CNF: Wizard of Oz Snowglobe
by Hillary Leftwich
You spill your guts: glitter and stale water, all over my hardwood floor. I clean up every piece of you, shards of glass and a half-cracked figurine of Dorothy. Her lips are red. A color my ex would call Whore Red. There is a look of anxiousness painted on her face. I pick her up, delicately—because she is broken—and hold her between my thumb and forefinger. She is staring off into the abyss of my living room. A living room filled with moving boxes. I recognize the look. It’s the waiting for the storm. It’s the smell of incoming rain. She is facing the single event in her life that will change her path forever. There’s an evil old woman pumping her legs on a bike, a tornado scraping itself together, heading right for her. There were never Styrofoam flakes masquerading as snow in this fragmented globe, just glitter and plastic. Without snow, what do I call you?
When I stood in line at the women’s shelter, my face painted on with the same look, bruises on my neck, a baby in my arms and my lips smeared with my whore’s red, no one knew what to call me, either.
Hillary Leftwich lives in Denver with her son. In her day jobs she has worked as a private investigator, maid, and pinup model. She is the associate editor for The Conium Review and the nonfiction editor for The Fem Lit Mag. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, WhiskeyPaper, NANO Fiction, Monkeybicycle, Dogzplot, Cease, Cows, Five Pure Slush Vol. 10., Crab Fat Magazine, Eunoia Review, Tethered by Letters, Progenitor, and The Citron Review. Her story “Free Lunch” was nominated by Progenitor for The Pushcart Prize in 2015. She thanks her writing tribe, The Fishtank, for their continued support. Find her on Twitter @HillaryLeftwich.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Wizard of Oz Snowglobe”? “It was a terrible thing to do undergo, but during the year I stood there I had time to think that the greatest loss I had known was the loss of my heart.” — the Tin Man
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Upcoming
01/13 • Edward Thomas-Herrera
01/20 • Zero Laforga
01/27 • Jack Bedell
02/03 • TBD
02/10 • Gaurav Bhalla
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02/24 • TBD