Bread and Bread

It was nice to log into Blogspot for the first time in ages and read my happy AWP post from March, just to remember that I haven't consistently been a human dumpster fire for the past one to five years. I am  inconsistently a dumpster fire. My current problem is unemployment. I was fortunate to be steadily employed for twenty years(!), weathering the great recession of 2008 and the pandemic. But budget cuts came to 826LA, and my job didn't survive them. I am good at diligently applying for jobs, but so far I haven't actually landed one, and I am bad at dealing with uncertainty.  All of which is to say I have not used this time to make my house fabulous or have a creative renaissance. But I did write one short story, which is basically  Little House on the Prairie fan fiction. I'm posting it here because I don't think there's a huge literary market for Little House fan fiction.  In one of the books, Little Town on the Prairie, Laura teaches at a tiny country sch...

The audience-participation component of my Ask Me a Question/Give Me a Prompt series hasn’t totally panned out (although it’s not too late, Breadketeers!), so today I borrowed one from Brian Kiteley’s The 4 a.m. Breakthrough. In my case, it’s more like the 5 a.m. Just Write Something. Write a short piece of fiction that depends on a character’s precise perception of or reaction to the color red. We pulled our van up to the white-curbed loading zone, that sacred space, at noon. Gomez was driving and being a dick. He was usually a pretty kick-back guy, but something about Sunset Boulevard and all its valets darting into lanes like deer brought out the worst in him. He’d been shouting at the windshield since La Cienega. “You think you can haul the carpet up all these stairs, Shannon?” We all called each other by our last names, and Shannon was mine, but when Gomez said it, it sounded like a first name. A girl’s name. And that’s fine, I am a girl, but he made it sound like a b...