SNEAK PREVIEW: My Favorite Short Story

Here’s the first part of the short story I wrote for After Dinner Conversations, an intriguing magazine in which the stories all have an ethical or unique philosophical focus.

I’d love to know what you think.

I NEVER

by Lynne Curry

I’ve never harmed a living creature. I’ve never tied thread to a butterfly’s wings or pulled a daddy longlegs’ center from his wriggling legs.

Thirty years ago, Ma gave birth to me on a rotting cloth cot strung up in a leaking tar paper shack in the Tennessee hill country. Two were born on our hill that night under a thunderstorm that bent trees to the ground as it rolled west from Mt. Juliet. There was only one midwife this far west from Lebanon and she didn’t come our way. She was busy with the Hart’s baby. They were her cousins. We were no relation.

My pa delivered me. Pa’s hands were over big for the task, and he panicked when he felt my ma slipping away. His fingers pressed into my soft skull like pincers to get me out fast so he could see to her. Eight fingerprints hide in my hair, but nothing covers the two sunken troughs his thumbs stamped into my forehead.

Ma named me John. Pa always felt more guilty than ashamed of me. We had a bond. He’d shaped my head. That’s why he left the truck to me instead of his brother Hap.

I loved the truck and going off by myself on the rutted dirt roads and feeling the horsepower under the seat. I loved seeing the bald cypress with their knobby knees protruding above the brownish-gray water and the black walnut with their drooping leaves and furrowed bark. I liked breathing the sweet smell of wet swamp grass and lily pads and every now and again catching a glimpse of a slithering alligator.

The drive that changed my life forever came on a humid, stale summer day when I drove through a swamp noisy with insects. I’d just seen a blue grosbeak launch up from the cattails when I saw a still, pale form lying by the side of the road.

At first, I didn’t believe what I saw, a woman lying next to those brown, thorny bushes. I throttled down so sudden I slammed my chest against the steering wheel. I threw myself out of the truck and landed on my knees in front of her. I’d never seen anyone lying so still, blood pooling beneath her neck and chest and splattered all over, her legs stretched out slender and white. I’d never seen such dainty feet and marveled at her pink frosted toenails.

I longed to comfort her and touched her neck, sliced open like a slaughtered animal. She was so cold. Someone had ripped her pretty, white blouse open and left a butcher knife sticking up in the center of her chest. I thought I should take it out and reached for it. That’s when Sheriff Thorn came.

I can post this  part because After Dinner Conversations started the story, in the middle of action, with what came after “That’s when Sheriff Thorn came.”

You can get the full story, and the six others in the July issue, for free, using the discount  code “sample” at https://www.afterdinnerconversation.com/subscribe/bimonthly.

And the photo at top shows my favorite writing assistants.