Alumni Updates

Dawn Abeita (fiction, ’96): Dawn’s short story “Mom” appears online at Superstition Review:

Two boys are following as Nina and Mae walk the two palm-lined blocks from the middle school to Mae’s house. One is skinny and his blonde hair hangs limp as Saran Wrap over his head. The other one is dark and shaggy. Nina knows this because she and Mae take turns looking behind them without being too obvious. The girls giggle, and Nina tugs at her pink hip huggers. The boys are flirting with them. “Dogs!” they say, and hurricanes of laughter leave them staggering past as Nina and Mae cut up through the burnt smelling grass to Mae’s door.

The girls scrounge up all the stuff they need – the needle and thread, ice and alcohol – and put it where they can on the crowded dresser Mae shares with her sister, Julie. Mae picks the bald ice cube out of its bowl and squeezes it to Nina’s ear. Nina jerks away and the ice cube clunks on the floor. “Just do it. It couldn’t hurt worse than that.” There is the sound of Mae’s mother, Mrs. C., coming home, the jalousies in the door lift and rattle and fall, the sharp tread of her walk down the hall into her own room, the door shutting...[Keep Reading]…