A.R. Geiger

We take them out at dawn, when the sky in the east is red and the birds are starting to sing. I climb onto our bull and pull my sister up beside me. It’s her first time herding, her first time coming into the fields and pastures with me, and her little arms wind around…

The air smells like antiseptic in the hospital tents. Men lie in rows along the canvas walls and listen to the war waging outside, barely a mile away. So close. So very close that sometimes the gunfire and thunder of the bombs shake the walls. I don’t have enough bandages for them all. Their shirts…

I leave a handful of seeds outside my garden gate when I plant in the spring. The faeries don’t like it if I forget them. They like to plant their own little gardens, sometimes beneath my flowerpots, sometimes under the porch in the front yard where the light is dim and the mice leave their…

We open the stall before dawn turns the eastern sky pink. Grandfather pushes the metal door up until it disappears, and I sweep the floor and tidy the booths. The spices have spilled in the night, only a little, a dusting of red here, yellow there. I sweep them into the street and watch the…

The trucks come rumbling into our camp, dust rising in their wake. The beds are full of boxes and men with guns on their backs, and I run to meet them, praying to whatever god might listen that Fetch is with them. I’m always worried he won’t come back. He almost didn’t once. They dragged…

The fires bring them. Light blossoms into the sky, brighter than the stars, red as the flowers that grow along the roadside, and the people gather towards its flames as if we’d spent our throats and our lungs calling for them. We’re dancing already when arrive. My skirts billow around my bare legs, and I…