BY BETH GILSTRAP
Splayed out on the grass, my whole world is pine and honeysuckle. The fragrance used to be a comfort, but as spring comes now, a humming dread rolls in with it. A sickness at the thought of the sweat and scent of summer. A pulse behind my eye with the thousand tiny ways the warm season remind me of all that’s lost. Dandelion fluff can’t be disassociated from Nicole’s hands. The sound of kids’ feet hitting pavement, jumping double-dutch. Unfurling leaves take me back to my long-distance running days, when I could drop down off curbs and hoof it up flights of stairs without a care—bass drums thumping, feminist playlists telling me to shake it off, shake it out, fill it with rage—my heartrate steady, headphones causing my ear canals to ache.
Now, lines of perspiration forming where my thighs meet my pelvis trip the alarm set deep in my nervous system. Some events are asteroids. The debris, unshakable.
It’s nearly three years since I lost the eye. I miss the fleck of brown just outside my iris. Steven agreed it was a shame to lose the right and not the left, since the left is so dreadfully ordinary. He didn’t say it, mind you, he just gave up after months of badgering—his cheeks slackening the moment he could no longer pretend. I often wonder if that eensy splotch on my right eye made me the person I was before. A woman capable. A woman grace-built with long limbs and lashes full enough to brush lenses of heart-shaped sunglasses. Feminine sweet. Perhaps even tender. Had Nicole survived, things might be different. Normal, even. She’d help me forget about my eye, and we’d keep our catalogue shopping and wine Wednesdays and maybe one day, we would share coffee and huddle together at the bus stop, sending our big girls off for the day, getting lost in the detritus of school projects, construction paper and poster board, rubber cement and glitter, so much glitter. But when I woke from the accident, they told me about Nicole first, my eye second. So here I am without my Irish twin, stretched out on the ground, counting the days until the three-year mark, hoping once it’s past, I can catch my breath again.
I can live. Or I can die.
One-hundred and fifty-three Sundays since I lost half my sight, half of a life shared. As I said, I still like to lie in the yard like I did in thickest fog of grief—those brutal recovery months—each day a lifetime and a fraction of a second distilled—every moment defined by its movement away from the event. In the beginning, when I was still bandaged and desperate to get a handle on gravity, bumping into everything, with the purple knees to show for it, I got the idea to flatten our pristine HOA-required fescue grass into shapes like croppies do in great wheat fields.
I don’t know what made me do it that first time. Except to say it’s something when half your world goes black. I suppose it was related to insomnia and grief or vertigo and hours upon hours of documentaries on all manner of strange and unusual happenings. The fire in the Chicago theater. Thermite and the Hindenburg. Angry ephemera at the rifle manufacturer. The bile-inducing wave of riled up white supremacists in Oregon after U.S. Marshalls shot a survivalist’s son and wife. Pet food industries poisoning our animals. The inevitability of a factory farming-spawned virus that’ll kill us all. But then in the witching hour, when I was half covered in cheese curl dust and unable to locate hope outside a full wine bottle, I caught a film about an elderly Englishman who took visible joy in listening to what wheat and long grass said, how he never meant to cause hubbub about aliens. “It’s something there, speaking,” he said, puffing on his pipe. “Mother Earth. She murmurs. One just has to listen hard enough.” I wanted to hear what he heard. When the show was over and the infomercial about wrapping yourself skinny started, I switched off the television. The sun hadn’t quite risen, but I felt my way down the safety rail on our deck until my feet touched grass. When I laid down, disoriented and reeling from trying to adjust to a flat world where all color seems wrong, I called out to the unseen. Not too loud, mind you. Just a little hum—a melody stuck in my head. I lay there night after night, snuggled into the grass Steven was no longer allowed to mow until something finally popped in my head—not a sound, but an image, a pattern I couldn’t shake.
On my first attempts, I fell down a lot and the designs looked like nothing. Rumpled grass after a picnic. The truth is, I don’t think the earth spoke to me the way she did to the Englishman. But I kept at it, put the baby in the middle of the yard in her empty yellow wading pool. She was my reference point—her fat rolls a reason to live. She wasn’t quite crawling, but would play with her busy station, making itty bitty tings and giggling until she wore herself out and curled up with her stuffed lion, sweat dampening her baby fuzz. After an hour or so, I’d tire out, too and try not to look at myself in the fake mirror when I picked her up.
