20130318

What They Take From Us

by Kimberly King Parsons

His teeth are my fault. Weak dentin from the distaff and his darling grape soda is supposedly corrosive. You can’t watch them all the time. Pretty or not, the boy’s brains are unscathed, the worst genes eschewed. Me, I wasn't much help. At his age I folded failures into textbooks, blamed broken chalk for my public flubs; even now I count months on my knuckles, navigate the world by making an L of one hand.

6S

Kimberly King Parsons is a Research Arts fiction student in Columbia University's MFA program. She is the former Editor-in-Chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. Her fiction has appeared in elimae, Sojourn, and Suddenly: A Journal of Flash Fiction. Visit her here.