“Brothers and Sisters, Children of Lord God, Hear my words.” He liked killing with his hands. Jeramiah had a gun in his waistband, knife in his boot, and a choke-wire in his pocket. But when the time came for the Preacher-Man to meet his end, Jeramiah just wrapped his thick hands around that holy neck…

It’s strange how many countries and futureshave receded from you like the tide and that you, once so restlesswill now have to stand still. I used to picture you on some Chinese mountain your hair brushing the sky’s blue domeor in some other sceneyou painted with stories of your travels: glittering cities, lantern-hung alleys.You direct…

Clarence Portis (1946-2013) was one of the greatest spellers ever to walk the halls of Exalted Wounds Catholic Elementary in north St. Louis. He was also one of the school’s first black students. Pale boys with razor knicks on the sides of their heads pushed him into lockers and called him things, while nuns looked away…

On Believing the Night Has an End When the Night Has No End The quarterback spits in his shoe and believes therefore he’ll win today. In this story I am the believing, though once I thought I was the shoe; I thought my father was the spit; I thought the quarterback was very bearded and…

July 3rd on a thin strip of land in Arizona; I remember how I’d leaned in to kiss you on the right side of our bed. Your absence was heavy. Savage. But I felt your presence in the atmosphere so I traced back the covers. (You loved violence and science.) And as I re-awoke I wandered…

The last day of my parents’ marriage, my mother’s lover elbowed my father in the mouth. This lover had been my dad’s best friend growing up, the boy next door. He followed my parents to Indiana when the steel mill in our Downriver Detroit neighborhood closed. They let him sleep in the basement of our small…

Breath & Shadow is a quarterly journal of disability culture and literature. A project of AbilityMaine, Breath & Shadow is the only online literary journal with a focus on disability. It is also unique in being the sole cross-disability literature and culture magazine written and edited entirely by people with disabilities. While some literary journals may devote…

Thank you Thank you for your service Thank you for going Thank you for coming back Thank you for not dying Thank you for taking the bullet, the mortar round, the shrapnel that is making its way to your heart by micromillimeters every year Thank you for eating that god-awful food gritted with sand so we…

The place where I live is about to disappear. The Outer Banks will soon be sandwiched between the seashores of Morocco and North Carolina, squashed between larger landmasses. Seven days before the collision, the newscasters say, although they, along with the scientists they consult, can tell us nothing about the phenomenon. Like us, they wonder why…

Bob Sanders stood in his living room, shoulders squared to the wall upon which hung the third 32” flat screen Smart® TV Bob had owned in two years. Bob held a Wiffle bat, its knob pointed at Bob’s belly button, tip at his reflection in the powered-off screen. “Bob, I swear to God, if you…

At first it is no more than a curiosity satisfied. The fleshiness of verdigris: sour, like licking blood. The new-grass bite of funicular. The prickle of a full-stop. But the boy Edward soon becomes ravenous. Schoolbooks prove reliable, if uninspired, sources. Those from the daily paper, once his father is done with it, tend to be a little…