Published Works
Ghost Rider
Maybe it was something about the way it plunged from the sky like a rock. Maybe how it carried them lined in a row inside its snake body. Swallowed eggs. The girl felt the plummet in her heart from miles away. A tiny, black hole poked her muscle, drew blood. She heard the captain on the news, envisioned the dots creep in to the center. She saw the black out, heard the panic behind the calm in their voices, felt the bullet hit. We all crash, she thought with her hammer heart, foot flat on the tremor that rippled across land. Someday, under the weeds and grass, mud in rain, perhaps in pieces swirling down a river. She inhaled, wondered about her own immediacy. She felt displaced, like the shredded wood of the house, the accident, that tiny percent of chance. It’s the face of the arrow, the barreling slug’s violent thrust from here to there when nobody yelled, “fire.”
*Published in Peregrine; Volume XXVI, 2011