Halatia

When Vee had first arrived on Earth, she thought she’d never really pick her feet off the ground. She hated the sky. It was too wide. Too empty. It made her mistrust gravity. But when it came to maintaining a shuffle or running for her life, Vee chose to run. With her heart pounding loud in her ears, Vee burst out of the woods. She turned in a full circle, feet scuffling in the loose gravel that littered the dirt road.  On one side was the woods they’d run full tilt through. Her bare calves stung with a multitude of tiny cuts from the wildflower underbrush that had seemed so pretty at first. But Vee felt every single minute gash

The whole world was watching when the Prime Minister had a knife driven through his heart. Eliana was home sprawled on the floor, a pile of gears and and bolts and screws splayed out before her. She only half listened to the news caster as she excitedly commented on proceedings. Ana’s mind and fingers more concerned with building a pocket-sized catapult, per her father’s instructions. Her father sat behind her on the couch, his posture sloppy. Quite unlike him, his elbows on his knees, one hand buried in his hair. The action let his ears show, the pointed tips quivering as he strained to hear the news over the sound of ElianaR

The backdoor was always locked, a heavy deadbolt of a lock, almost too difficult to throw back, even for a grown man. The most secure door in the whole house no doubt. So he couldn’t have gotten out that way. And all the doors upstairs creaked with weathered age or slid rough in their tracks, grating plastic on metal. The door off the sunroom, though, held potential.     This was the basement that still haunts my memory: one bedroom, a den and a short connecting hallway that ended in a bathroom. The great room, long and thin, was mirrored to the north by a hallway that connected a half kitchen and laundry room. Then a workroom that in

I Time is a human construct ably abetted by the sky, the stars. We looked at the sky and decided to delineate day and night, to make them into two halves, when in fact they were just fine whole. Prehistory – our prehistory – we were overwhelmed by the sky. Cave paintings and inscriptions are a myriad of hypothetical disasters, stars falling, bursting, chelating. For we saw the Milky Way in all its wonder, all white dust, blue light and rosy curls, a solid mass hanging heavy in the sky. II A girl has prehistory as well. Before she is born, before she is even the star twinkling in her mother’s eye, her parents meet. They f