Hard Year for Everybody

GABE DURHAM

This one begins on brooms. Fanciful gist, the way we like it, based on a movie my friend made when he saw a book a pretty girl was reading in the contemporary cinematic facelift of The Crucible. You drink and ride and drink and span the blacktop until you fall over. We rush around you and say what you’ll be based on how you’re lying. Like one girl was spread-eagle so she became a patriotic ornithologist. One girl was dead so she became a ticket dispenser there on I-90. One girl never fell so we cursed her children’s blood. It’s just fun, Mom. If you’ve got a better way of discovering God’s postgraduate plan for my life, scrawl it on a donut receipt, find some bored talons to stick it in, then tape up the bird and mail it wherever my soft body crumbled.