Folded Word
Exploring the world, one voice at a time.
Category: short stories
A Summer Snowfall
There once was a young woman named Bega. She lived in England in a time before us, when the land stretched onwards for miles like a slow breath and the hills rolled quietly and the sea whispered its lullabies. She lived with her father amid tumbling hills and rumbling streams, where mountains touched the sky and valleys sank low.
As Forest
This was our territory once. Every lifetime our places and times of day diminish, but as long as food sources remain plentiful we will stay here and adapt — learning to cross carefully the hard grey roadways and the daylight hours, the noise and… Continue Reading “As Forest”
The Aegean and the Land
The warm air of the Aegean is a blanket wrapped around you. Life moves slowly and without any cares. Days stretch long like a yawn and nights are still and quiet. Here, in Greece, the heat of the day weighs your bones and makes your limbs heavy, pulling rest and sleep in to you naturally and peacefully. The ocean withdraws and then pushes forward to the land again and again like deep and dense breaths.
Josh
Josh who once lived in this house “Josh!” I hear Dad call even before he’s standing. “Up!” he says, though he might have called, Josh! then, Fire! meaning, tend to the coal-stove. Up means move, boy. Downstairs he’s at the cooker rattling the gate,… Continue Reading “Josh”
Together
They had a routine, and that was something to hold onto. Every morning began the same. She couldn’t remember exactly what the night and the day had been like before they made this child, but she knew they had been less full, less anchored.
Nautical Twilight PM Selection
A Dream of Dragons I see dragons in the sky while Eva sees attacking bears. Too quickly, the clouds shift and both sky creatures dissipate. The snow is on its way, Eva says. We better head home. We race each other back to the… Continue Reading “Nautical Twilight PM Selection”
Still Life with Motion
In photographs, the Earth is still a circle. It’s a geometry we keep relearning, just at new velocities. We’re always at the open end of the radius. Asymptotes. The way any two numbers have infinite numbers between them, two numbers even further apart have… Continue Reading “Still Life with Motion”
A Meeting of Minds
They sit around the table, ten women, their years stretched between fifty-five and eighty-three. They take a mug of tea and a shortbread biscuit between their stiff fingers and they wait a while.
A Story Festival
On a small patch of green beside the library in this close community on the hill, once a year we tell stories in a marquee while the sun blazes, the rain beats and the wind howls.
Between April and May
Coyote hunts the streets like a stray dog, her claws clicking along the asphalt. Among the urban diaspora, her lean shanks and rusty coat look primordial or alien. Her teeth flash among headlights like slashes of white paint on a dark canvas and her… Continue Reading “Between April and May”
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