Original Fiction
A Catalogue of Broken and Lost Things
A tattered stuffed dog. My brother’s stuffed dog. Threadbare at the neck where he hugged it, held it till it fell apart, the neck snapping from the body. I say snapping but what I really mean is tearing, or just crumbling, because the fabric was worn to mesh, the spider web of threading that lay beneath the mangy, gnarled polyester of the dog’s fur loved to bareness. Loved to nothingness, so that the head just fell from the body. And Davy held it up, presented it like the thing he worst feared had just happened. Like we could fix it. And I laughed. Because Davy was twelve years old, too old for stuffed toys. No. I laughed for the same reason Davy cried. I had expected it all along. It had finally happened. You don’t carry around a stinky thing like that for twelve years and expect it to hold together. But do you see? I laughed, so maybe that makes me heartless. All I know is that it was better than crying. My father stored that stuffed dog in a drawer while my mother promised she would find a way to fix it, until Davy forgot about it.
The White Elephant Party at the End of the World
They brought a nylon hairbrush, its uses manifest but unlimited: for scraping dust off thresholds or snow off tarps. Or, as Renee pointed out, for actually brushing hair, though she hadn’t taken hers out of its tight bun for a dozen weather cycles, not since Paul had wandered from the Shelters and not returned.
"They Never Know"
Author’s Note: I wrote the first draft of this short story for a creative writing class in grad school. We were supposed to imagine a story featuring a celebrity, dead or alive. I decided to base mine off of a dream I once had — that young Harrison Ford, whom I’d had a crush on since childhood, showed up at my house and proposed. Through several drafts, it turned into a story about expectations, disappointments, and assumptions.