"Someone in Nebraska" Published in Potomac Review!

I’m so pleased to see my story “Someone in Nebraska” published in the always-fabulous Potomac Review.  I wrote this story while in—guess!—Nebraska, last year when I was enjoying my residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts*. And this rarely happens—believe me!—but this was a story that came fast and furiously, actually after a conversation in a bar.  (So you know it’s good!)

Here’s the opening:

You have finally met someone—live and in person—who has seen the white light at the end of the tunnel. She’s a bartender in a small town in Nebraska who had a heart attack when she was forty. “They run in my family,” she says, as if that might be an obvious thing to understand about her. She knows everyone in the bar, everyone except you. You’re the stranger. You must like being the stranger wherever you go. That’s why you go to so many different places. “I was clinically dead for twenty-five minutes,” she tells you. Others in the bar listen, but clearly they’ve heard the story, the minute-by-minute. Only you don’t know, although you know the end: there she is, standing in front of you, bringing you a Bud whenever you ask for one…. 

I’m sorry that it’s not online, but you can order a copy here, on amazon.  While my story is only five pages long, there are lots of other delights in the journal—I especially recommend Thad Rutkowski’s short-short, “Warts and All.”

*The application deadline for the next residency period is September 1! You already know what an inspiring place it is.