featured short fiction
"The Position of the Sun" The Normal School
"The Position of the Sun" The Normal School
"The Position of the Sun" The Normal School
I was a few weeks shy of nineteen when I saw my father’s wreckage for the first time. The pickup truck had been towed to a junkyard storage lot, its contorted front end rippled like the bellows of an accordion. His was the only vehicle not covered in snow, if my memory can be trusted. The driver’s door that bore the name of his business, DeBoer Painting & Wallpapering, was twisted and misshapen. Only half of the letters and the 312 prefix of his phone number were legible. His dried blood had hardened on the chrome door sill and frame, transformed by its exposure to the elements into a dark and dusty crimson.
"small comforts" the swannanoa review
"The Position of the Sun" The Normal School
"The Position of the Sun" The Normal School
There was also this: Milena was due to give birth in two months. Our first. The due date coincided with my twenty-sixth birthday.
A boyish-looking pastor around my age doing his weekly visitations—we’d learn later he’d lost a child to cancer—had suggested to us once that it was the circle of life what we were going through. Milena had given me that look again to stop me from saying anything. But at our apartment that night, standing naked in the bathroom, hands on her distended stomach, she was the one who said with a bite, “Circle of fucking life.”
"normal people" euphemism
"The Position of the Sun" The Normal School
"normal people" euphemism
Could these girls be the same age as Marcia? Some, with their braces showing, rail-thin arms, and underdeveloped breasts, looked like children. She felt older than all of them. She had for a long time, really. It’s not that she didn’t like to talk about boys or music or hair or clothes. She just felt different from most girls, like she was in between two things—one in the past, the other yet to happen. Maybe it was simply because she wasn’t from this place. Maybe she’d be a different person if she still lived in the Netherlands, living a different life, moving toward a different future, as if there could be two versions of Marcia, the same person but not the same life.