The Cross
“All the world shall be taxed.” (God is without.)
“There is no outside-of-text.” (God is within.)
Taxed to the donkey-hair blanket.
Texted in the sense of being reachable but still left hanging.
*
“You know we always considered him this great outdoor dad. Hunting and fishing. Old Testament dad, he created a lot of distance. He might of had a temper but it came with the territory.”
If
confidence is faith and synthesis is love, what is contradiction? Abraham from Fear and Trembling trudging up the loose analysis, leading his son whom he either saw or didn’t see as an animal. Either a crisis or a covenant of imagination, an act he’d been tested to accept, the goat going bug-eyed as he stroked its silken throat, its narrow withers shivering.
Shipwreck
I was against the hypnotizing cliché, clouds gathered, shadow-puppeting the sheet of sand. The tide-line was stenciled in washed trash. A traditional line of waves kept breaking. Form and freeform. Forgiveness wasn’t a form of innocence, it was futuristic.
A pattern of waves that kept breaking wasn’t a broken pattern. I wasn’t paying attention. Looking out across the water as gray as an underworld I was the dove who sighted shipwreck and saw dry land.
—
Kirstin Allio received the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2 for her 2024 story collection Double-Check for Sleeping Children. Previous books are the novels Garner (Coffee House Press, 2005), Buddhism for Western Children (University of Iowa, 2018), and the story collection Clothed, Female Figure (winner of the 2016 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize). Her awards and honors include the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, and fellowships from Brown University’s Howard Foundation and MacDowell. She lives in Providence, RI.