Writing Excerpts

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The sun that evening was a molten blend of colors as it began to sink behind the dark contours of the Cascades to her west. It created the illusion that the surrounding forest was engulfed in flames, the hues shifting from orange to red to purple before vanishing. In the cloudless and remote darkness, a parade of planets began to reveal itself to her: low over the Three Sisters Mountains were Mercury and Saturn, with Mars, Jupiter, and Venus above them. On a trip to the Planetarium in Chicago when Aurora was ten, Marcia had explained that many of the dots of light they saw in the night sky were millions, even billions of years old. Her daughter wanted to know how it was possible to see something that had already happened, unconvinced by her mother’s explanation.

Now, as the planets slipped behind the Cascades, the moon emerged, its spotlight outlining the vast scale of the Paulina Mountains to the south and the Ochocos to the east. The Oregon landscape made her feel like a new immigrant again: uncomfortable, off balance, a stranger in a strange land, reminiscent of her girlhood experiences moving to Illinois. But there, everything was flat, exposed, monotonous. Here, she was surrounded by volcanoes, the earth below on fire, tectonic plates forever shifting in unseen increments. She closed her eyes and imagined them converging and colliding beneath her.

* Forthcoming in 2028 from Regal House Publishing *

My sister, Maddy, problem child that she was, refused to get out of bed that morning, then declined to change out of her pajamas, then acted like she didn’t want to go, prattling at our father, “Are we really doing this, Mr. Turner?”, before insisting that I sit in the middle, on the hump, so she could prop her pillow against the Honda's rear window and sleep her way to Orlando.

Our father was a high school science teacher, my teacher the previous year. I’d heard enough lectures and dinner discussions to guess that he planned this trip as a field experiment. Change one thing to see its effect on another. The testable question: Would a family vacation do anything to curb Maddy’s erratic behavior?

2026 Finalist Ploughshares' Emerging Writers Contest