Silenced
He was old and lonely, sitting at the airport gate and leaning his liver-spotted head on his cane. He looked grumpy and curmudgeonly
Two Fishermen
The two men had fished for three days straight and caught only two grouper, and some trash fish. It had been disappointing to the young man
The Wolf Boy
You couldn’t tell by looking at him now that Clint Truelove spent the first fourteen years of his life living in the wild. They said he was left in the woods as a baby and nurtured by a pack of wolves
Sanctified
Carson took one last pull on his cigarette, flicked it to the dirt driveway, and stamped it out the way he might a bug. The frigid air bit at his exposed neck so he pulled his coat tighter around him and took another pull on the moonshine he kept in the flask
Gaston Street
The summer I met Clayton Wingate I’d been cleaning houses in Savannah for two years, enough time to see all kinds of people. Clayton was fresh out of law school up at Emory, and renting the third floor of the Pearsons’ house over on Gaston Street, a block or two west of Forsyth Park. All the houses on that block look pretty much like the others
Hailey Gets Arrested
by Donna Smith Fee Leo usually shoots me up but this time I am on my own. Eight flower boxes on a brand new house designed to look old among turn-of-the-century Victorians on Boulevard had to be installed today. Inspired by an historic Queen Anne house in-town that belonged to a favorite daughter of a long-dead UGA law
Storm Warnings
by Ronald M. Gauthier His little sister slipped and spilled words bubbling with family secrets, and now he could get expelled from the Richard Wright Academy, a special charter school that had a coveted waiting list to get in. His usually tough young face
Drifting too far from the Shore
by Niles Reddick For Muddy, scenes she relived and imagined in her head were more of a reality than anything on the TV or around her now, but the third doorbell chime in the faux wood box next to the front door brought her back
Old Man Runner
by Barbara Donnelly Lane She met him at one of those small town barbeques: neighbors milling around the grill amidst thick smells of burnt hamburger and bug spray. He was hunched in a plastic chair like an old bird perched in its nest,
Hot Grits, Cold Heart
by Donna Smith Fee I left him in the oven with his feet sticking out like a turkey too big for the pan. Giggling at the thought of Hansel and Gretel and the nibbled house of sweets, I felt like a good witch. Driving south on 441 from Athens, Georgia, I matched my breathing to Naomi’s slow deep breaths. Roommates at the University of Georgia twenty-plus years ago, she and I had always gotten each other into and out of trouble. I wasn’t sure who was in more trouble this time. Me, for pushing her husband into his bakery’s oven, or her, for leaving the hospital despite her broken ribs, miscarriage, facial contusions and I.V. drip. “What?” she looked so weak in her hospital gown and stolen scrubs. “It is just a little funny. A baked baker.” “What if he’s dead? How am I going to explain that?” Naomi sought the order in things, looking for the whys. I mostly struggled with the why-nots. We slowed down as we passed through Madison with its streets lined with antebellum homes supporting fabulous porches and Boston ferns bigger than tubas. The town claimed they were too beautiful for Sherman to burn on his march to the sea. “He