Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Metal Detector Days in Holy Moly/RVA Magazine



My short story, "Metal Detector Days," is in Holy Moly, a supplement to RVA Magazine. To see it, go to the RVA Magazine site, scroll down about 3/4 of the way, and click on the image on the left side that says "Holy Moly." It'll download as a PDF. My story is on p. 30.

Here's an excerpt:

"Our first morning in Richmond, after my sister and I, both vegetarian at the time, ate grilled cheese for breakfast, he drove our family around Northside, pointing out the houses of all of his ex-girlfriends.
'We went to junior prom together. My daddy said I could only borrow the car if he sat in the backseat. He told me he didn’t wanna be a grandfather just yet.'
We stopped in on his great-great aunt Edith, the one that he didn’t like because she wouldn’t talk to him in the late ‘60s when his hair was too long. She had saved his hippie ass from getting jumped one time when he was leaving her house. As he was walking towards his blue VW Bug, some tough guys crossed the street and came at him. Edith ducked into the shotgun house and came back onto her porch with a handgun, which she fired into the lawn. The thugs crossed to the other sidewalk.
My sister and I liked Edith; when she won at the horses, she’d give us twenty-dollar bills. Twenty bucks was a lot then, when minimum wage was $4.25 and a whole meal at Taco Bell came to $2.07, after the tax.
My mom told Edith about the ex-girlfriend tour.
'Don’t you worry Mary, they’re all fat grandmothers by now.'"

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