“Blue Squill,” by Kevin McIlvoy

Fiction faculty member Kevin McIlvoy was recently featured in The Rupture. Read an excerpt of “Blue Squill” below:

Blue Squill

Grateful for his body’s productiveness, Mr. Jordan Jabbok took three satisfying morning walks in order to piss a circle around his newly planted blue squill bulbs encircling last season’s blue squill plants orbiting his weeping cherry tree sending its large but tender roots under a ring of curved red bricks red-golden now and fringed by high blue larkspur rising from within a circle of squill planted in other seasons, and smelling like strong rat poison when they are in bloom.

The long masterful piss on a daily basis was the expressive performance of the retired ballroom dance instructor.

“This is how you begin?” my restless sister asks. Adept at mocking biblical jargon, she says life permits two choices: “You can ask, ‘Why is it so?’ or you can say, ‘It is so.'”

Certain tales answer the former question.

Certain tales, much smaller, embody the latter. This one is of that kind.

 

Read the rest of this story here: https://www.therupturemag.com/rupture/blue-squill