Mind noisy, crowded with lost & tarnished loves half-forgotten yet resilient in red muscle and white bone. All she craves is a single aperture to the light, a space as narrow as her objective to cross the minefield of her history and arrive new born.

She was outspoken, broad-minded, & outraged by cruelty & hypocrisy, but her moral center was gutless–jerry-rigged on a platform of distance & excessive novel reading. Expendable to the brave righting wrongs, she cultivated her own garden of rage & words.

He loved the tang of propellant that told the whole world he scored & he needed to relish the libtard kill with a cold 6-pack. Alma & the kids had to be asleep. He flipped the kitchen light. A sob shook him. His own. His family, flat on the lino in a viscous red puddle.

His Georgian house rife with zebra hides & native masks, the major mourns his loss: the respect of rank, spices, & handsome women glad of a sovereign. All swept away in the clamor for independence. He’d have died then, but God betrayed him into exile.

A jolt from the side & I careered off road, bumping & scraping thru the hatched pine saplings. Branches bounced on the car roof; needles & leaves on the windshield blocked my view. It hit the brake but tipped the accelerator & seconds stretched into infinity.