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dancing girl press, 2013
$7.00 |
Tess Patalano received her MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She has been published in Transfer, Generations and is forthcoming in PANK. She lives in Brooklyn with a male human and a female dog.
Keeping Close
She has an unregistered gun. She keeps it under her pillow at night. She smiles thinking about the spacious particulars of unheard deaths revived in her sleep. A thin armed sallow faced gentleman sporting a white napkin comes to polish her gun at or by night. She leaves the downstairs kitchen window open for him. Once he didn’t come to clean it. She knew this because there was no oily residue on the trigger. She left him a note under her pillow the next night. Don’t terminate your services, I need you. The next morning the window downstairs was closed. She walked back upstairs, placed the gun in her lap feeling so safe, so sorry.
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