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Submitted to Contest #337
A dope fiend grabs my leg as I approach the front door. They’re reclining on the pavement and turning their heads at nothing in particular like wild horses. Wild horse numbers are managed in some states by a Bureau of Land Management that captures a predetermined number and auctions them to people who dream about purchasing free-roaming horses. Free-roaming horses can be tagged, but typically they’re branded. Not all branding hurts the horses because there’s a painless way to do it called cold branding, at least that’s what people say. The w...
Submitted to Contest #332
Rocks thrown at the face leave scars, and the boy studies the long kiss of a scar above my left eye. The kitchen floor is littered with chicken bones, barbecue sauce containers from fast-food restaurants, Saran wrap, and a baby’s unassembled crib. “It’s because my brother can’t walk so she just throws shit on the floor,” the boy says. In his brother’s bedroom there’s a poster of the film “Bully” showing the famous scene where Brad Renfro holds a phone up to his ear. The brother’s not in the room so the boy takes me back outside where the flo...
Submitted to Contest #326
I laughed at the image of kelp as I entered the woman's kitchen. The wood-paneled walls were painted a shade of brown that suggested kelps combed from sublittoral kelp forests. Most people think kelps are a type of plant, but they're actually multicellular organisms that develop long blades with pneumatocysts and spores. The spores in turn develop their own slimy blades. It's disgusting. Marine protected areas, or MPAs, have been established to limit human activity in order to preserve natural resources like kelp, but that's because most peo...
Submitted to Contest #192
The boys throw rocks at us, and one of the rocks hits me on the side of the head. They boys are leaning out of windows and hiding behind bus shelter advertisements. Adam says we should move to a new town, but we don't go to Rehoboth like he wants but to a place neither of us has been before. We book a room in a motel where you can pay by the week and the motel manager talks to you from behind bullet-proof glass, but people in town smile at us as we walk past. Adam says they’re only doing that because they don’t know who we are. Adam only has...
Submitted to Contest #188
And among the ruins were the cages of the English lops. The house had burned, yet the lop cages had been spared as they sat in a shed some fifteen feet from the house. The lops made not a sound as I approached. They all appeared unharmed in their cages. I'd settled on setting them free as it was a terrible thing to be unfree, and they had earned their liberty as far as I was concerned. Their metal cage doors were opened, and I simply coaxed them out with a hand. The lops were so docile that in spite of all that had passed some of them didn't...
And after Jane was done making breakfast, she walked into the yard to take the clothes down from the line. She was angry. She'd forgotten to take the clothes down yesterday afternoon, and it had rained, so now she had a mess of wet clothes to figure out how to dry. We didn't have a clothes dryer. She threw the clothes in the sink and sat beside me at the kitchen table, but she didn't say anything for a time. Then Jane said: "I'm moving out." I explained to her that she couldn't move out because we were engaged and splitting the rent on the h...
Submitted to Contest #182
Shooting a horse is something a man should never do. But sometimes you're shooting at a person and the horse is in the way. The alarm in the house goes off after I've already broken in, and when I see the man outside running towards me, I shoot in his direction. I miss him and hit his horse instead. When I leave the county jail, the officer tells me I should consider making it up to the man whose horse I've maimed. I don't know how he expects me to make it up to him. I'm charged with breaking and entering, possession of an unregistered firea...
Submitted to Contest #180
The sound of the horse hooves clopping on the dead earth helped me forget the ranch. I followed the horses to the scrapyard where the animals weaved through the burnt-out husks of Nissan Maximas and Scania trucks. The horses trod more lightly in this constrained space. They neighed when they struck their shanks against the metal. They neighed when they were confused which way to turn to be free of the cars. I thought I'd follow the horses wherever they led as I had no place to be. They were wild horses.But before I knew it the horses had gal...
Submitted to Contest #177
Then there was the sound of the rain slapping against the window. Mrs. Fischer was sitting on the edge of the bed in her bathrobe. I could see that she was speaking, but I couldn’t hear her so I told her that I was mostly deaf. My hearing was particularly bad in the morning. I read her lips. She said: “Don’t you have a hearing aid?” I did have a hearing aid, but it didn’t work well in the morning. There was a doleful silence, and I walked out of the room. It was her house. Her children were sitting in the kitchen when I walked in. They wer...
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