Angels of the Meanwhile

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Title: Angels of the Meanwhile
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Release Date: August 3, 2017
ISBN13: 978-1974143207

 Overview

Angels of the Meanwhile is an e-chapbook/anthology to benefit Elizabeth R. McClellan and is now available for purchase. One of my stories, "The View of My Brother in the Rear View Mirror" is included.


Excerpt

Recently, my brother said, "Once, Uncle Harold said something so mean about Dad that I grabbed his hand and wrestled him to the ground. You remember that."

I didn't. I don't. Probably neither does Uncle Harold. The only person who remembers that incident is my brother himself, because it is likely an enhancement, or a purely made-up wish. Many things he says are. His friends are so accustomed to his fabrications that they explain them away by insisting that anything my brother tells you must be divided by two-thirds to ensure accuracy. The Calhoun Constant, they say, professor-like. There is something admirable in being able to live inside your own imaginary world, and I wonder if my brother's memory of events is not really that rose-colored or if he has simply lost awareness of when he is inventing.

Then again, perhaps it did happen. Our family is prone to sudden fits of violence, self-contained, rarely more than a few seconds long. Abruptly rage-ful at some infraction, Mom once slammed my bedroom door open with such force the doorknob punched a hole in the wall, a fist-sized opening which remained until we moved out of the house. I taped a poster over the scar for a while, then removed it, a reminder of the physical manifestation of my mother's fury. When my brother was older, he followed in family tradition and also punched a hole in a wall, but this one came from his fist. After our familial fits of violence recede in the distance, no one speaks of them, or refers to them, or apologizes for them, as if they were merely a shared hallucination, a bump in the otherwise smoothly sarcastic surface of our daily existence. We are not a family that is kind to our homes.

Outside on the tarmac painted white bullets pass under the wheels of our car, a monotone Morse code, giving no message, yet sending a signal.