Author: rivervoltareview

The deer are moving again, sojourners of snow, shovel-faced bambis that shit brown M&M’s in the yard without regard. The nerve of these white-tailed vagabonds. The nerve of these dashers and dancers that couldn’t pull a fat child let alone a fat man. Don’t they know we are dying and bats (maybe) laugh in their [...]

Effort The first full day of spring, 2020, is a white meringue of snow under a blue sky, sunglasses essential. Four of us meet at a course groomed for Nordic skiing, snap boots into bindings, and take up our poles. Volunteers have packed new and winding trails this year, wide and smooth for skate-skiing. We’re [...]

YOU WOULDN’T KNOW the place was there at all, if you didn’t know where to look.  It’s a long way out, Carrie told people, knowing they would get only as far as the old cemetery, where pavement gave way to dirt winding darkly through corridors of pine and brush. Then they would turn back, thinking they had passed it. [...]

No one talks about the life rattle, the one she makes in her crib, florid with her first-ever cold—the result of a germ you overlooked. The perks of parenthood, unlimited stains on your record, dishonour splashed across your breast. You could signpost every spot: first waddle through the busted gate; the burner where you superheat [...]

She smells smoke.

Moving swiftly in the dark, T’Rayles pushes through the dense forest as she makes her way back to the village.

The smoke grows stronger with every scarred birch and solid spruce she passes. It’s not the comforting scent of a home’s hearth or metallic tang of the blacksmith’s forge.

No.

It smells of [...]

Estella had to walk around the train to get to the platform, and she watched as the Diamonds and the other passengers spilled out of the two passenger cars, thankful to have arrived and anxious to get to their beds. Oliver and his sons began to ferry the women and children in the Oldsmobile and [...]