Author: rivervoltareview

Natalie and her friends wore stiff neon vests like sandwich boards advertising their faith in finding Bettina, the little girl who’d wandered into the bush three days ago. At least Natalie’s friends had faith—this was their second time through the same field because Morgan had a “good feeling”. They were just a few of the [...]

MOLLY stands at a table brushing COLIN’s police dress jacket and pants. MOLLY (to the audience) He was terrible funny with the limericks, Colin was. The scourge of the church, though that didn't stop him. He'd make up new ones every day. New ways to embarrass me, reciting them to anyone, anywhere.  Some of them were lovely [...]

The picnic table, a husk of cracked, salt-worn wood, brittle onion-skin paint branded by cuss words, its struts bolted to concrete too near a chain-link fence.   The lawn runs to the ocean, leaps over pebbles and prairie dog holes to the tide that drags the picnic table toward the cruise ships flaring like birthday [...]

I turned a corner and got God. That’s how they’ll tell it to the future gens. They won’t say nuts about the smiley smackin’ through my head, that I had to piss. They’ll say I was the thirteen who killed so many in corp wars but cried for the first time in all his years of warring after seeing the perfection of the Monkeyman’s face. They’ll spout that my geneticized heart was opened to love. They’ll write [...]

So shy, immaterial, you lit out at night for a climate that knows no change, peeping to the call of winter in Jamaica, first-primed paradise. Now, Swainson’s warbler, spread your wings wide, a better treat than an eagle in the hands of the migrating naturalist, your if-a-tree-falls- in-the-forest rock-a-bye-ba- by song interrupted by glass. More [...]

Wake up, Kay heard. Wake, wake, wake up, girl, whispering, then a tweedling humming, wake up wake up again, all very soft and almost sleeping in her ear. The air was cool and sweet. She had been dreaming, running along a path after Annie as the dark was coming, and where was Thea? Lost, as [...]

I have no raisins. The larder holds no coconut. No pecans. Drat, out of nutmeg. Short one egg – O, I saw her – Aisle five, the woman who carted Last carton of eggs perhaps In the world. Her eyes above her Mouth-mask told me, ‘too bad, loser, I got here first.’ I do not [...]