Photo by yuraforrat – Pexels.com
by Kathryn Kulpa
We knew every house on the street: the Campbells, whose daughter Tricia was our babysitter; the Lopes, whose twin boys monopolized the local paper route; the Francises, whose teenage daughter ran away last year. At the top of the street Victorian manses leaned, green moss eating their shingles. Further down, postwar suburbia reigned, jalousie windows, white curlicued railings, sprinklers that never stopped sprinkling. Houses ended when asphalt tapered into dirt. Uprooted trees told us there would be more. That summer diggers savaged the soil, exposed earthworms wriggling away in halves; tunnels lay half-built like severed arteries we crawled through, jungle explorers, until we found a shoe, stiff and gray-caked, heel sticking out of the dirt, and we pulled and pulled but didn’t start screaming until we saw the foot.
KATHRYN KULPA likes coffee, cats, and cornmeal jonnycakes. She was chosen to be a 2025 writer in residence at Linden Place in Bristol, Rhode Island. Her stories are published or forthcoming in Fictive Dream, Matchbook, Milk Candy Review, and Your Impossible Voice, and her chapbooks include A Map of Lost Places (Gold Line Press) and For Every Tower, a Princess (Porkbelly Press).
