Spoiled
As the sun soars, heat blots out birdsong, the scratchy call of insects, and soon there’s nothing but the tramp of our boots across the parched earth. Ahead, a stand of trees, dark fruit hanging from bare branches.
We’re almost in their shadow when we look up: not fruit but bats, wings gently flapping to fan away the heat. But this heat—there’s no escaping it. We lean against tree trunks and sip tepid water. Soon, a soft thud. Another. In the dirt around us bats lie splayed, broken things with pink mouths that gasp and gasp, then go still.
Gerri Brightwell is a British writer who lives in Alaska with her husband, fantasy writer Ian C. Esslemont, and their three sons. She is the author of the novels Dead of Winter (Salt, 2016), The Dark Lantern (Crown, 2008), and Cold Country (Duckworth, 2003). Her short work has appeared in many venues including The Best American Mystery Stories 2017, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Copper Nickel, Redivider, and BBC Radio 4's Opening Lines. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and has been spending the pandemic learning to bake better bread.
Leave a comment
Comments will be approved before showing up. We don't allow comments that are disrespectful or personally attack our blog writers.
Also in The Waking
On the Endangered List
+-
-
Ruminate Community
_____________________________________________
_____________________________________________
The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.