Ryan Row

You are a girl alone on a prairie. You hunt alone and you sleep alone. You sleep alone, with your thighs clamped tight on nothing at night, but not too tight. You carry a rifle and a dream of a white dress. You sleep under the stars. You hunt. You were a farm-girl once. You fell in love at a husking bee, your heart flipping open like a broken-clasped locket, showing a hidden face to the world ’til you scrabbled to snap it shut once more.

They make my heart out of stone. A slate-colored hunk of granite run through with thin veins of fool’s gold like silver cracks that the father found in the mountains outside of town. He had been gathering lackweed to chew, so that he could make himself numb, and could fall asleep in the meadows, in nests of dry grass like a bird. The afternoon sun burned his skin, and he felt almost as if the light were passing through him. He felt like a window. Like a single pane of a glass.

BCS 2017 Ebook Subscription Drive, going on now! Subscribe (or donate) and you'll support BCS and help us unlock our goals to raise our word-count limit for submissions. “Honored Father Pan Bao,” I asked, “Please tell me again why we are on this freezing mountain? I haven’t seen the sun since we entered this forest.” You lock them in the west tower, and, even after all these years, you are still ashamed each time.