At six years old, I found our pet rabbit, Stew, mauled to death in his hutch. His soft, white pelt was streaked with blood, and his face—what was left of it—was a roseate valley of matted fur and wet meat. Bits of chewed-up carrot littered the hutch, like the fox had startled him mid-meal, and a final evacuation of his bowels was stacked sky high.
It was a bitter February morning, close to my birthday, and the ground was crusted with frost that crunched under my wellie boots as I trudged down the garden. I’d filled my beach bucket with carrots, as I did every morning, and was rubbing stars and fireworks into my eyes.
When I came to the hutch, I didn’t realise the rabbit was dead.…
In a sports bra worn thin by use and sweats that once tight hung were now loose, Jennifer ran five miles before her morning class. It was her second favorite part of the day.
Her bare feet hit the unyielding pavement, shock waves assaulting her feet, ankles, knees, and back. Though the hurt felt good, she vowed that, when she hit 25, she’d stop this. By that time, she’d be totally grown, married, have children, and spending hours in front of an ironing board. She’d be too worried about how the table linens looked to indulge in a hobby as consuming as this.
In the meantime, it was pure bliss: running and running and running. Arms and legs churning. Body floating. Like a waterfall, like Niagara, pouring herself through the sunrise. …
when the night winds down beside you, indifferently, lethargically, like a cat and the wonderance pesters you like a cat to backtrack the day’s density, be it complex or mundane, dense nonetheless, and makes you replay every interaction flip-book style showing how your consonants cut when it should have glided, how your eyes scoured when it ought to have gleamed, and how last night you said you’d change, how you’d vowed to be less harsh to mother, friend, and cat, to everyone, really, but especially to yourself, and how, regrettably, you’d broken that vow today again,
remember that you can try again tomorrow. and you can keep trying again and again and again.
Taking a deep breath, he placed both chalked hands on the starting jug hold, and then positioned his feet on the wall chips, one after the other. He gave the signal, exhaled, raised his right leg, pushed himself upwards and reached his left hand to the next handhold, a nice incut, which was solid, then his right hand to the smaller but gripable edge hold. There was just something really compelling about the first move, a rush of adrenaline when you lifted yourself off the ground. It was like a rocket launch or a plane taking off. This was the moment when you realized you could fall. This was the moment when you realized you could fly.
Libby found herself on her son’s street for the third day in a row, this time just after a night shift at the hospital. Her chance of getting any sleep was slipping. A heavy fatigue settled in her eyes and dragged down her thoughts. The haggard face in the mirror startled her, a sad and tired woman: dry skin, swollen cheeks, droopy lips. Her hands on the steering wheel slackened and her head nodded off. She fell into a passive, blank feeling. There was no name for it, this feeling, but it carried her to sleep until the sudden glimpse of a dream. A large bug landed on her neck and bit her skin. She woke in panic and placed her hands on top of her blonde hair.…
and my mother buried him at the Waynesville cemetery in a double plot with a pair of tombstones, one for him and an unmarked slab waiting for her, and my father became a crow in the red maple behind the house in Hazelwood, and my mother lived another thirty years and waited for the day when she would lay down again with my old man. And sometimes my father would call her and sometimes she would pack a picnic lunch and sit outside sharing a pb & j and a slice of Dad’s favorite cherry pie. And often, she would be scolded with a caw from the telephone line running to the back of the kitchen. And she didn’t mind when my father stole the seeds for the smaller birds she kept in the bird-feeder hanging from the maple all winter long.…
