“Don’t you wonder how we die?” He mimes flipping a switch and I hand him his pill. He swallows it with water he throws back like bourbon.
Ann Marie Gamble (@amgamble) is usually pretty long-winded. And the footnotes! Those are a pain to code.
This story won 1st place in our 2010 Nanofiction Contest (for Haiti).
Deftly he pours a Cabernet the color of his shirt, pushes the glass across the table to her. It’s enough time to say no.
Ann Marie Gamble (@amgamble) is usually pretty long-winded. And the footnotes! Those are a pain to code.
This story won 2nd place in our 2010 Nanofiction Contest (for Haiti).
When he and his brother played doctor, it was tests and equipment and bureaucrats and complications. Always complications.
Once he told a girlfriend that the scars on his neck were from bites. His timing was good, and they snuggled for the rest of the movie.
He hinted to some guys in a locker room that there’d been a climbing accident, but they got technical, and he had to back off.
His mother says only that he had a central line when he was a baby. If he gets home late or coughs a certain way, it cues her watchfulness.
He takes three pills a day and gets a flu shot—not the mist—every year. He phones his mother to tell her he’s well. He’s lucky, really.
Ann Marie Gamble (@amgamble) likes finding inspiration for poems and thrillers and space operas in her soccer mom life.