fawn & other stories

While I work away on collaborations for content and editing, I’ve also been putting together a small collection of short fiction – one that will hopefully some day be more than a small collection. The stories are interconnected through family and youthful experience, exploring the highs and lows of adolescence, and what family really means. Below is a quick glance at one of the stories, titled “Skin.”

Skin

“Angel pulled her face from the nook of Andrew’s chest and looked up at him; he was at least five inches taller than her. He didn’t look down, but she saw him smile, noticing her stare without returning it, like it was the cutest most innocent thing in the world; she felt his appreciation was sincere, and so in that moment, it was. She looked at the angle of his jaw, the hollowness of his chin, and for a second, its boniness reminded her of her father.”

“Angel wondered what her father would think of how she’d spent her day, or her week, for that matter. She’d barely made it to school. She thought of what he might say if he knew she was standing in a boy’s embrace on the side of the road, turning air into ice with each breath, consumed by Andrew and his occasionally unreasonable temper in the face of authority; Angel’s father’s hypocrisy amused Angel, since he was worse than the two of them combined. And as for Angel’s mother, she’d left long ago, but not so long that Angel didn’t remember her; she recalled her wiry, sandy brown hair, her thin-rimmed glasses, her hazel eyes graced by a whisper of eyelashes, much like Angel. She remembered her musky vanilla smell, a cheap perfume whose empty bottle Angel still possessed, foggy and rippled, gold-tipped and smooth; her lips, always lined with a taupe rim, filled with a shiny, color-free gloss. Her fat arms. Her thin leggings. Her soft stomach. At five years old, Angel had sensed the hasty departure of her mother; ten years later, she still didn’t know what caused her to leave. Perhaps it was Angel’s obvious lack of beauty; that she was a dud, eyes soaked with a certain emptiness, too slippery for a mother to grasp. Of course, these suggestions were born from her merciless father, whose ceaseless blame landed on Angel’s shoulders.”

“On the weeks that she saw her father seldom, Angel was able to climb around his accusations and look at her situation with rationality; her mother left because her father had a drinking problem, which contributed to his gambling problem. Which explained everything. And even though his eagerness to risk every penny they had on the game of chance, she preferred it when he wasn’t home. Without him around, she came across a costless luxury as dreamy as the concept of breathing underwater, like a womb of weightless existence. If he wasn’t at home, it was because he was at Kicker’s Bowling Alley & Bar; or, in more flirtatious cases of his irrepressible desire, at the casino. He ebbed and flowed between extremes, but what Angel knew was her attachment to his absence. An empty fridge and cupboards full of crumbs filled her more honestly than his mood-slurping presence. And now she had Andrew, too, to enjoy the raging quiet inside her bony, thin-skinned trailer on Dosey Road.”