He remembered her face; a few dances ago she was someone’s wife. A scratchy record, the
needle stuck in her sophomore year of high school, the girl who failed to self-abort on the floor
of the bathroom, soaked in blood, carried on a gurney to the ambulance, sirens blaring. Now,
here, over cheese and red wine, a single’s dance, leftovers from broken dreams and broken hearts
with jobs and debts, they stare at one another, cracked sculptures of ice.
Flash by Marty B. Rivers
Image by Adam Strong
Marty packed his few belongings and left California for the rural life in Tennessee, where his wife shucked peas and his two children spit watermelon seeds and splashed in the creek. It was there he discovered a lack of dentists, catfish, moonshine, and fried foods. His writing is off-beat, counter-culture, geared toward YA and those still capable of thought. An emerging author, his work has been published in Heavy Feather Review, AOL, Yahoo and the defunct Los Angeles Free Press.
Backwards Trajectory 