It’s Halloween, which signals October’s close, and our WWS members continue to send out their work and publish in amazing places.
This month we’re celebrating the WWS members whose work was published during October of 2021. I’ve included an excerpt from their published pieces (if available) or a blurb if the publication is a book, and a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Please join me in celebrating our members who published in October!
Congratulations to Roz Weisberg, whose short story “Signature” appeared in The Bangalore Review.
The first letter of Georgia’s name was supposed to be a tribute to a dead great grandmother on her father’s side that no one remembered. She’d always been grateful that despite her father’s insistence, her mother refused to name her Gertrude which was the name of the deceased great grandmother. When Georgia learned to write her name in cursive, she gave the G an extra swirl through the middle that looped across and the tail swept below the pale blue line on the wide ruled paper in Mrs. Deal’s 3rd grade class. Mrs. Deal marked the extra loop with a red felt pen, writing her own cursive G over Georgia’s demonstrating how the extra swirl made Georgia’s G look like a Q.
Congrats also to Désirée Zamorano, whose short story “Wednesday” appeared in Air/Light.
Gilbert drove down the 5 toward Sunset Beach with a deep green 1967 Mustang on his roll-back tow truck, its grill crumpled like newspaper.
He was grateful to have arrived long after the paramedics and the cops and the ambulances and the firefighters. He was grateful only to have to wonder at what the carnage had been. All that remained was a police car, a cop guiding vehicles, and fire sticks keeping traffic at bay.
Kudos to Toni Ann Johnson, whose short story “This Side and That” appeared in Aunt Chloe.
When I pass on, my second son will arrive more than twenty minutes late to my funeral. With wild, dyed hair in need of a cut, and his Burberry overcoat rumpled, Philip will drag open the door to the stone chapel, causing it to creak and scuff against the slate gray floor. He’ll stand there stiff, wide-eyed, and bewildered as each head in every pew turns to stare at him while my niece May reads the obituary that I’ll have written myself.
Sighs and rolling eyes will shame him on my behalf as they add this offense to others: the time he went silent and shunned me for months, the many times he raised his voice, and the time he left me to die in a sub-par nursing home, when he could have afforded better. But I’ll receive his last act of aggression toward me without resistance or dismay because in the end I’ll observe, and accept, and I’ll let things be.
Kudos also goes to Ellen Tremiti, whose short story “The Influencer,” in which a “detective contemplates new media and new life stages,” appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Magazine.
A shout out to Saba Waheed, whose short story “Bugs in the Valley,” in which “[a] pharmaceutical company turns a rare flower into a equally rare medicine that cures cancer and stops aging,” appeared in After Dinner Conversation Magazine.
Congrats to Tanya Ward Goodman, whose article “Everywhere We Go, We Leave a Trail of Trash: Here’s What You Can Do to Help” appeared in The Washington Post.
Some years ago, in the company of my stepmother, Carla, I spent four days hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, counting stone steps and trying to keep my eyes open for blue morpho butterflies and the orchid called Wiñay Wayna, meaning “forever young.” There were verdant mountainsides and llamas and songbirds, and above it all, there were huge, low-hanging clouds that shifted to reveal icy glaciers made fluorescent by the afternoon sun.
But there were also, at breadcrumb intervals, numerous wax paper squares that had once contained Halls lozenges. Among the 500 people allowed on the trail in Peru that day, one person clearly had a sore throat. As I stooped to collect the wrappers, my vision expanded to include discarded beverage bottles and candy bar packaging. We found a plastic grocery bag and filled it with human-made detritus. At the end of the day, our guide, Fabrizio, noticed our efforts.