Lust Series (1)
by Stephanie Dickinson

I stood in my lavender nightdress in the wet grass. The man cried before they roped his neck and lifted him off the ground, letting him back down. But still he did not sing out that he killed the girl, so up and down again he went. Proof, they found her stockings on him—pale lilac in moonlight. They cut off the man's toes joint by joint. They started a fire under him with a can of gas. I heard you laugh. Not the you who ate grape pears with me in the orchard. I covered my eyes. A baby shrieked. They hung him higher, quivering with life. You could hear them singing down the street, fragrance to their singing. 

Stephanie Dickinson has lived in Texas, Iowa, Louisiana, and now New York. Her work appears in Cream City Review, Mudfish, Green Mountains Review, PMS, Storyquarterly, Feminist Studies, Ontario Review, Water Stone, Columbia Journal, and the McGuffin, among others. Along with Rob Cook, she publishes and edits the literary journal Skidrow Penthouse. Her novel Half Girl, recently published by Spuyten Duyvil, won the Hackney Award (Birmingham-Southern) for best unpublished novel of 2002. Her story “A Lynching in Stereoscope” appears in Best American 2005 Nonrequired Reading, edited by Dave Eggers. Rain Mountain Press has recently released her short story collection, Road of Five Churches, and she is a 2006 fellow in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

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