Robyn Carter Writer Educator Storyteller

As you climb the stairs, the cocky squeak of a Sharpie grabs your ears, pulls your eyes to the back where blades of inky felt skate across the ceiling in lawless loops. Up front, someone’s grandma muttering at invisible demons in a language you don’t speak. Still, because of her surgical mask and nitrile gloves, you can tell she is a healer. The old woman drags her trash bag down the aisle and it crinkles wit

The Walgreens air is buzzing a faint yellow-green that mutes everything inside you except the pain clenching and loosening its fist in your belly at intervals too random to decipher. Go for a walk, the midwife said when you called her an hour ago. Waiting in the Baby Needs aisle for the burning palm to slowly let go, you picture yourself at the center of the transparent blue teething ring in front of you. Your eyes frisk the rows and columns of precious nubs growing from its plastic skin, and th

A FEW DAYS HAD PASSED since I’d spoken to Simon about the blow-gun. But it was still stretched across the living room floor, now with a fresh litter of clockworks burrowing in the shadow of its plastic throat. Built from cracked sprinkler pipes someone had abandoned in
the vacant lot next door, the blowgun was the newest addition to the cache of homemade weapons Simon had been stockpiling that fall. The menace of their points and surfaces would dull with time and dust, but newly born they pulsed with savage potential, lurking around the
house, webbed or stuffed with metal nerves and organs harvested from dead machines, if not to live again then for their restive beauty.