The following short story by Computer Science teacher and Tech Department member Andrew Alford earned an Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train Press and was published in the Sweet Tree Review. His fiction and poetry have also been published in Midnight Echo, Space and Time, and Supernatural Tales.
Erasure
(excerpted from Nights in Haiti)
School had been canceled for tomorrow, and there was already talk of closing on Tuesday as well. We were giddy at the prospect. Mrs. Luciemable kept a little orange hand radio in her kitchen window. She turned the volume up on Chuck Mangione’s flugelhorn, and so, for me, “Feels So Good” will always be the song of the blizzard of ’78. It was early in February, and my friend Yves and I were anticipating an apocalypse of tremendous proportion. My mother had dropped off a bag of pretzel rods (by special request: I kept it carefully hidden from my hosts) and a change of clothing so I could spend the night, and wake up with my friend and the snow.
Pictures of the Luciemable family covered just about every surface of their house–and almost as many pictures and statues of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and St. Jude, with many of those pictures framed, as if their last name, too, was Luciemable. The religious pictures left me feeling sorry for the Luciemables, especially since there was a synagogue right across their street, and that was where Sister Christina’s professed husband (“Yeshua. Not Jesus. Yeshua!”) would have felt most at home today (or so, with Mom safely out of earshot, my father told me). Of actual photographs, two featured a younger Yves, and his brother Emanuel, as old as Yves was now, but with a broader face and wearing a Yankee baseball cap. The older boy’s right arm had been amputated below the elbow; and in another photo, almost to the shoulder. So the first thing that shocked me was that this kid’s arm was gone, but the next, that some thing had come round for a second bite.
Read the rest of the story at: Sweet Tree Review.
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