Brad Barkley

Early morning, and Clarendon starts like a wind-up toy— cotton and rice farmers machining the Delta soil, jackhammers breaking the streets downtown. Bosco is talking, too much and too loud, finding no difference between nighttime talk and daytime [...]

We have this tree in the backyard, a spindly oak full of squirrel nests, which has split into two trunks and grown up in a big V shape. Sometimes I imagine attaching a long piece of innertube between the trunks halfway up, like a sling-shot, and fi [...]

October had arrived, the season of typhoid, when the women and children withered as quickly as leaves on the trees. All the beds and the overflow cots on the ward where Mary Privitte worked were full, the emaciated bodies in tremors, the blues and [...]