My short fiction has been published in december magazine, storySouth, Southeast Review, Contrary, Flash Fiction Magazine, and the North Carolina Literary Review. Four of my stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, four for Best of the Net. I’m a winner of the curt Johnson Prose Prize and the Lorian Hemingway International Short Story Award. Above the Rooftop was a Million Writers Award Notable Story of 2011.
The Reason the Dress is Yellow
There’s a reason the dress is yellow, a reason it glows like a single candle in a darkened window, the cloth of the skirt folding in on itself then unfurling in tiny ebbs; there’s a reason but if he asks I won’t tell him.
It’s possible the dress began something, became the cause of some sequence, the sunburst instant of a new universe or history.
In the dressing room mirror, months before, I hadn’t known what the dress was for, what kind of artifact it might become. I’d only known my nakedness before the mirror and the anticipation of my skin just before I slipped it over my head, known that these things were some kind of marker.
A long clench, finally loosening. An ending, for sure, and possibly a beginning.
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Yield
I’m laughing in the fall. Laughing the instant control dissolves, the laughter replacing fear somehow, the laughter a vanishing into space, a lightness, a return.
Emma hears my laugh from below. “You were like a kid,” she’d say later, “It was almost a giggle.”
I haven’t made it very far up the rock face before I realize I can’t go back. The ledges are too narrow and spaced too far apart, the sheer walls slick where they’ve been cut away. I was an idiot to start in the first place, but I’d seen guys scramble their way up before, then leap into the still pool below, and something about the quiet contentment of the day made me brave or adventurous, or simply stupid. Now, I cling to the smooth stone, my feet tensing on a narrow shelf, staring into the forty-foot drop below then tilting upward across sixty feet to the rock ledge above where everyone jumps.
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