Julie C. Day’s story this week of family and loss, memory and grief, contains a bit of magic too. ~ Julian and Fran, April 14, 2024
This month’s stories are by authors Eric Smith, Julie C. Day, Juan Martinez, and E.C. Myers. The first story of the month is free to read, but it’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep publishing great stories week after week.
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Standing in Jorge’s hidden garden, with its water-impoverished stand of willow trees, Carl wasn’t so much surprised as resigned. The Quinone family curse had struck again. This time it was in the form of a sealed glass booth, seven feet tall and three feet wide, set on an empty stretch of the Chihuahuan Desert—a trip to Looking Glass Road via Texas public lands.
A strange truth: Carl was now the only Quinone left living in Alpine.
“Goodbye,” Mama had said all those weeks ago, as though she were just heading out for another drive, as though there wasn’t a nurse standing nearby.
“Goodbye,” Jorge had repeated today.
It was just past midday in late May. Here in the arid expanse of Far West Texas, the air teetered on the cusp of summer heat. The glass booth, empty, captured the UV rays from the surrounding sky. Sometime in the last hour, Carl had stood witness to the magic of Jorge’s twisting hands and incantations. Leave it to little brothers to plan and execute the impossible.
Carl stared inside the upright glass box, eyes squinting against the reflected light. A scattering of sand lay across the floor, surrounding two rough boot prints where Jorge had so recently stood. Carl’s fingers worried at the soil imbedded under his nails. Beneath his clothes, dried sweat clung, coated, crusted over.
Jorge was gone.
Carl’s brother was only sixteen. Had been. Possibly still was. He’d entered that box as though stepping through a doorway, and, at some unnoted forty-second interval, he’d vanished. Though whether Jorge had traveled through or behind or simply found himself stuck between was entirely unclear.
“I need help,” Jorge had said six weeks ago as they’d stood in the cemetery. “This house is so empty,” Jorge had said when they arrived home. “I miss Mama,” Jorge had said every single day.
And Carl, being his older brother, loving him—of course, loving him—had listened.
The brothers had taken multiple trips, transporting supplies from McCoy’s Hardware down Highway 118 and along a dirt-and-gravel track. Once hidden on the far side of the mountain, they drove miles overland—a tedious business of inadequate shock absorbers and bruised knees. But Jorge had said he needed those desert willows, needed that hidden “workspace.” He needed—
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