Winter Blooms Issue & Blank Canvas Issue
contents
home
chats
THE
ART OF SHORT FICTION What
is it? Author
Charles Blackstone tells.
WRITING GREAT SHORT STORIES Elizabeth Kadetsky who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and at Columbia University’s School of Journalism serves up some advice.
continue...
CRAFTING
CHARACTERS THAT JUMP OFF THE PAGE Punching
up your
fiction?
Where there's a tipster, there's a way. Discover Robert Gregory Browne's
secrets to
getting multiple book deals.
continue...
BIOFICTION
INTRODUCED Even as she receives 5 stars
on Amazon for Trine Erotic while editing/publishing
Entelechy: Mind & Culture, Alice Andrews takes time
to chat about the esoteric world of this mind-bending read.
continue...
Here's our winner of TOP PICK!
“Duotrope Digest ”
"...think of Duotrope’s Digest as a matchmaker of sorts.
If you write fiction or poetry, we can help you find appropriate markets
for your work."
--Shannon Wendt, Duotrope creator
flash
I SAID I DIDN'T KNOW
I couldn't do it because I loved her too much to put her through all the suffering our marriage would've caused her. It's just infatuation, I told myself. Lust. Youthful California sunshine, seaside romance that would surely die on darker soil. I'll get over it, I told myself. But years have not lessened the pain of my regret, and no sun has set on our cotton horizon that didn't leave me longing for her company and pondering her fate.
Rosie.
No one else will ever be right for me. Beautiful, intelligent, vivacious, often silly. Asking me about the style of her hair as if it mattered, worrying about the condition of skin on which I could see no blemish. Slowly parting her lips into a soothing smile; sparkling eyes and warm soft flesh ready to pull me close and relieve my fear and anxiety. Everyone said how beautiful our children would be. Heaven. She would have married me anyway and I wanted to spend my life with her but no, I couldn't do that to her. Couldn't expect her to make that adjustment. I always knew when my time was up and I was discharged from Naval service I would have to move back home and run the family farm. My father's...his father's...his father's... Couldn't see her as a farmer's wife. She'd never be happy here, I told myself. I told her. She was devastated.
I hope she got over it because I haven't. I threw away all those silly cards and letters and poems she wrote. And the photos, except the one Randy took of me and my new 1987 smoke gray Hyundai. At the last second Rosie stuck her face in the picture and it captured her un-postured beauty the way I want to remember it. A little piece of heaven in the lower right corner of an otherwise banal snapshot. I kept it close for years after, and one day my father came in to discuss a costly delay at the gin and saw the picture on my desk. "What's this?"
"The Hyundai I bought in California."
"Foreign car?"
"Yes, sir."
He gave a disapproving grunt and shifted focus. "Who's the nigger?"
I said I didn't know.
He tossed it down, not seeing it slide off the back of the desk. "Funny how they all like to jump in front of a camera, ain't it?"
I said it was.
First published in Flashquake, September 2006 River Huffman chronicles life in the field and factory world of West Tennessee. When he's not writing or playing the guitar, he travels the back roads and listens to tales told by strangers. Last year, his works appeared in Muscadine Lines: A Southern Journal, Flashquake, and Heavy Glow.
|
IS ON
FOLLOW US!
On Sale! Available at www.amazon.com SHALLA Magazine has arrived
& we're always getting better & better, & better...
SHALLA Magazine in your iPod... on You Tube... --oh my!
Everyone's a Critic! Where our guest assistant editors choose their top 10's or top 5's or... Read what they say about each one!
Shoe Schuster's TOP PICKS
1. Fake Fire and Rescue by Blake Butler 2. Homecoming by Bill Brocato 3. Sri Lanka by Byron D. Howell
Misty Day's TOP PICKS
Who's
made the cut so far? TOP PICKS
What
kind of work does she like? Do you agree?
|
© Shalla DeGuzman.
All rights reserved.