bright and crusty beryl crystals inside half a brown stone egg would make a little girl with sequins on her shirt say “so pretty”?

Continue reading “Bones”

Five glass water jars

sit on a windowsill.

Each contains an identical scene

complete with sunset and silhouette.

All the same.

Continue reading “Five Glass Water Jars”

It always starts around the fire. The air is still heavy with heat after dark here, for a few weeks in the summer, which it was that night. The Dennon’s live outside of town and don’t have any neighbors close by, so there’s nobody to snitch about noise, or beer. Time runs backward when the sun goes down. We turn into kids again, and there has to be a game. Sometimes truth-or-dare, or telephone. But that night at the Dennon’s, our legs itched to run. I was scratching at my mosquito bites, too. They’ll leave scars.

Continue reading “The Night of the Bonfire”