Cottage Road
The danger of broken things
The name of the girl across the street shone like copper. In the apartment below a teen with a Mohawk was already imagining the bomb that would explode his hand into bloody petals.
When the leaves turned that year the kids from the tenement took turns jumping off the roof of an empty house and called it flying. I stood off to one side — tried to explain the dangers of broken things, the treachery of glass. The next day the boy with stitches in a crooked line across his ass would call me a witch but that night the neighborhood stray found its way up the stairs into my room — its fur wild and warm against my face. It was the beginning of aloneness and of love
Lori Lamothe, originally published in Honey & Lime
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