The Ward of New Kettering
READING AGE 16+
He was seven when they brought him home blind, and his aunt Dana has been holding that house together with two lies ever since: the yoga class she never goes to, and the money she keeps in a coffee can for a school she can't afford.
Adrian knows about both. He also knows that what the doctors called blindness isn't what he has. He can see, and has been able to for years, through the black cloth he winds over his eyes every morning. He doesn't take it off. If Dana doesn't have to lie awake over a boy who can see, she can sleep between shifts. That's the trade he made with himself, and he'd make it again.
Then a man named Eli Krantz puts a brass coin in his hand and tells him there's work, and for the first time since the accident there is someone who doesn't flinch at what Adrian is — or explain it away. What Adrian has to weigh now is the family that raised him against the stranger who believes him, and he has never been good at picking himself.
I wrote this about the debts inside a family, the kind you can't pay off.
Unfold
Thirty Feet
The wind came up the cut behind the furniture store, off the river. Wet iron, standing water, the sweet rot off the Dumpsters. And under all of that, meat.
Adrian stood at the mouth with his hand flat on the corner brick and did not go in.
Nine fifty-something, and the lamp on the……
Waiting for the first comment……