“Mommy’s losing it, sweetie,” I’d whisper into her elbows and the backs of her knees. “But Mommy loves you.” And when I pulled back, “Not everyone can say their Mommy does, mind you.” But there was something to it, some tiny vibration in the earth, and it grew with each attempt. I miss this time with Anna. She’s old enough now to run away from me, knows I can’t chase her without losing my balance, and cackles at me from behind the weeping willow. I try not to dread the day she realizes other moms have two eyes and stereoscopic vision. I try not to imagine her face one day when her cousin tells her I caused the crash or what it’ll do to their friendship. I try not to think about her grandmother phoning Steven, asking him to bring her to the farm to visit or his nail-picking when he told me.
“I know it’s tough,” he said, looking at the floor. “But Anna needs her grandmother.”
“Too bad your mother’s gone,” I said.
“I don’t know that she’d be any better, but yes, it breaks my stupid heart she didn’t have the chance to meet Anna. Your mom—I’m not sure it’s fair to keep them apart.”
“You’ve made your choice. I don’t know why you—you made it months ago. I don’t know why you’re looking to me for permission. Pick her. Queen mother. Everyone does.”
“It doesn’t have to be like this, Jane,” he said brushing his hair out of his eyes. “It’s not so bad. She’s not. Besides, I’m not picking her. I’m putting our daughter’s needs ahead of our own.”
“Take her and go. Live there. I could give a shit.”
Steven looked at me like I had ripped off my own scalp, threw it at him, and had it in me to do the same to him. What can I say? It’s when you are most desperate for connection, that you shove it away, hard and fast, a bloody projectile hurtling into oblivion. It's a miracle he didn’t leave.
I’d like to say my behavior has improved since then, but I’ve seen that same bewildered look so much I’m almost disappointed when I lash out and get calm mouths and healing caresses from the wide world of the concerned.
After three years of flattening shapes into our grass and letting it grow long again, I’ve learned to sketch first, to create small daily goals. I’ve found it’s best to move counterclockwise, to follow my good eye. My best tools are my bare feet. With them, I tramp pears and droplets and bisecting lines, feeling the weather in my toes, the microcosm of living things tickling my arches, how the trees talk to each other through their root systems long after one of their own has fallen. Recently, I moved on to more complicated spiral patterns, my nod to the extinct ammonites, relatives to squid and cuttlefish and octopus, who are reproducing at alarming rates in our warming oceans. I like to imagine great swarms of them in epic love throes. Tentacles and legs everywhere, blocking out the refracted light fifty feet below the water’s surface.
My designs improved when I started tying a three-foot length of rope between my ankles and stopped drinking as much. It’s progress sure, but lying here, my visual of how pear blossoms fall still makes me blue—forever stretched and warped and pushed off-center. Resting my head on my arms, I let them brush over me. For a few moments, I softened to wonderment, wishing I could transform into a lusty sea creature, hell bent on sex and death. Though I’d closed my eye, I felt Steven standing behind me. Light and heat disappeared. His body blocking my sun. Not sure if I’m sleeping or awake, he stayed put for a few minutes shifting his weight from left to right, clicking the grill tongs in series of threes. Eventually, the sun returned and the screen door screeched shut. After three years, the poor guy lost his ability to speak to me about anything but food and physical symptoms. His fidgeting silence was a clear signal he was close to giving up. I wished he would.
I wanted the spent blooms to accumulate in the rivet where my eye used to be so I could pack them tight—like a nurse armed with gauze. Tamp the petals down to encourage germination, so I may sprout into a sapling. I could become a light sweetness on the air no one could name if I fixed myself there next to the weeping willow, learning to bend and sway, to shed my leaves in autumn. Or perhaps, once the tender skin is covered, I would heal. I could catch Anna and swing her in circles until we fall in a fit of giggles. I’d try my hand at cartwheels. Because the recurring dream where the world swooshes by as I careen head over feet on mother’s front lawn was becoming too much to bear. Green over blue, of the earth, of the sky, until I woke with vertigo. But transformation was foolish, impossible. The oils might’ve lingered on my skin, but the blooms would loosen, blow away, and disintegrate like everything else.
