HOOT ONLINE, ISSUE 46, NOVEMBER 2015 – MICRO FICTION, POETRY, MEMOIR, BOOK REVIEWS
Postcard from the Afterlife
by Ann Hudson
Here there are no aging birds.
It’s a new century,
downtown on a clean day,
a vigorous skyline. These sparrows snap
the sidewalk free of breadscraps, dart
from shade to shade. They are needles
threading our gaze down the block.
We won’t see them falter. We
won’t see them unlearning how to fly.
by Jessica Van Dessel
“So you’re the daughter,” said one of the aunts. “Well, your mother always was a.”
The breakfast room was deserted, only a covered dish on the warmer, and a note, which said.
Then he smiled, and it transformed his face: “Actually, Miss, what I’m looking for is.”
“Oh, no one goes in there,” said the housekeeper. “Not since the day when.”
Suddenly, the door was flung open, and she found herself face to face with.
There it came again, faint but unmistakable, the sound of.
“This is madness,” he said, and opening the bureau drawer, took out his.
Then she saw in his face that it was over, all over, and from now on they would be.
And it was only as he took her hand, and they drove away, that she finally saw the.
—
Ann Hudson’s first book, The Armillary Sphere, was chosen by Mary Kinzie for the Hollis Summers Prize and was published by Ohio University Press. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Chautauqua, Cider Press Review, Crab Orchard Review, North American Review, Orion, and elsewhere. She lives in the Chicago area.
Jessamy Dalton lives in rural Virginia, where she reads, writes, pulls weeds on the family farm, and somehow keeps existing despite the fact that most of society considers neither writing nor farming ‘real’ jobs.
