Lust Series (5)
by Stephanie Dickinson

The room smells white, is white, has pasteboard walls a fist or a feather could easily pass through into the next government-subsidized apartment, bare to knuckled blue-white striped bed, afghan stuck to the floor in a flame of red ants. Albino cockroaches scuttle, whispery feelers melt into the dresser drawers, panties, silky blouses, they wiggle against skin slips. A TV tray is knocked over, cornnuts and cigarette butts scattered. Is there a place where her eyes rested?  Her lids didn’t close and she slept with the whites of her gaze glazed to the ceiling. Floating on Atavan, into sleep everlasting, a wheelchair smacks against the door, hair tangled in the spokes, long black cigarette burns in On Heroes & Tombs. 

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 Her novel Half Girl, recently published by Spuyten Duyvil, won the Hackney Award (Birmingham-Southern) for best unpublished novel of 2002.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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