Rachel finds an orange pebble in her boy’s pocket while she’s doing laundry and is about to throw it away but stops herself. This could be a treasure when you’re six. She remembers what her mother tossed when she was a child: a Matchbox car, a butterfly wing, and a scrap of paper with a boy’s name and number.

Rachel takes her son’s pebble and holds it tight. She feels anger she thought she forgot wave through her, and squeezes her eyes against the tears from that anger at the loss, and how she wishes her mother were still here.

John Brantingham

was the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (east of Fresno, CA), and now lives in Jamestown, New York. He is the founder and general editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder, and the author of 21 books of poetry, memoir, and fiction including his latest, Days of Recent Divorce (Arroyo Seco Press, 2023), Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press, 2020), and Kitkitdizzi (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022), the latter a collaboration which features artworks by his wife, Ann Brantingham.

John’s poems, stories, and essays are published in hundreds of magazines and journals. His work has appeared on Garrison Keillor’s daily show, The Writer’s Almanac; has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize; and was selected for publication in The Best Small Fictions anthology series for 2022 and 2016.

Author’s website: www.johnbrantingham.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ A Walk Among Giants by Kendall Johnson, a review of John and Ann Brantingham’s book Kitkitdizzi: A Non-Linear Memoir of the High Sierra, in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 16, January 2023)

⚡ Finnegan’s (Fiancée Goes McArthur Park on His Birthday) Cake, flash fiction by Brantingham in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 9, August 2021), which was subsequently selected for publication in The Best Small Fictions 2022 anthology

⚡ Objects of Curiosity, a collection of his ekphrastic poems (Sasse Museum of Art, 2020)