Curls of them slid down my cheekbone. Pink-tipped renegades landed on my shoulder, telling me the sun had baked my skin too long. Of the earth, by the earth. Steven would never understand. If I spoke these thoughts, he’d look at me sweet and place an overfilled plate of barbecue chicken on my lap, telling me all I needed to do was eat. “You’ll feel better,” he’d say. “It doesn’t have to be so hard, this life. You just got to get some protein in you. Got a good glaze on it this time. Same way you used to.”
I wiped myself off and went inside where he was already seated. A plate of burgers and burnt dogs waited next to fruit salad and peas. Anna reached for our blue whale butter dish, but Steven was an expert at deflecting her little arms with his elbow while scraping the last bits of food off his plate.
“Hi, Mommy,” he said. “We’ve done well with our sweet peas. We’re so proud, aren’t we?”
“We are,” I said, moving my plate closer to the food so I could hold it and the serving dishes. You have to hold onto things when you lose an eye or you misjudge, grab empty space, your hands thudding against tabletops. I retrieved a burger and a hotdog with my fingers, licking the juice off, before I grabbed tongs for the fruit. Peas are difficult without a spoon and a bowl unless I eat them like Anna does, chasing one at a time around the plate. Steven forgot, but realized his mistake when I sat down without them. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “But if you wouldn’t mind putting some ketchup on my dog, I’ll give you a million dollars.”
“What I could do with a cool million,” he said, leaning toward Anna. “Swimming pools and movie stars.”
I tried not to focus on his face anymore, to let it soften into a haze like everything else. A woman can only take so much forced effort, so much pity, such worried brows and clenched jaws. If he and I could unlearn the things our bodies do when our mouths stay shut, perhaps we could make it. He shook the container on his way over and squeezed a dollop onto my dog, but the bottle splurted and ketchup landed on my pineapple. “Don’t worry about it,” I said.
Anna banged on her tray, pea mush still on her chin. He didn’t clean her up fast enough. He didn’t, he didn’t, he doesn’t. When Nicole was still alive, (therapist that she was even during off hours and despite being my sister and most definitely the last person I would ever hire in that capacity) she used to try to shift my negative thinking. I never realized how much so until she was gone. “Yes, but Jane,” she’d say, “Look at the way he cradles her. Not many fathers dote that way. Ours sure as shit didn’t. He plays with her. How can you be so blind to all the light there?”
I’m not sure we’d have stayed married this long without her behind-the-scenes assistance. But I was the problem all along. Not Steven.
“I appreciate you fixing dinner,” I said. “Burgers are good. Juicy.”
His eyes crinkled at the hint of a smile. “How’s it going out there?’ he asked, wiping Anna’s face with his own stained napkin.
“You know I hate it when you ask me that.”
“Is there a better way to say it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Anna Anna Bo Banna,” he sang, scooping her out of her chair.
“It just feels like you’re judging me.”
“I know. You’ve said so before, but I think you’re—what would Nicole say? Projecting.”
“Please don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, making googly eyes at our daughter. “It’s time for someone’s bath anyway.”
He balanced Anna on his hip and two plates and her sippy cup in the other hand. Her legs dangled, looking longer all the time. I crumpled my napkin and tossed it too far right of the plate. A dragonfly knocked into the bay window. I never felt more childish or sick of him being the decent guy.
I cleared the table though it took me longer to balance my plate, cup, and the leftovers. It took four trips between the dining room and the kitchen, the door swinging back and forth between. My speed got ahead of me, sometimes; when I turn around too quickly, trails follow like tendrils trying to pull me back to the earth. I wrapped the bowls and stacked them too high in the fridge, but the food was put away. Upstairs, the tub was filling and the two of them sang their bath time song. The hot pink tyrannosaurus rex would be splashing in the ocean before long. God help buzz cut Barbie.
When the kitchen was half as clean as Steven would like, I headed toward the back door, but when I reached for the handle, I turned and went upstairs to my family, rolling my sleeves up when I got to the bathroom.
“Look who’s here,” Steven said, keeping his eyes on Anna as he pushed her chin up with two fingers, pouring water over her hair from an empty half barrel of monkeys.
“Save some water for the bath, for goodness’ sake.”
“It couldn’t be helped. There was a dinosaur-induced earthquake.”
“And a tsunami followed?”
“Precisely,” he said, scooting over enough for me to squeeze in.
“Well, we better get buzz cut Barbie to safety. Looks like it’s too late for the monkeys,” I said, pointing to the red plastic figures covering the drain.
