Kirsten wasn’t at the bus stop. My first thought? Betrayal. How could she miss the first day and let me go it alone? I wasn’t prepared for this.
Kirsten and I weren’t popular, pretty, or special in any way, but we liked to pretend. We’d walk through Kirsten’s trailer park — dirty knees faded shorts — one day cheerleaders, the next, cute boyfriends by our sides. Gravel roads were our runways, only marred by the damn sand spurs that clung to our ratty socks and dug into our palms when we cartwheeled.
She knew how much seventh grade meant to…
An Author-Supporting-Authors Piece
Writing is a habit. If not done frequently, our skills get rusty. Like dancers must practice every day to stay en pointe, and doctors must read journals and attend seminars to practice at modern standards, as writers, we must also exercise our skills to produce quality work. It’s crucial to develop a routine to readily tap into the creative process and put words on the page. We can’t wait for an epiphany, uninterrupted chunks of time, or the many other conditions we tell ourselves are necessary to finish our novels or finally start that memoir.
The struggle…
The streetlights went out, and night became real — no more passersby to offer change or a dirty look. The temperature fell like a sleeping cat from a balcony — she’d seen that more than once. Mary wrapped herself in soiled charity and moved inside. Mary wasn’t her given name, but she found it invoked more kindness from strangers than her own — the few who cared to ask. A cold moon glowed through the cracks of her shelter, highlighting the lines and folds on her bony hands — a map that no one else could read. Tick-tocking paced the…
In the early 1980s, I remember listening to the song “2525” by the American rock-pop duo, Zager and Evans. To say the lyrics left me with the heebie-jeebies would be an understatement. I’d never before heard a song with such a foreboding message about the world. The lyric that stuck with me the most was about the year 6565, a distant time when people would choose their sons and daughters from the bottoms of long glass tubes. It sounded like something from an episode of the TV series, The Twilight Zone, but later I found out something eerily similar had…
