Fiction

As the video conference ended, quiet tears poured down her cheeks. She felt very small as if someone had taken her voice away.

I buy admission to the tattered big top amidst a hundred or more whose skin is the color of my own.

I mulled over what I could have done differently. A crack in one of the hazy panes caught my eye. A fissure.

My bullet has been eroding into my spinal cord for the last ten years, the sandbar under my feet slipping away..

This isn’t about you. It isn’t about the Barbie you once belonged to, or the kid that Barbie might still belong to. It isn’t about my own kid’s Barbies…

When I unfold the paper there’s what appears to be a bunch of feathers. As I reach for them I discover it’s a bird’s wing.

I sigh with the tree. The tears sprout from my eyes, dripping onto the tangled roots beneath.

The hypnotic tingling draws her inward. Her mind starts humming a tune she never dreamed of singing.

With trembling hands, Millie gently removed the lid of the urn and exhaled with the first release of gray powder.