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Home to RoostBy Nancy Brewka-Clark QuailBellMagazine.com Marsha grabbed the dashboard. “Why’d you stop?” Trapped in the cone of light cast by the low beams, about a dozen wild turkeys formed a paralyzed barricade across the driveway. “If they’re too dumb to move, mow them down. ”
Joe kept his foot pressed down hard on the brake. “You can’t just kill them.” “Who says? I’m sick of the damn things strutting around like they own the place.” Marsha pushed the remote. “Drive.” A hundred feet away, the garage door rose silently. “Just do it.” The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
we were fledgling lightbulbsan absence is easier to hold than a person. warm limbs tucked into a shoebox in your mind that don’t leave or lose touch, just go on haunting & haunting like a head full of honey. i want to say what we did without making the sidewalks about pathology. how could you know what it would mean for goodbye to be a howling city with an underground train. how growing up there wasn’t a train or a way out of anywhere. & you giggled into my shoulder like so many unburdenings. have i ever told you sitting next to you is like being awake in a sleeping forest? oh my great & wind-scattered loves. when Kentucky swelled our veins we were fledgling lightbulbs. we were oaks dressed in overgrown roots. i’d marry time if it would give me more of you. once lying on the floor his eyes closed he said is this what dead is & we said yes & he said good. what more is there? you can’t put belonging on a shelf. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The ChessboardBy Adreyo Sen QuailBellMagazine.com There is a kingdom that is a black-and-white chessboard. You can only travel between alternate states of black and white. At the center of the kingdom is a narrow, but deep well. It is rumored that the architect of the well slumbers there and that, when he rises, the kingdom and the hills that surround it will shatter. The black squares are inhabited by a black race and the white squares by a white race.
Were this is a simplistic story (well, one kind of simplistic story at any rate), the whites would be forces of good and the blacks forces of evil. But, such an assumption would be false. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Cara's VoiceI breathe you in like Saturn orbiting the dark a single turn around the sun takes so long I've lost all my words for you as I travel the line back home The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Nighthawks
Marlon stopped his brother’s convertible Camaro in the middle of the highway, staring at the apparition in his headlights. He switched to high beam to illuminate the muggy Northwestern Ontario night, the banks of fog rolling off the rivers, creeks, marshes, and lakes along the Trans-Canada Highway. Surprised at the figure, he sucked in a big gasp of air and took a gulp of cold takeout coffee, which he bought at the convenience story in Northcliff, coughing as the liquid went down the wrong passage. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
poltergeist branch arms opened for me
she stands at the edge of the woods, split down the center, leafless canopy over a circle best reserved for black magic yet littered with beer cans. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Room for TwoWords by J. Ray Paradiso QuailBellMagazine.com *Editor's Note: Originally published at Dream Magazine. She turned, smiled, nodded. And then…
Two rows left, four rows UP in Room 4-2 in St. Brides School at 79th and Coles on Chicago's South Shore bloomed Mary Rose Sullivan. Minty-Irish, and close enough for me to sneak-a-peek at "MRS" in CAPITAL letters on her brown Kraft lunch bag. Stuffed in the right corner of an old-school Heywood Wakefield desk. Yet, f-a-r enough away to ignore me. |