Short Story – excerpt

My cousins’ farm stretched out behind us, my grandmother’s summer cottage was tucked under a stand of trees that erupted beside a tidal drainage ditch, a ditch that emptied into our broad Creek, then into the Choptank River and the Chesapeake Bay.  A cicada year they said, but it was too early for the bugs to come out and everyone was furious for the flood of noise and glint lace wings.  We were at a remote corner in the fields, an angle of split-rail fence separating pasture from turned earth where an old apple tree stretched in the sunshine and dropped lazy shade over the cooler parts.  A place where horses and dusty boys were blown by invisible wisps of idle thought, urging them to straddle the light and the dark.  We were out on the edge, Danny and me.

“Tag,” The Baltimore Review, Volume 1, Number 2, Summer 1997 Issue

Editor: Barbara Westwood Diehl