Amira awoke with a start. Smoke was billowing out of her shattered bedroom window. She scrambled out of her straw bed and made her way to the broken window frame. The sight before her was enough to make an adult …
Sunlight aglow casts along the field. Slow and growing much like myself. The dry stalk shadows splinter across the ground. A shiver shoots through my body. I flicker like a flame in the cold. A beacon of warmth in a …
I awoke in sweat. When I opened my eyes, I felt like I was still dreaming. For a moment, I’d forgotten where I was. “get up, my child,” I heard my grandma say in Navajo. I closed my eyes again, …
“She’s just a dog, I gave her a good life, she’s an old dog, time for her to go,” he often said.
And one day she was sure she’d come to love her baby too. It was a bit of cosmic mercy in the midst of hell.
As the evening star appeared, the despair that she’d kept locked in a fist grip behind her moved in close, as if the tiny light had beckoned it forward.
My friend Jon and I were in one of our moods of being destructive little men wreaking havoc on the small town of Ontonagon.
There was a strange but familiar smell, it was a mixture of musky perfume, sage, and beef soup. I knew for sure who it was in my kitchen, and it wasn’t a burglar, it was my Grandma.
After a time his anger and embarrassment turned to a melancholic blanket of regret. He now wanted to find relief from his actions more than an explanation for them.
He was just an escapee from the border town of El Chuco, working a shit job in a shit hole, passing through on his way to tomorrow.
