‘A Place You Can See the Stars’
— Joyce Chong
Nice, babe, her lover says. He always calls her that, drives a red truck with a door that doesn’t match, never changes the oil.
I have some more fiction this week, courtesy of Cathy Ulrich in Easy Street Magazine. ‘A Place You Can See the Stars’ is an excerpt; a glimpse into new life, through smoke and fire and open air. A walk through the tenuous space between young and grown, and the shaky progression towards what comes next. Heat becomes the unknown, the driving factor moving us ever forward. Like fire, it threatens to burst through, to evolve and consume, to leave behind new growth.
Her baby will be born fire; her baby will burn. She feels it, feverish during the pregnancy, exhaling smoke from her mouth.