Glass Houses by J. Bradley

The smell of chemically burnt skin and screams wake me up. I look out my bedroom window and see three people getting smaller and smaller as they run away, mom seeping out of the glass shed. Find a glass repair and call them, I yell as I run past Mitch at the breakfast table, his mouth full of breakfast cereal.

I walk over to the part of the glass shed mom seeps from, notice four rocks on the ground. I pick up one of them and see a hint of glass on the stone. I just wanted to thank them, mom says. I put layer after layer of duct tape over the crack, ask mom to stay calm, to stay put. Mom calms down and she thins herself down to a fine mist.

They should be here this afternoon, I hear Mitch say behind me, his voice not muffled by a containment suit. I’m hoping whoever threw those rocks doesn’t live in this neighborhood, doesn’t have parents old enough to believe their version of what happened.

 

Biography
J. Bradley is the author of The Adventures of Jesus Christ, Boy Detective (Pelekinesis, 2016) and the Yelp review prose poem collection Pick How You Will Revise A Memory (Robocup Press, 2016). He lives at jbradleywrites.com.

Image: Jilbert Ebrahimi