« older | Main Largehearted Boy Page | newer »
April 2, 2020
Flash Dancers: Ekphrastic Singles - "The Embrace" by K.C. Mead-Brewer
The Flash Dancers: Ekphrastic Singles series is curated by Meg Pokrass. Authors pair an original work of flash fiction with a song.
The Embrace by K.C. Mead-Brewer
Paired with Laura Marling’s song “Devil’s Resting Place”
I won’t tell you about my dream, I know you don’t want to hear it. Anyway it was just another leaving-me dream. This time the place he left me was high up on the wall at a clothing store; I was going to plummet any moment, weeping for him to please bring the ladder over to catch me, let me down gently, but he ignored me or couldn’t hear me or both. I think he was shopping for someone else. I saw him reach for his wallet as I fell back into myself and woke up feeling so alone I couldn’t believe my bed was still there holding me. He once bought me a sweater, a joke Christmas sweater with a satanic goat head in a Santa hat, and it’s so warm every time I wear it, it’s like the coals of hell are woven in somehow, softened and tamed by the love that’s inherent in all gifts. One time, I forgot myself and ended up at work with the sweater still hanging onto me. Imagine it, me, attending the forgotten old in their narrow bedrooms at The Home, pinching their thin shoulders in the scoop of my hand and rubbing their thick fingers until they cry with relief and all the while this goat head’s grinning at them from the middle of my chest. It wasn’t a dream but it still feels like one: the story I was told as a girl by my afterschool watchdog Mrs. Olin, the one about Jesus waiting at the bedside of the righteous to carry them tenderly aloft while the sinner down the hall starts screaming about fires and flames and smoke even before they’re dead. To think I almost confessed to that woman about my fantasy problem (having too many of them), hoping for absolution before a car hit me and Jesus was forced to leave me behind. I wish I could wrap that frightened girl in this sweater, how soft she’d be in it, and remind her that goats have rectangular pupils so they can see the world’s edges and corners better than we can. And there’s nothing evil about seeing things differently. We all want to be warm. It’s about finding the right arms to enfold you.
K.C. Mead-Brewer lives in Ithaca, NY. Her fiction appears in Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, Joyland Magazine, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Tin House's 2018 Winter Workshop for Short Fiction and of the 2018 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop. For more information, visit kcmeadbrewer.com and follow her @meadwriter.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Support the Largehearted Boy website
previous Flash Dancers stories
Book Notes (2018 - ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2015 - 2017) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2012 - 2014) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 - 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Librairie Drawn & Quarterly Books of the Week (recommended new books, magazines, and comics)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Short Cuts (writers pair a song with their short story or essay)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film's soundtracks)
