Published by Heartwood INSTRUCTIONS FOR HOW TO LIVE MY LIFE if I should die. Use resistance as formaldehyde. Refuse to accept the fact of change. Reserve the right to refuse, and refuse the right to be reserved. Stop eating when you’re upset. Burn off the rest in punishing workouts. When you hear about emotional eating or exercise addiction, don’t identify. React to every word or change like it’s a harpoon. Pump your cortisol day and night ruminating on safety. When you have to set your...

First published by Literally Stories The man who pit this roof against rain, his best friend and owner of the final store in town, the woman who pits seed against element to feed me all my life, our humdrum hay baler, two others I didn’t know and I sit in a circle in Shopkeeper’s empty store. These are our Friday nights now after the litany of systems failures. “Supply chain-issues,” Papa mumbles when it comes up. “Just the economy cycling again, actually,” Shopkeeper grumbles. “No one...

First featured in the Doubleback Review Clay When we played all those blue games near the highway, Mom didn’t stop us at first, though cars flowed like the creek behind our house. When we knocked over her favorite pot of daisies on our rush after a runaway soccer ball, then Mom dashed, overtook us. Cars stopped, had to claw their way through a snagging siren. Maybe this moment was the moment, friends suggest years later, that I got my guardian angel. Maybe. The stream still has to use its...