“…Thought it was a good solution, hanging with the raisin girls.

~Tori Amos

“Hey! Guess what I have!”

Samantha dipped her hand inside a duffel bag and pulled out an old Thom McCann shoe box. She shook it over her head, then held it like the Lion King revealing the new baby cub. She placed it on the picnic table, opened the top and dove her hand beyond the frayed edges of cardboard, bringing forth a stack of old Polaroid and Kodachrome in different shapes and sizes. A mischievous smile splashed across her face.

“This is us.” She said.

We gathered around her as she shuffled the photos like a deck of cards. One by one, we saw frozen moments in time long forgotten. Our pimply past of lost after school afternoons in sepia shades of faded hues.

There we were on Laura’s bedroom floor listening to her older brother’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” album.  There’s the Halloween when Samantha dressed like a leather chick hooker. Here’s the eighth grade picnic when it snowed. There’s Little League practice on the fields of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic School. Our young years before Samantha slipped away from us, lured by another set of friends who brought her to the dark side, away from the innocence, the cereal and milk –  toward the vodka and meth.  Her thumbs fanned out our days together, cornflake girls swimming in suburbia   This was before she disappeared from our lives before senior year.  She slipped into our peripheral view as we funneled through a rite of passage, moving on to the next step in life,  when we looked in the side view mirror and wondered if we left her by the side of the road.

“Raisin Girl”. Excerpt from “Entrances & Exits: A Book of Short Stories” to be published on Amazon,  October 2014.