From "When We're Lying"

When I was four, there was a church Christmas play, and all the little kids were dressed up in white Dr. Denton’s; they came with hoods in those days, and the moms had glued cotton balls on the heads and bottoms; we were supposed to be lambs trooping up the aisle behind shepherds and kings in the Christmas pageant.

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"

It was a violent day from the start. Thunder broke at dawn, and the driving wind and rain brought limbs and parts of large trees crashing to the ground, and, for four long minutes, sirens signaled a disaster on the highway just under the rock ledge on which my house is built. The house came forty years before the highway. The house and its woods and fields would have been quiet back then; the fields were for grazing cows, and growing hay. The road up here wasn’t even paved. But that was then, and I shouldn’t long for a time I didn’t know. But I do.

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?"

I’ve had six boyfriends and two abortions. One live birth. That’s what the birth certificate says, live birth. He’s no secret, my thirteen-year old son, but almost everything else about me is. Even innocuous things like the fact that my mother nurtured long rows of rose bushes, and never, ever cut a bloom to bring inside the house, while my father grew corn, lots of it, in our suburban backyard; from July to March, we ate corn.

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