She climbs the hill in the snowstorm, wearing swimming goggles. At the top, she looks out at the bare birches, the grey sky, the swirl of flakes. At the bottom awaits a tree, a pond, a thicket of thorns. She holds the trashcan lid with oven mitts. A towel for a scarf. The whole way down, she will look to the window for who’s watching — mother, father, no one.
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Randall Brown is the author of the award-winning flash fiction collection Mad to Live (Flume Press 2008), a collection that has been recently republished by PS Books in Philadelphia as a Deluxe Edition with “bonus tracks.” He directs and teaches at Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing program and holds anMFA from Vermont College and a BA from Tufts University — along with an M.Ed. and a B.S. in Education.