Working the Fire Line – Fierce Fiction by Alan MacLeod – October 21, 2018 The first time I saw her we were on the fire line digging a ditch to contain the blaze. “There’s Beth,” someone said. “ Bobby Freeman’s sister and a damn good digger too.” I saw a short, slender woman in her early twenties, wearing a bright… Read More »Working the Fire Line
A Jeep has sat in front of our house for a month, its red boxy body catching my eye every time I walk outside. Whoever left it, placed it equal distance…
I have learned life is short, and dying takes forever. For nearly seventy years, I’ve been a whirling dervish. I ran to and from various aspects of a life filled with perpetual…
I am offended. It is not my fault that there is no bedroom door to close to keep the drywall sanding-dust out. No, not my fault, and to tell the truth…
When my daughter Sela was three, she invented a story about Bob Marley and Frederick Douglass. I put her allegory in the “Afterthoughts” of…
My mother saw the raccoon first. She was chopping veggies in front of an open window, hoping for a breeze because it was August, and already hot and sticky…
I sat alone at the Shanghai Dumpling King on 34th Avenue in the same seat she always sat in. I came on a Thursday afternoon the way she always did…
I am six years old and I go to Yeshiva and my name is Moshe. In summer there is an old woman who lives in the radiator in the living room of my apartment.
Fifty feet of nylon line and a milk jug stretched across the bay. Twenty hooks, mostly trebles, hung waiting; chicken liver and dough balls luring them in.