Marathon Literary Review, 2018

My nonfiction story, “Theater in the Night Veracious.” was published in the Marathon Literary Review, Summer 2018.

Theatre In the Night Veracious

The ground is wet from passed-on rain; sporadically little drops sting my upturned face, sudden remembrances of a rainy day now at dusk. Chill spreads up my legs and into the small of my back but I am focused on the Lodge Pole Pines that stretch black into a yellow-pus sky. I am struck by the stark colors, black against creamy yellow, how they hold my eye like a car accident. It will be dark soon, and colder. I pull my rain jacket down past my navel and am shocked, for a moment, when my fingers emerge from the folds of clothes covered in black-red stains. I am bleeding. Some forty feet away I can see someone lying against a boulder, eyes closed, gooey brain matter and blood oozing from a crack in their forehead. The woods are quiet but for the distant swoosh of the creek away down the hill. I look at my fingers again and notice the darkened tips have disappeared, camouflaged in the open wound of sky. A tremor ripples through me, from the slow-spreading cold, but also because I am imagining that my plane has just fallen out of the sky, that I am bleeding profusely, without help in a darkening wilderness. I am imagining I am going to die. But not yet. Not alone.