Content warning: subtle themes of assault
You want the memory to serve you somehow, to mean something that you can make sense of and eventually use to get moving again in some sort of direction, any direction at all except the one that leads to the vertical drop that haunts you. In the mornings you wake up achingly cold and sweaty with recall, strangled syllables caught in your throat like throwing stars. Your visions persist beyond their nighttime cruelties, heavy stones in your pocket that seek their own fearful company. So you move inland and sign up for a class in a high school gym taught by three ex-policemen that finishes with one of them simulating the unthinkable, unforgettable thing and you find out there is nothing you can do, nothing you have learned, that can stop it from happening again. You can’t even be sure that your terror won’t prevent you from uttering a single note of protest, which your favorite no-longer-a-cop instructor allows would be all you could really do, yell real loud, because you’re mild and puny, and you refuse to even consider carrying a weapon. His oracle eyes are sad when you thank him for his time. You move again, this time to the mountains, closer to the sky where the leaves change predictably and the wind howls when it wants to. And you think maybe one day you’ll be able to howl too.
A Pushcart Prize, Best Micro Fictions, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions nominee, Carolyn R. Russell‘s poetry, creative nonfiction, and short stories have been featured in numerous publications, including The Boston Globe; Eunoia Review; 3rd Wednesday; The Citron Review; Blink-Ink; Litro Magazine; Club Plum Literary Journal; Daikaijuzine; Orca: A Literary Journal; Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine; Brilliant Flash Fiction; and New World Writing. She is the author of four books, the latest of which is a collection of cross-genre flash called “Death and Other Survival Strategies.” Carolyn lives on and writes from Boston’s North Shore. More at http://carolynrrussell.com/
