Matthew Pitt is the the 2009 Literary Awards Program Grand Prize-winner, selected by judge Pagan Kennedy. We’ll be excerpting Chapter Three from his winning entry, Listening for Life. Chapter 3—Late Summer, 2001—Carlos Note the texture of the thorns. That’s a...
There were three of them. There were four of us, and April lay on the campsite and on the river, a mixture of dawn at a damp extreme and the sun in the leaves at cajole. This was Deer Lodge on the Pine River in Ossipee, New Hampshire. The lodge was naught but a...
You and Mark, your little boy from your first marriage, stand together on the bank of the Arkansas. You let your boots squish into the dark sand and you hope that Mark feels the sand squish beneath his boots. You hope that he experiences it like you did at his...
“Now. I’m stark naked, holed up in a cramped room with two dead whores, my radio is shot to shit, and I’m blue-balled all to hell. Twelve shots in the clip. I’m estimating there’s at least seven of ‘em outside, and they ain’t all going down with one bullet. My options...
“I knew things were bad when the second whore shook, seized up, then slid sideways off of me like a concussed jockey falling out of the saddle. Shot right through the breast. I’d thought the other one just fell or something, you know? She was dicking around with the...
Tuesday night and here we are, tilting at windmills again, grateful for their tolerance, or more likely, benevolent indifference. How we adore them all! How we cherish their wry splendor and casual wit, their pixie noses and cropped cuts, their unabashed declarations...
