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They Marched Into Fields
by Jamie Iredell
art by Christy Call |
The fields were polka-dotted with strawberries. The youngest—a towhead—said his finger had found the furthest reaches of his nose, which tickled, and that the sky had turned pink. The middle one—Michelle, a girl, brace-toothed and bespectacled—said, "Shut up, Bobby. You’re such an idiot." The strawberry arched from her fingers in a parabola of streaked red. It splattered Bobby’s shirt so that it resembled a television gunshot wound. The freckled chubby oldest filled the inside of his headlock with Michelle’s curled locks. Another berry—smashed upon those curls—resembled the brains that ticked away under Michelle’s scalp, the mind itself overcome with hatred. She was, after all, the middle child, a girl, the one they called "Four-eyes," and "Lispy," for her retainered S’s.
"You fat ass," Michelle hollered from within Jacob’s elbow. It sounded like she was deep inside a cave, locked away, which, of course, she was. There were things these brothers would never know: the twisted ruined barn beyond the southern hills, the old man and his son, the hundreds of colored bottles, and that to those men she was beautiful and wanted.
When Jacob released her, the hills sparkled not with strawberries and brothers, but with dew, alight with sunset, dappled like a tuxedo’s white-rosed lapel, the scent of mango carried in from the sea.
All content in SmokeLong Quarterly copyright 2003-2010 by its authors.
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Jamie Iredell's Prose: Poems, a Novel is due out this October, and is made up of the chapbooks Before I Moved to Nevada, When I Moved to Nevada, and Atlanta. His writing also appears in elimae, The Chattahoochee Review, and The Literary Review, and is forthcoming in H_ng M_n, Opium Magazine, and Keyhole Magazine. He designs books for C&R Press, and blogs at jamieiredell.blogspot.com.
Read the interview.
Christy Call's home on the web is at http://christycall.com/. In addition to illustrating this story for Jamie, her artwork will also accompany his forthcoming "Prose: Poems, a Novel."
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