Tag: flash fiction

I could tell it hurt. This time was different. He winced when I said it and in that moment the words solidified for me and I chewed it up with green chili and warm pizza dough and swallowed. “You’ll be back,” he mumbled with confidence. He spoke into a brown ale that was our favorite.…

“Thirst, probably.” He reported as if he’d swallowed something too large and it had stuck in his throat. The news had come as a sand-sting to the town; it covered the small wagon-wheel in dusty rumors. I’d come as an outsider with a Corolla and a funny accent. “Ironic, isn’t it?” He continued. I didn’t…

There was nothing beautiful about a New Mexican spring. For every flower and warm, sunny afternoon there were six or seven lung-fuls of dust and needle-like torrents of sand blasted at her face at thirty (sometimes forty or, God forbid, even fifty) miles per hour. There was no beauty in a sky painted brown, a…

“It’s not the same,” you remind her gently, still several dozen miles from your destination. Even though you can’t look at her, you can feel her eyes scanning the horizon, miles upon miles of sun-baked earth and yellow grass, mesquite bushes and cracked asphalt patched once, twice, a thousand times, the sealed lines spreading out with…

“I’m suffocating in all of this openness,” he said over a pecan beer and our favorite sugary sunrise. “Jerry, stop it. There’s plenty of room to breathe here.” We’d spent most of our savings on the move. On the truck we hadn’t needed in the city. On some specific sort of peace of mind. Quiet.…

Look up, dear wanderer, dear withered man scorched brown by ten thousand rising suns. Look up over the wall of your mortality to the morning star that has finally stolen your life. Your ancestors worshiped the light of the world, wondered at the renewed blessings of illumination that wiped away the shadows from the face…

“There’s no magic here.” She said. Her hair was black ice, slippery shine. Her fat lips formed around the words as if she were praying to the god she couldn’t find again. She’d tried. Time and again, she’d tried. Bending knees never led her back to Mexico–the sharp incline of rock where her grandmother had…