By Sarah Blanchard The gun shop owners are busy with customers wanting gunsmith services and booking time on the rifle range. They don’t know there’s a troll in their midst. She’s the pudgy, silver-haired grandmother in Wrangler jeans, a buffalo-plaid sweatshirt, and well-worn leather barn boots, casually perusing a display of gun oils and cleaning … Continue reading Avoiding Failure
I was sitting on my concrete walkway, pulling weeds from what you could have called a garden, intermittently looking over at Shelly's house—checking for signs of life.
His feet are large. His hair is hard.
Now they had religion. It was time to buy a house.
Part of our mission was to directly fight insurgents; the other part was to stabilize and protect communities that were being terrorized by small groups of radicalized insurgents.
Al was my new-found brother, filling the sibling gap of an only child. We matched each other in height, though I was always the skinny kid and Al was more round, of face and body, and that never changed.
I was free. Free to stand on my own feet, rise from dirty baptism – a disbeliever no longer.
Straight hair was fun for about two minutes.
Mourning netting, I call it, hiding the dead.
I want to tell you of a house on fire. And, of virga, rain that evaporates before it reaches the ground.***I’m still twenty-three when I get married and move to New Orleans. It’s March of 2007. Sometime around my birthday in June, I realize what I’ve done.***The previous summer, my heart breaks for the first … Continue reading “Crescent City” by Anna Oberg, 2020 Nonfiction Spring/Summer Contest Winner
Causeway Lit 