These days it’s hard to know whether the words coming out of Mom’s mouth are actually the same ones she’s got rumbling around in her head. Her doctor says the cancer cells have zipped around to every part of her body, crushing all the normal cells. Even her brain cells are mostly mush. Most of the…
That July there were five Becomings. I hated spending my small allowance on crappy gifts, and Mom complained about driving me around town. It was different when she was my age. Back then, she said, a Becoming was a discreet affair, marked in private with close family. I told her not to worry: she would never…
1 The somewhat bizarre account set forth in the following few pages—about a man, as it happens, with no special virtues, yet who in the aftermath of an ischemic stroke became (and perhaps verifiably so) the happiest man on earth—cannot properly be called a fable because it is mostly true. Nevertheless, it will not be…
From the pale-lit hallway, Jeff could hear his date bustling inside her apartment for half a minute before he knocked again and she opened the door. She was beautiful, small and slim, with dark hair and straight-across bangs, nicely modest- chested. Her brown eyes called out with long lashes against the deathly pallor of her ash-white…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
Let me make this clear: I didn’t want to kill that tiger. And I certainly didn’t want to kill him on stage. I loved him, but he was a dangerous old cat. White tigers always are—it’s a genetic thing. Their chromosomes are all out of line with each other and they don’t know what the hell…
There was no furniture in the cabin left to burn. It was either the floorboards or the books now, or her daughter’s toys. The floorboards were pine, the worst fuel. Pine burnt fast and left a residue in the chimney that could ignite the house if it was left to build up over time. Still, time…