“I’m afraid so.” He poured more water over Anna’s shoulders. “What do you think, little missy? Yes. They’re a goner. And Barbie?’ Anna hid her behind her back and leaned against the edge of the tub, laughing like a maniac.
“I’ll save them,” I said, picking out one at a time, hoping their curled arms would loop. “Look, look. This guy’s saving his friend.” I dangled the pair over Anna’s hands and she was so thrilled she leaned forward, clapping and splashing, and buzz cut Barbie bobbed up to the surface. We were soaked. “I’ll get some more towels, Papa.”
“That’s nice to hear,” Steven said.
“Towels?”
“Papa.”
I returned with more towels than we needed, trying not to think of an elaborate fractal, petal upon petal upon petal—the way a flower looks like a fist before it opens and how it must go on for eternity under a microscope. Tossing them at Steven, I tried to get another laugh, but the tone had shifted and Anna started crying because she wasn’t ready to get out.
“But sugar lump, your little fingers are so wrinkled,” he said, pulling a towel around her shoulders. “Looks like b-e-d-time is going to be fun tonight.” He takes a deep breath and tosses her over his shoulder, trying to get her back to silly, but it doesn’t work. Her lip quivers. Her thumb goes in her mouth and the tears fall almost immediately. It’s like there’s a direct link between thumb and tear ducts, but this kind of crying is manageable. She’d be asleep as soon as we got her dressed and tucked in. Buzz cut Barbie, T-Rex, and the monkeys stayed in the tub.
Sure enough, she was out in five minutes, her little lip still moving as she nursed her thumb even in her sleep. Steven pulled the cord on the cupcake-shaped lantern in the corner, letting out a deep sigh. His back cracked as he leaned into side stretches. Under faintly purple light, he said again, “Nice.”
“I know,” I said, walking up behind him and hooking my arms under his and around his broad chest. I lay my head against his shoulder blade, turning so my eye was covered and the room went black. For a moment, we are only damp clothes and warm bodies, the scent of baby shampoo hovering.
“Maybe you’re right.”
“About?”
“My mother.” He turned around, put his hands on my waist like we were at a middle school dance. For a moment, it felt like he might sing or twirl me, but instead, he smoothed my hair out of my face, and even in dim light, I felt his pity return as he took a step back.
“I can call her, then? That would be so great. I think she could do some good.”
I wanted to tell him I knew it wasn’t only about Anna. He hoped mother and I would fix our shit. He hoped when we did, it would mean I was fixed. We could put this whole unfortunate incident behind us and get back to normal. I wanted to tell him to get fucked, that he could leave, take Anna if he must, that I’d be fine. Life would go on. But I couldn’t. I would never be fine. So, with only his speck of hope between us, I gave in. “Okay.”
That night I woke barely an hour into sleep. I had of those nightmares you know is recurring while you’re dreaming, but when you’re conscious all you remember are flashes, dogs you’ve loved and lost covered in blood, something horrible you’re trying to protect them from, a falling, a fire. Nothing. My heart pounded in my ears sounding like that first ultrasound before we knew Anna was a girl—the beating, all liquid. I couldn’t shake the thought of sea creatures, how we all emerged from saltwater, from bacteria, from scale and fin. My mother teaching Nicole and I how to gut a fish. How she’d wrap the innards in paper grocery bags with spent lemon rinds to try to curb the smell. How her hands looked thin-skinned when she was a decade younger than me. What she’d say to me when we visited when I hadn’t been able to face her since the accident. I’d heard she’d gone back to drinking. That she was thinking of selling the farm, moving into town. That her knees were shot.
Steven let me sleep late. When I finally went down, he slid a coffee across the bar like we were at a saloon, tossed the kitchen towel over his shoulder, and leaned on the counter. “How are you feeling this morning, gorgeous?”
“Okay,” I said, slurping down half the cup of coffee. “What’s all this?”
“Breakfast of champions,” he said, turning back to flip the waffle maker.
“That’s a lot of food.”
“I thought we should fuel up before our road trip.”
“Jesus. Already?”
“I called her as soon as I got up.”
“And?”
“She was thrilled. Said she’d have supper waiting.”
“I don’t know, Steven.” I slid my coffee back to him for a refill. “It’s so fast.”
