Corey Campbell (fiction, ’12): Corey’s story “Introduction to Airborne Radar” appears in the latest issue of Conte:

In October—or if you listen to the local DJs, Rocktober—Delia, her mom, this snooty ski-society woman Peg, and I sit in a Chinese restaurant in Vail. Lunchtime on a Friday. Parent-teacher conferences are this week, so the high school gave us the day off. I’m sixteen. I was supposed to spend the day with Ernie, but he decided to take an extra shift down at Bowles Crossing Cineplex instead. He told me this in voicemail—said he needed gas money—and I had no way to talk back. I left him my own message filled with my dumb enthusiasm, cringing even before I put the phone down, though I still meant it.

Delia and her mom drove us up here from Littleton this morning. I’m staying with them while my parents are in Glenwood with this weird religious couple they met online. They go on retreats every so often—“to bullet-proof their marriage,” they say—and finally I’m old enough to be left behind.

In fall and winter, the Rocky Mountains wear their name—dark, jagged, and iceberg-like. And though I hate driving on ice, and would have been fine staying home alone with my CD player and some movies, I know that traveling in them, even for a few hours, always feels like a massive, head-clearing journey, only broken by the return to the suburbs hours later...[Keep Reading]…