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He wrote a breakup letter Blaming me for all his faults An offering of pride Patched together with the shame He should have felt but couldn’t, Because then he’d have no one To sacrifice except himself. The breakup letter contained a list A litany of lies That laid out every scarlet sin I never committed
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Hey God, just a quick question I can’t seem to find the protocol For offering an olive branch. Seems like the olive branch Comes from the offender, And not the offended. Wasn’t it you who sent the floods? Yet, Noah, the last one standing After the violence, sent the dove. I’m curious how one determines
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3 So she named the Lord who spoke to her, “You are El-roi,”[b] for she said, “Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?”[c] Genesis 16:13 NRSVUE Here in the waste, the wilderness of doubt Where thorns and dust and brambles choke the ground I sit beside the well and pray aloud My call a cry, a
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Canada is not like how I thought it would be. It’s better than I had heard. It’s better than I ever imagined. Mira, Simon and I spent four months in refugee housing. It was an apartment block filled with women and their kids, or kids living with an assigned guardian from the Canadian government, men
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I wrote everything out for Maddie. No code. She would need to understand everything as it was. Just like Gran did for me when I first joined the network. I hid this letter in the basket under the bathroom where I keep my menstrual supplies. Mark would never look there. It reminds him how different
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The worst part of recruiting anyone new to the network of letter writers was the uncertainty. It was always lurking in the shadow of your surety, waiting to pop out of the darkness and scream that you were wrong. It whispered to you that it wasn’t worth the risk, that it would be better to
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I’ve leaving on the next shipment. There are two placements remaining. If you need to get something to Africa, send it by airmail. There won’t be another opportunity until the guard changes in the old capital. Be on your best behavior. I folded Gilda’s letter tightly and stashed it into my bra. I picked up
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I drop the letter to Gilda in the normal way. There is an old brick in the stone wall behind the post office that wiggles loose. I always fold the letter three times, tuck it to the right of the brick, then shove the brick back in place. I check the brick every few days.
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We don’t talk about the women in the stocks. Not openly on the streets. Not openly in our homes. Not openly in the most intimate of settings with our spouses. It’s never safe to talk about them, and how they got there, because if we ever discuss, it could be seen as questioning. We can
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I don’t know how to be sorry For something I didn’t do But I do know how to hurt Because you think I did. When the dust eventually settles And you can look me in the face I will still want to ask you Aren’t we better than this? There’s always hope for repair But
The Quick and the Dead
Short stories. Creative experiments. Ideas that might not pan out.
The Quick and the Dead 