“Ordinary Details,” by Sue Mell (Fiction ’16)

Fiction alum Sue Mell was recently featured in the L’Esprit Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Ordinary Details” below:

Ordinary Details

Here in Queens, 6:30 on a January morning, it’s still deep dark, streetlight glinting off the chrome and driver-side mirror of a station wagon parked across the street. Between the car and the white wrought iron fence of a neighbor’s yard a figure, in a hooded sweatshirt, passes. Even in silhouette, I can read the hands in pockets, the shoulders shrugged against the cold. His bobbing gait carries a determined, almost musical, rhythm, white spires and scrollwork seeming to unspool in rapid motion as he moves by. His outline blurs in the sheers, then disappears beyond the molding of my window frame. A moment captured in the sharpened contrast of LED; gone the soft orange halo of sodium light once so effectively portrayed in a tiny square etching made by a friend—a realist painter now long dead….

 

Read this piece in its entirety here: https://lespritliteraryreview.org/2022/04/13/ordinary-details/