Where Did You Come From?
by Timothy Gager
You came from two black eyes and a sore asshole because when you had no one, your best friend gladly stuck it in you and all your mother asked was, did you finish your homework? Instead you laid your face against the basement floor--cold, you'd not slept for days, why didn't anyone notice that? There were blood stains in your underwear, sweet Jesus, a fraud, a liar, didn't die for you. You'd shove that crucifix through his open wounds with every last bit of strength if you had one chance to kill the motherfucker. Things at dinner made no sense: the air was thick and ladled into your lungs like the gravy on the roast, ice cubes ignited a forest inside your heart and when your father laughed you had to sit there and take it.
Timothy Gager is the author of eight books of short fiction and poetry. His latest, Treating a Sick Animal: Flash and Micro Fictions (Cervena Barva Press), features over forty stories, many previously published in various literary magazines. He has hosted the successful Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts every month for the past ten years and is the co-founder of Somerville News Writers Festival.
His work has appeared in Night Train, McSweeneys, Hobart, Twelve Stories, Word Riot, Skive, Dogzplot, Six Sentences, 55 Word, Monkeybicycle, The Binnacle, Thieves Jargon, Long Short Story, Zygote in My Coffee, Fried Chicken and Coffee, Slurve, Poor Mojo's Almanac, Tuesday Shorts, The Legendary, VerbSap, The Smoking Poet, Write This Magazine, Further Fenway Fiction, The Blood Orange Review, Poems for All, Right Hand Pointing, GUD, Boston Poetry Journal (Bad Ass Edition), Edifice Wrecked, Blue Print Review, Barnstorm, Lit Up Magazine, Spare Change, Delmarva Review, Third Lung Review, Poesy and Ibbetson Street. He has had over 200 works of fiction and poetry published since 2007 and of which eight have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.