Tough Times

“I saw it with my own eyes” and “true fact” were her favorite pleonasms, and now I miss hearing them. There’s a hoot owl beyond this fringe of hickory trees that constantly sings these redundancies to me in the hollow of the night, and when I hear them it straightens my spine with a shock of electric current. I don’t like that one bit. I miss her, and I’m gonna’ shoot that hoot owl… but for now I’m really having a tough time making ammunition at home. I’m having a hard time getting completely outfitted for this apocalypse. I didn’t know if I was supposed to do everything from home, as we’re under orders to stay in place — which I really don’t enjoy because I’m a man with transit issues anyway. I can only walk as far as my peg leg will get me. But the longer I hold off the greater chance I have of eating a marmot. Auspicious. That’ll be for another day…

“Short fiction is a special, very different discipline, often requiring at least as much skill and effort as novel-writing. And while it’s relatively easy to get away with a certain amount of bagginess and loose plotting when you’re writing a novel, those things become quickly and mercilessly apparent if you’re writing a short story.”
— Joanne Harris