“It’ll be good. I know it. Now, do you want butter or chocolate and whipped cream like me and baby girl?”
“Just butter. Anna in the living room?”
“Yes, she and half her stuffed animals are watching a movie. Go join her and I’ll bring in the food. We’ll have a picnic. A waffle picnic and a road trip. The perfect Sunday.”
“If you say so.”
I curled up with Anna and her menagerie of fuzzy critters, she’d arranged in a half-moon around the television. She used the biggest one—a white bear she’d named Sugar—as a pillow and snuggled as many as she could under her Wonder Woman blanket. She must’ve been up for hours to be so calm. She pats my knee and leans into my side until Steven comes in with his breakfast masterpiece. Her eyes had never seen such glory outside the pancake house. We rarely gave her so much sugar. I wondered if getting her hopped up before strapping her into a car seat for four hours was a good move, but I didn’t want to spoil the moment. Their eyes said cheers to each other in that papa/daughter way I never experienced.
As we ate, I constructed a new piece, a horseshoe crab, one of the oldest species on the planet. Not a fractal or a traditional shape for a crop circle, but a marvel of a creature. Two compound lateral eyes. One thousand ommatidia. More eyes that detect visible and ultraviolet light. More eyes on top. Ventral eyes near the mouth. Photo receptors. The biggest rods and cones of any known animal and they still have relatively poor eyesight, but are more sensitive to light at night and tied to circadian rhythms; between that and their blue blood, medical researchers have a field day with the poor suckers. The horseshoe crab was an obvious choice for my totem. I loved the thought of an entire seabed crawling with them, powered by moonlight, feeding on mollusks.
In the car, I pulled my shades on and my ball cap down. Anna sang made up songs about butterflies and sunbeams and pine trees until she fell asleep. Steven put on a playlist he’d made for the trip. Songs that made me tuck my knees into my chest. Van Morrison, for one. The last time I danced to that song was not with Steven, but with Nicole. He should remember. He was there for fuck’s sake. Fourth of July the year I was pregnant with Anna. A few months before she was pregnant with Sadie. Her hair tied with red and white string. “What happened to the blue?” I asked. She’d run out of time. “I didn’t know it’d take so long to get it wrapped,” she giggled, shaking her head so hard the red and white strands whipped us both face to face, almost forehead to forehead, and our bare feet muddy from the sprinklers. We spun like we did when we were girls until we fell ass down in the melodious glop of a summer night. She lay her hands on my belly, and sang to Anna, messing up all the lyrics. She was high on kind bud and I was drunk on my own cocktail of baby anticipation, sister love, and early 70s rock.
“Why’d you put this on the playlist?”
“You’re smiling, aren’t’ you?”
“Until I’m not.”
“But, baby, shouldn’t it be about the smile and not what comes after?”
“Said the man who’s never killed anyone.”
“It’s such a nice memory though.”
“I’m done trying to explain it to you. Can’t you put on talk radio?”
He turned the music off, but didn’t bother with anything else so we spent the remainder of the ride in silence. I couldn’t shake the flurry of images between that July night and the night of the accident. A brutal flipping of pages between a dance and blood and glass and Nicole’s legs twisted unnaturally beneath her, stuck, nearly forehead to forehead, but inside a funnel of darkness. When we pulled up the long gravel drive, mother was standing on the porch, a kitchen towel in her hand.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” I said, biting the rough skin on my thumb.
“She’ll be glad to see you, I promise. She’s missed you. Everyone knows the accident wasn’t your fault.”
“At least we can shove Anna in her arms. That ought to make her happy.”
“Babe,” he said, unfastening his seatbelt. “Do you hear yourself?”
“What?” I said. “It’s the truth. You don’t know her like I do.”
He let out a deep sigh. “I’ll get Anna up. Go say hello, for God’s sake.”
Walking up to the porch, I noticed she’d had the tulip tree cut down and the split rail replaced with chain-link. Acres of corn grew behind the house, the bright green stalks swaying in the late afternoon sun. A pair of goats stood on a picnic table no human had used for years, their ears flicking at my approach. I tried to go down the animal classifications, to count the spaces between the invertebrate horseshoe crab and the mammal before me, but I didn’t know much about goats aside from a reputation for destruction and fainting. Mama’s hair was longer than it had been since me and Nicole were children. A small clump of curl caught the breeze, tapping against her elbow.
