‘Stolen Gig’ by Sarah Shields

Flower bouquets, loud in their cellophane hoods, are laid at the end of the pier in offering.

This week I have for you some lovely short fiction in the latest issue of pidgeonholes courtesy of Sarah Shields. Part love poem, part story, with hints of surreality blended in, ‘Stolen Gig’ contemplates death and circumstance and passion. The girl’s descent into the ocean almost parallels the narrator’s own descent into infatuation; a sense of traded places, or interchangeability. How the ocean finds its way to the shore, how land manages to finds its way to the water. All these displaced bodies, lingering on the edge of something else.

It is long after dark when the g­­irl jumps off the pier, into the Pacific wasteland. Waste as it is total, land as it is ocean—she lets it in.

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