Here’s a short from Lydia Ship, managing editor of The Chattahoochee Review. Lydia and I also went to school together, so I’ve been reading her stories for a long time. She just keeps getting to be a better and better writer. I’m actually astonished that she hasn’t published a book yet, but one must be coming. Look for her.
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Each of us had a Reader meant to store the blacker roots of our teeth, and some put those readers in their bodies, and eventually grew ill, and some put them into food with no taste which they ate by the barrel, and some put those readers into chains and whips over a beloved, and I put mine into a boy. Therefore the boy’s face was twisted, and his hair matted, and he bore my capacity for wholeness, leaving me golden, healthy, beautiful, and sweet. And while I watched those around me drag their bodies down feeding the readers inside, sleep on the readers or carry the readers to bend their backs, I kicked my reader into the boy continually, and made the boy starve, and shiver, and expect only hatred, while I basked in love and admiration, fine fragrances, and everyone thought I had mastered my reader, that I alone had no reader, or that mine must be present with such secretive dichotomy as to be psychotic, but those lone suspicious types could not touch me, since I continued to grow in power and stature, and sent the boy off to sea. The boy drowned. He drowned, he drowned, he drowned, he drowned, he drowned. A reader washed onto shore lodged in a piece of driftwood and in reaching I cut my hands, and I felt my darker double arrive. Then I would feel the sand under my feet, gritty, and I could not float, only wrap my arms like seaweed over thoughts of the ocean, taking the boy as my own, finally, to find me.
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