Photo by Thomas Stephan on Unsplash
by Beth Konkoski
When I was a girl, rough boys lived down the street, older, angry, stealing cigarettes kind of boys. Brothers with younger sisters my age, so we swung into each other’s orbits too often and with a buzzing sort of noise, a heat as they watched us play in the sprinkler, breastless bodies they flicked when we ran past them in search of popsicles. In a cave of sumac, they dared us to smoke. My hands too heavy with fear, my fingers made into fists against the reaching, until they held me down and put the hot paper to my lips, forced my teeth apart, laughing at my tears. Calling me a baby even as they pushed their hands between my legs and squealed. I threw up my lunch that day, and my mother worried I had been out too long in the sun.
Beth Konkoski is a writer and high school English teacher living in Virginia where she spends as much time as possible listening to the sounds of water over rocks and a pen across the page. Her fiction has appeared in journals such as Story, Smokelong Quarterly, Bending Genres, and Split Lip Magazine. Her collection of short and flash fiction, A Drawn & Papered Heart, won the 2023 Acacia Prize for Short Fiction and was published in 2024 by Kallisto Gaia Press.
