Volume 2 Number 1 • Spring 2010
She was just as out of place at the Dallas Cotillion as Christmas lights shining brightly in a mid-July day. She couldn't dance. She couldn't mingle. She didn't have a proper date. In fact, she had snuck in, alone, through the catering entrance, after she had read an article the week before, about this posh soiree in one of those swank, metropolitan magazines, the ones that are read almost exclusively by lawyers, high society Texas matrons, and sparkling blonde debutants (the vast majority of the latter, named either ‘Ashley,' ‘Haley' or ‘Heather'.) Now, standing at the bar as alone as a prickly saguaro on the Sonoran desert, she was surrounded by elegant couples sipping green-apple martinis and cooing to one another about their planned Paris excursions. She soothed herself with two cans of Budweiser: one crumpled in each clenched fist.
Brad Rose was raised in southern California, and lives in Boston. His work has appeared in Tattoo Highway, SleetMagagazine.com., Boston Literary Magazine, Up and Under/QND Review, FutureCycle Poetry, Getting Something Read, Espresso Stories, SMITH Magazine, Imagination and Place (forthcoming) and Six Sentences. Links to his work can be found at http://bradrosepoetry.blogspot.com. His short fiction blog is http://sixsentences.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?user=1d0yhjn3i0nkf.