The Meeting Place. SEVEN. — As resistant as she was to unwrapping herself from the layers of warmth that kept her from a full body chill, Evangel lifted her hips and untwisted herself from the wool blanket that was her bedroll. Was it her age that kept her faithful bladder active in deep night? She…

The Meeting Place. SIX. — With bowed heads the family repeats their practiced version of the meal prayer, which they call grace. Liv steals a glance at Dave. The gold and green floral wallpaper is all wrong against his dashiki. Dad starts the red and white cardboard bucket around the table after serving himself. The…

The Meeting Place. FIVE. — Liv’s shadow stretched before her as she ambled toward the persistent whoosh of the highway. Soon enough, dodging speed demons would become a game she dreaded on her trek to school. Pedestrian traffic was not common around here, she was quick to learn. And neither was respect for it. She…

The Meeting Place. FOUR — Sprout had returned empty-handed and dropped the coin back into Evangel’s purse with nary an explanation. The farm they’d passed had clothes still on the line and its fences intact, but no one answered when he called, and he was too small to gamble his limbs on anyone who might…

The Meeting Place. THREE. — She wasn’t used to thinking in long sentences or philosophizing about free will. Her mind had been honed by hunger and want of safety. What she had done wouldn’t bear witness to anything except that she was responsible for one thing. Her dogged resistance to giving up or letting the…

It’s no language I want to learn, this torrential, pelting dogma that is rising like a river gone rampant, its liquid bluster billowing over its banks into knitted communities and onto hard-scrabble streets where children’s futures are bantered about like a tether ball at recess by billionaire bullies who live…

The Meeting Place. TWO. Pushing the red messenger bag through first, Liv wriggled forward as the yielding chain link scratched at her back like fingernails. She felt the dampness of leaves on her palms as her knees sunk into the mushy earth. A hopeless mess already, once completely under, she…

The Meeting Place. ONE. Charles Dickens was paid by the word when his works were serialized in magazines, and so the soap opera found breath, a cliff hanger in every issue. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, he claimed. …

AKA En efterfest? Nej tack. — I could go anywhere in the next sentence. Put down the pen, open the door, and enjoy the lower temperatures that the clouds brought in. But no, I must, as Eleanor Roosevelt has been quoted as saying, Do the thing you think you cannot do. I’ve been terrified to sit…