Amos rang the doorbell and stepped back over the “Llama let you in” doormat. He wrung his hands. The porch light cast his shadow over the llama’s shades. He had shades like that, looked better on the llama though. The gentle thud of socked feet approached the far side of the door. Now would be the time to run, make it all a ~totally sick prank~. Perry opened the door.
“Why’d you ring the doorbell?”
“Your parents aren’t home, so I figured… um.”
“Just knock, normal people knock, Amos.”
She was smiling, her hazel eyes glittered in the porch light. A moth bumped into her face. She flinched as though punched, sending her straightened hair into a crown around her head. It smelled nice, sweet, and floral.…
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He makes love to her wondering if it will be the last time. He walks out afterward, but not in a cruel way. He’d held her, run his fingers through her dark hair, massaged her scalp with his fingertips, looked into her brown eyes and told her he loved her. He leaves knowing he had told her the truth.
He drives away trying not to think about her tears or her confusion as to why. He was terrible at trying to explain why; to her, to his parents. All he knows for sure is that something inside—his heart, or conscience, or spirit, or whatever the fuck, is pulling him away from everything familiar. He has to leave. No forwarding address, no plan, no idea where he’s going.…
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Charlotte was to the manor born, lived that way until her father gambled the family down from mansion to middle-income home to shanty, until her third marriage was to a poor dirt farmer and factory worker. But Charlotte knew her mother was frugal and crafty, so figured her mother had squirreled away as much or more than what her father had squandered. All she had to do was wait for her mother to die, and she would inherit the hidden fortune. Such hope kept her alive, but not long enough
On her deathbed, Charlotte asked her mother how much she would have inherited should she have outlived her mother. Her mother told her “millions”. And next Saturday, Charlotte’s mother went to confession, asked the priest to grant her absolution for having lied to her daughter on the daughter’s deathbed.…
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I kept my head on straight and my eyes forward as the march began. My friends and family I left behind, for they were much stronger than I. They could remain rooted to this town, like things that had been planted and had the power to stand on their own means. I was more like the chaff left behind in the fields, never meant to stay on the thing which grew it. I pretended like I left on my own will, but this was a front.
There was no vehicle to draw me forwards, for this was not a time in which such a thing was readily available. Not even the beasts had fallen to the sway of man yet, so I walked alone and long.…
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There. There it is. I see it. There’s the mist, blowing left to right. It drifts over the ground near the huts. The four soldiers emerge from the mist like ghosts, their rifles ready. The villagers stay inside their huts even though they’re on the same side. They’re scared. No, why? Why are they scared? The wind blows. A soldier whistles. An old man and woman come out of a hut. A spooked and nervous soldier shoots them. No, why? Other villagers come outside. The soldiers shoot all of them except for the children. The soldiers set the huts on fire and take the children into the bushes. No. Another patrol comes along, sees what the soldiers are doing and shoots them. No, that’s not right.…
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We escorted the dying woman to a plot of land. Not the land she has been cultivating with wild seeds for the last who knows how many years. No. We walked with her to a plain spot of loose red soil and mountains at a distance.
She was very short, by the standards of the village, but large in the ways women like her seem to grow to be given titles like curandera, mother of us all, high priestess, or maybe even goddess. Whatever it was she did for you would trigger the right title. For she had touched us all in one form or another. She was our center. We gravitated around her like a planet to a star, a hog to his slop, or a bee to the hive.…
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All day I had been nervous. Frightened. The whole eastern section of the city remained dark behind locked doors. The uniforms were going street-to-street and door-to-door. Fists pounding. Glass shattering. People crying. Shouting. Intermittent gunshot. The echoes of it all could be heard bouncing from building to building throughout the streets. They had been here earlier tromping through my house unimpeded by anything resembling decency or compassion. They had found nothing and no one, of course, for I had little and lived alone.
I was picking up the scattered bits of broken china left in their wake when there came a tentative knocking on my door. I turned off the lamp and went to the window in hopes of seeing, while remaining unseen, who was there before I committed myself to whatever lay outside.…
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