The next Weekly Rumpus features fiction from Wynne Hungerford. Here’s an excerpt:
After losing the foot, my daddy gave up on going places. He sat on the leather couch in his office at home. He drank Yoo-hoos and stopped throwing away the bottles. He peeled off the label, painted the glass with shades of pink and green. He placed the bottles on the window sills, and I remember sitting with him one afternoon when the phenomenon occurred. A blanket covered his legs and I forgot what was missing under there.
He said, “The light’s coming home.”
In walked this sunlight I’d been waiting for my entire life. It moved like someone returning from a long day at work, tired and looking for a place to settle. This light had been serving the sky all day, and now it relaxed, loosened. The Yoo-hoo bottles glowed. Daddy’s body became more than a sad cocktail of blood and bones in that light, which turned his cheeks the color of three-leaf clovers, and he looked like a stained-glass figure in a church window. Nothing else changed. The office was still filled with papers, encyclopedias, and broken lamps. They were barely touched, while he sat in the palm of something big.
Wynne Hungerford’s work can or will soon be found in the Tulane Review, Pilgrimage Magazine, The Whitefish Review, The South Carolina Review, The McNeese Review blog, Pif Magazine, edible Upcountry, and Montana Public Radio’s program Reflections West. She was a poetry finalist for both the NFAA YoungArts contest and the Norman Mailer College Poetry Prize. In 2013, her story “Ladies Chocolate Night” won The Meadowlark Award. Wynne is a recent graduate of the University of Montana.
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