Shorts
The Wren
The field between the school playground where Emmy is standing and the the stream below the church seems as wide as an ocean. Emmy is walking alone as she does every Sunday--her mom says it’s safe to be alone on the military base where they live. Those big GI’s will always help you, she says. They’re just like your dad.
Decision
Drip. Drip. Drip. Angel watched the crystal-clear droplets squeeze one-by-one from the valve at the bottom of the IV bag. The drops pool together in the drip chamber and then continued their journey down the long and winding tubing, through the Heplock and into her son’s unmoving arm.
The Bad Mother List
Sophia groans and rolls over, tucks the sheets tighter around her head, unwilling, unable to look at the 13-year-old daughter she knows is standing over her, glaring, cup of coffee in hand. Like a mother. Like she is the kid and Sarah is the mother. It’s pathetic, Sophia thinks to herself, as the sharp bitter smell of what is surely a French-pressed coffee syrup sneaks under the covers. One of these days, she really needs to teach Sarah the right measurements of coffee to water. No. What she really needs is to teach Sarah is what a mother who has it fully together looks like. What she really needs it to be a model of strong womanhood. If she could just stop her whirling mind from the paralytic impact it seems to have on her body and pull her ass out of bed.
Being There
The end, after all, is merely a re-telling of the beginning. Of a beginning. One. Whichever point in time that you believe is the beginning of your story. Or, the beginning of the end. Rebecca realizes as she walks into the emergency room that she is approaching the other end of a circle, one that started five years ago, possibly that very first night with Adam, and ends today in this place, with sterile walls and antiseptic smells and watery, indecipherable black-gray images. This hard place with its fixed points and measurements and expectations.
The End
Lauren’s heart mirrors the dense pulse of movement in the city street not yet below her apartment window, but getting closer. Thud. Thud. Thud. She jumps with each door that slams up and down her hallway, with each muted click-slam-crash filtered through paper-thin walls and rising up through the creaking, ancient floorboards. It’s happening. She hears screaming. It is coming from all directions, from the right and left, from above and below her. Women, screaming. Children. Babies. She cannot tell if there are men within this swell of sound; their tones are so much deeper, surely lost in the high-pitched surround-sound soprano of shrieking.
Long-Form Fiction
An Anatomy of Mercy
An excerpt from an envisioned book length work:
THIS DRAFT IS PASSWORD PROTECTED. FOR MORE INFO email CherylMurfin@gmail.com
The pains came in waves, burning, electric jolts riding along the brilliant bands of color surging behind Mercy Wakefield’s eyes. Her eyelids were sealed shut, squeezed so tightly tears poured from both sides of each socket. Spasms came too; so fast, so furious Mercy could control nothing whatsoever -- not her belly, not her bowels, not her her mind. Only the brief lull between surges. And in that moment of amnesty Mercy found herself angry, burning angry . . .