Our Friend

The forest behind the house in the holler has a bridge over the rivulet of water we call a stream. Over the rivulet and through the woods. Strange symbols await us in piles of garbage nailed to the trees. Elijah makes an alcohol concoction called Wet Fart and it smells like oil and burns like tattoos. We sit in a circle in silence. The circle gets larger and larger. We are so far away from each other. “We can contact the dead this way,” Misty says. “Let’s hold hands, ask for a sign.” So we do. Into the middle falls a thud. Someone screams. What happens next.

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by Katie Jean Shinkle

Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of four novellas and six chapbooks, most recently “None of This is an Invitation” (with Jessica Alexander, Astrophil Press, forthcoming) and “Will You Kiss Me Goodnight?” (The Offending Adam, 2021). Recent work has been featured in Fugue, Sou'wester, Always Crashing, NELLE, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a 2021 Lambda poetry fellow, co-poetry editor of DIAGRAM, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing program at Sam Houston State University.