Break From Reality. Daily.
“Mr. Peabody?” A portly, middle-aged woman in a rumpled gray suit clutching a clipboard materializes beside me. “Mr. Malcolm Peabody?” “What?!” I look around. Where did she come from? “Who are you?” She points to the laminated ID card pinned to her chest. “My name is Brenda.” “Do I know you?” “No, Mr. Peabody, you…
This story is by Joanna Dunn Samson and was part of our 2025 Fall Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here. “Hospitality is the hallmark of Southern womanhood, but it need not extend to Fuller Brush salesmen, crows, or kin of dubious character.” — Miss Birdie Mae Chastain, A Primer on Manners…
At first I was delighted when Aunt June returned from the dead. I had adored her as a child and even more so as an adult. She was the most competent woman I knew. She had managed her sixty-two-acre farm alone after her husband Ed died in a tractor accident when she was twenty-six. She could repair heavy equipment and wield a chainsaw. She could tell the difference between the whistle of a Broad Winged Hawk and the raspy shriek of a Red Tail. As a kid, I followed her around the farm with the same devotion as the pack of stray dogs that never left her side.
But after a while, June’s miraculous return began to feel less like a cosmic gift and more like a haunting. Unlike the live June, who had been placable and easy-going, the ghostly June was usually in a foul mood and complained nonstop about something I did or didn’t do on her farm, which she’d left to me on her death. These days, June and I bickered—a lot. I hated that.
Pleading guilty to a state crime was one thing, but a federal crime? That was something else altogether.
First of all, the sheer amount of paperwork required by the feds was intimidating. Alice sat in the waiting room of the federal probation office with a stack of papers on her lap, waiting to be interviewed by a probation officer about the man she lived with, William Casey Battle. Billy had pleaded guilty to three counts of intent to distribute ten kilos of opioids and was being held in jail pending sentencing. The purpose of her interview was to talk with Agent Riley, who was preparing the presentencing report for the judge, about Billy’s character.
That was another thing about the feds—the probation officers were a far cry from the doughy, indifferent social workers who handled probation for the state courts. Federal probation officers were trim, neatly dressed FBI agents with close-cropped crew cuts and good posture. When Agent Riley introduced himself, Alice had straightened her shoulders, discretely sucked in her belly, and cursed herself for not wearing control-top pantyhose.
This story is by Joanna Dunn Samson and was part of our 2020 Fall Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here. Llewellyn stretched out on her stomach on the rim of a flooded limestone quarry, chin resting on her hands, and studied the still, dark water far below. The light from…
This story is by Joanna Dunn Samson and was part of our 2017 Spring Writing Contest. You can find all the Spring Writing Contest stories here. If there is a gene for nurturing, I didn’t get it. “Sorry,” I said to my sister Pam, who had asked me to take care of her geriatric mutt…
