Dear Wigleaf,
 
I'm writing from the other side of the mountain. How did I get here? Well, that's a good question. This is the only place I've ever seen where you can drive off in two different directions and wind up in the same place. The secret? A pass through the mountains, like the hidden staircase in a mystery movie.
 
When you get there it's like being in a different movie, or maybe on a greeting card. Chateau-like houses hunkered down along snow-covered mountains. The occasional haystack. A silo or barn. Clownishly picturesque. On the way there a startled turkey standing on the shoulder of the road startles me.
 
On the way back I see a magpie pecking at the side of a deer. And that's finally what this place has come to mean to me. Death. The air—so dry, so high, so cold, so full of emissions—is killing my husband. So next month we're headed out, pointed toward someplace warm and full of sea breezes.

For now I'm filled with alertness. Looking at everything, trying to drink it all in. After all, I may never be here again.

XO,
 
DC


- - -

Dawn Corrigan's fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Opium Magazine, Pindeldyboz, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, Bound Off, Steel City Review, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction work appears regularly at The Nervous Breakdown.

Read her story, "Pink."

w i g · l e a F               01-21-08                                [home]