I'll Get You, My Pretty

 My flash-fiction piece “What I Do When I Can’t Sleep” just came out in the fall 2013 issue of Cloudbank, a print journal. It’s the story of a witch who wears a green satin dress and carries a torch for an astronaut. The dress was real, a gift to me from my dad’s Aunt Jimmie, a small, gravelly-voiced lady who wore red lipstick on her creased lips and offered us chocolates, probably Van Duyn’s or Whitman’s. When I was about eight, I dug Aunt Jimmie’s green satin dress out of my dress-up box and wore it for Halloween as part of my witch costume. Some people think an interest in clothes is frivolous, but that dress, with its gleam, had power. Just thinking about it now, makes me feel like I could fly….