Longlist – 2026 Gooseberry Pie Annual Writing Competition
by Laurinda Lind
You get old enough that you have a sense of direction and you’re tall enough (and with boobs) not to look like a third-grader, so when it’s too toxic in the house, you walk right out the door as it moans, bored, on its hinges like a porn star. What are they going to do, tie a leash to your bedleg, clamp your mind to the wall where there’s a hook that holds a pine tree up straight in the Decembers that anyone bothers to drag one in– drive to the graveyard and tattle to your great-aunts, still taking their dirt nap? Before that, though, you remember food and you stick a couple pieces of bread in your pocket and two wilting carrots, there’s blackberries out right now and you know what purslane looks like and lambs’ quarters, you’ll do okay if you can’t get to a friend’s house before dark. Three overhead hawks later, you are past the last bend on your one-lane road and not really looking, and holy crap Jesus, it’s your longeyed father– your yelling mother must have sent him ahead or he’s psychic or something, now what, can you, like, hide in a tree? When you get to where he’s sitting on a stump as if he’s unconcerned about what might crawl up his pantlegs, he’s just calm, you’d say even deadpan, now he’s saying, “I ran away, too.” You just stand there; he’s incomprehensible, like an octopus in a cocktail dress and eight silver heels and a hash pipe, and with neither of you getting any ideas for words, after a while he moves over on the wide scratchy stump, and you sit there with him and fish out one of the pieces of bread and one of the softening carrots and hand them across, both of you companionable in the sun, because there’s no use trying to read the next page when you haven’t even finished the one you’re on yet.
Laurinda Lind lives in New York’s North Country. Her poetry chapbook, Trials by Water, came out in 2024 (Orchard Street Press). Other flash fiction is at Defenestrationism, SmokeLong Quarterly, and The Last Line. She worked most recently as a caregiver.
Photo by DIEGO SÁNCHEZ on Unsplash
