From "When We're Lying"
My mother dyed my Dr. Denton’s black.
Everyone was looking at me, laughing at me, the black sheep; everyone was peering out from high wooden church pews and their were wide Cheshire cat grins on the faces of old ladies with large hats.
I blame everything on this.
From "In the Beginning, Sleep"
Now, literally above the traffic, I wait in my upstairs bedroom at night for the animals’ piercing, begging, save-me screams. I dread the screams, but screams are inevitable. Every so often, during the day, one of my dogs will find a bloody deer leg – skin and hoof intact, sometimes with the freshly torn hip cartilage – or part of a fox carcass with a tail intact, and drag it out from some deep corner of the woods. Coyotes, I guess, although we, my son and I, never see any. I worry that one will carry off a dog. And all the while, underneath us, the highway.
We often lose power. For days at a time, we’ll be cut off. I will venture down off the ledge to get coffee and sandwiches from the diner, but the people there, also without power, chatter too brightly, their sense of community seems false. They talk about trucks and crews, but my boy and I never see any of these, either. The power seems to come back on of its own, eventual, volition.
From "Do You Drink Alone?"
And less innocuous things, like the fact I have a brother I haven’t heard from since he left home at sixteen.
Or that I’m not married to the man the other moms call my husband.
Online, I fill out quizzes and personality tests having to do with depression and addiction. The second or third question is always this: Do you drink alone?
Sometimes I say ‘yes,’ sometimes ‘no,’ sometimes ‘once in awhile.’ I never answer ‘several times a week.’
Short Stories by E.V. Legters
E.V. has published the following short stories, and has been featured in several short story collections. You can read excerpts from three of her stories below.
SHORT STORIES:
“Away,” Honorable Mention, Glimmer Train’s Family Matters Contest, July 2013
“When We’re Lying,” Glimmer Train; Issue 83 (A Family Matters Prize Winner)
“Do You Drink Alone?” Alaska Quarterly Review; Vol. 28, No. 1 and 2
“Good to Me,” Honorable Mention, Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Contest, July 2012
“Imaginary Husbands,” Pisgah Review; Vol. 6, No. 2
“.com,” Lullwater Review; Vol. 28, No 1
“Stable,” Center; Vol. 5
“Lady’s Island,” High Plains Literary Review; Vol. XV, No. 1
“Wing Tips,” Other Voices; Vol. 11, No. 29
“Spinning Through the Dark,” StoryQuarterly; Vol. 33
COLLECTIONS
“Facing Forward,” Still Me After All These Years, Goddess Press, Fall 2017
In The Beginning, Sleep; semi-finalist, Press 53 Short Story Contest
“From Her Tiny Porch,” Main Street Rag Porches Anthology, January 2014
When We’re Lying Short Story Collection, Finalist, The Hudson Prize, Black Lawrence