Words For Wednesday

From Little Sinners and Other Stories by Karen Brown:

Memorial Day in Sunset Bayou begins and ends with drinks in an organized circuit of the neighborhood. The following morning everyone awakens to some form of destruction. The St. Augustine flattened and muddied, blown debris caught in the Winslows’ gardenia hedge, left under the Barringtons’ cast-iron recliniers – lipstick-stained napkins, toothpick American flogs. shards of Noritake, a pair of beaded mules with a broken heel. They’d face highball glasses abandoned on patio bars, the deteriorated lime gloating in the remains of gin, pools littered with grass and empty cigarette packs and a Monarch or two, struggling weakly, tragically, on the surface of the chlorinated water. (Swimming, page 17)

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