“Hey, mama.”
“Hey, baby,” she said. “Get on up here so I can take a look at you.”
“I’m here.”
The slats creaked as I stepped onto the porch.
“If that don’t beat all,” she said. “Never thought I’d have a one-eyed kid.”
“I never thought a lot of things.” She held me at arm’s length and examined me hard. “You look like hell, gal. And skinny. Too damn skinny. But then, Nicole was always the good eater.”
The woman had a way of usurping all my words. I stood there, mind racing, but my mouth frozen into, according to Steven, a sort of grimace.
“Mrs. Shirley?” he called, breaking the often seen, rarely mimicked, mother-daughter shit spell. “Anna here told me she was hungry.”
“Give me that baby,” she said, transformed. She held Anna’s head to her chest and smooched her nose until Anna broke down laughing. Mama booped her on the nose and lowered her to the ground, first swinging her between her legs like she’d done a thousand times with my sister and me. “Let’s eat. I made stew beef and macaroni and cheese.”
Steven started to make a face at me, but I shook my head no.
I didn’t say much over lunch, but Mama was happy to see me eat for once. She kept on and on about Nicole’s appetite, how healthy she’d always been, what a good attitude she had about her body. But I suppose it would appear that way to someone who never had to clean her up after she vomited in the bathroom of damn near every restaurant she’d ever been in. Anna didn’t like her stew, had like me, never been a fan of meat, but thankfully Mama didn’t pay much attention. Steven went for the antacids in my purse the first chance he got. I smelled the chalky mint on his breath when he returned to clear the table after he laid Anna down for her nap.
“How long y’all staying?”
“You tell me. Wasn’t this your and Steven’s master plan?”
“I was gonna can some corn tomorrow. Got four bushels and more coming.”
“Put us to work,” Steven said.
“What is Anna going to do if we’re in the kitchen all day.”
“We can teach her a skill,” Mama said.
“Lord, Mama. She’s too little.”
“Well, she can watch television or play outside, then.”
“On her own? That defeats the whole purpose of our visit does it not?” She broadened herself, the way she had always done when she was angry like she’d been walking around as two-thirds of herself and all of sudden there she was, larger than life and full of poison.
Turning her back on me, she spoke directly to Steven. “And what is it my only living child wants to do while she graces me with her presence? Perhaps you can enlighten me?”
“I’m sorry, Miss Shirley. We only—”
“Steven,” I said, placing my hand on his chest. “There’s no need. Go check on Anna. I’ll be up shortly.” Without hesitation, he scooted away. Though it had been years, Steven had witnessed Mama’s handiwork before. There’s nothing quite like the anger of a woman who feels she never got her due. Particularly from her children. Particularly from the survivor.
Mama stood her ground, but I did not engage the way she wanted. I would not raise my voice. I would not beg her to love her grandchild. I would not try to explain myself. This was a woman who rose at daylight and bedded down at dusk, a woman who had given birth both times in her own bed. We spoke different languages. And our translator was gone, dead going on three years. Instead, I walked out the back door, kicking off my shoes off just before I entered that glorious field of green.
For a while, she watched me from the window, a shadow against the incandescent glow of her kitchen. A light she never turned off. But eventually the shadow disappeared. The moon moved across the sky as I worked felling cornstalk after cornstalk without much thought. A hawk squealed in the distance, and sometime later swooped near me with a squirrel in its talons, still trying to wiggle away. At some point, a thorn had lodged itself in my pinky toe and my lower legs were bruised like hell, but I kept at it until the sky began to lighten. As I neared the center of my crab creation, I liked to think I was making a thousand rudimentary eyes, but how do you translate such a thing to other people? They may never know what I’m trying to say is here—here is what’s left of me. Light receptors. Circadian rhythms. Muddy feet.
Beth Gilstrap is the winner of the 2019 Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize for her second full-length collection Deadheading & Other Stories (forthcoming). She is also the author of I Am Barbarella: Stories (2015) from Twelve Winters Press and No Man’s Wild Laura (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press. She serves as Fiction Editor at Little Fiction | Big Truths and a reader at Creative Nonfiction.Her work has been selected as Longform.org’s Fiction Pick of the Week and recently selected by Dan Chaon for inclusion in the Best Microfiction Anthology. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, The Minnesota Review, Hot Metal Bridge, and Wigleaf, among others.