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It’s a dark and stormy night in North Saint Paul, and I am alone in a guest bedroom. Sleeping by myself during weather like this would probably bother me if I hadn’t spent the majority of my childhood rereading A Wrinkle In Time. Our copy resided at my dad’s old house, where my sister and I slept on a foldout couch in a cozy, amber-lit basement. Every time it rained, I huddled under the pink comforter and read the first chapter, Paige snoozing next to me as thunder shook the yard.

These days, the worse the weather gets, the more I am comforted. I could pad out to the kitchen right now, and I’m pretty sure Charles Wallace would be sitting at the table in faded blue Dr. Dentons, warming some cocoa on the stove. A grey fluff of a kitten yawns luxuriously in the attic. A strange woman knocks at the door. Anything could happen, and everything will be all right.

In ten short days, I’m submitting this week’s Branches story (#5) to the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Contest. I just started it tonight, (Note: tardy as usual. Man, beginning anything is terrifying. Before you know it — perhaps in a matter of minutes, seconds! — it could become something riddled with faults, and faulty creations beg complete, occasionally enraged attention. This tends to make me entirely unpleasant to be around. I never understood some writers’ aversion to the delete key. Oh sweetest relief, purest salvation! It’s all those other keys that have me worried.) but it can’t be posted here until October 31st when winners are announced.

I’ve found that this whole “requiring first publishing rights” concept goes violently against the instincts I’ve honed over the developing years. My first desire when I really like something I’ve done, or if I’m not sure if I really like something I’ve done, is to smear it all over the internet. See what strangers have to say. Instant gratification! Hello, world! “Not cool!” say respectable publishers.

But seriously, I don’t know how I’ll handle that. So how about this: want me to email you a short story? You’d be free to email me back with comments, or say nothing at all. It will be just like a blog post (note to potential publishers: this will not be like a blog post at all): in your inbox. Baby steps. I’d feel so much better just knowing you saw it.

Email me or comment if you’re interested.

Seven years ago, a girl named Sara moved in across the hall from me in our college dorm. Four years ago I held a corner of her chuppah. Two years ago she and her husband moved from San Francisco to across the street from the apartment Maria and I shared, and nine months ago she called and asked if I wanted to come to an ultrasound with her.

“Wait, what?” I said.

Sara and Miriam

They’re moving to New York today, two weeks after the baby was born — averaging four scattered hours of sleep every night since. “There has to be a prize for what you are doing,” I said. “Also, instead of helping you pack I’m going to get in the way and take pictures. Tricked!”

Or, How I Learned To Stop Resisting Conformity And Love Life
It was for the standard little-girl reasons — prairie life, petticoats, ponies — that my sister and I loved watching Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman. But perhaps equal blame should be assigned to Laura Ingalls Wilder and her irresistible boxed set of books. She’s the one who had a theme song first. She’s the one with the show broadcast during summer afternoons, when we were all otherwise restless with mosquito bites and squinty-eyed with sunshine. Losing interest in games outside, a land of dog poop and concrete and melting popsicles, we would inevitably settle into cool basement rooms and flip on the television.

It spread slowly across the continent like hostile African bees. Little girls started saying “maw” and “paw” in offensively-imitated twangs. We layered our parents’ paint clothes to look like farm women from the nineteenth century. We hauled out plastic buckets and stirred stone stews, keeping an eye out for swarms of locusts. Laura Ingalls Wilder gave Ye Olde Rural Life its cult-following amongst the young ladies, and I blame her for my eager acceptance of Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman — and, thus, my discovery of sexy men.

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I just stumbled upon my first criticism from the reading public! It is on a funeral industry/management blog.

Tim,

You do find the most unusual stuff in your voyage thru the net. I liked the office site, but I don’t get the chick writing about the funeral. She must be one of those artsy-fartsy folks I do not relate to particulary [sic] well.

Interesting stuff, that.