Up at the cabin, Bill O’Reilly demonstrates how to spread gravel.
Up at the cabin, a rainbow trout learns to swallow young women fishing from the bank.
Up at the cabin, thunder storms flood our shoes if left on the steps.
Up at the cabin, an ornithologist wearing khaki pants and shirt grows eagle talons used to shred a Wheaties box.
Up at the cabin, my brother saws up forty dead trees but never lays one fire.
Up at the cabin, cats perch on the roofs to stare in skylights like peeping toms.
Up at the cabin, crystal shatters when awestruck.
Up at the cabin, the closeted .22 shoots snapping turtles in its sleep.
Up at the cabin, golf carts belch black smoke and spin wheelies when not defacing the greens digging black soil donuts.
Up at the cabin, children weigh down a raft’s corner before age murders them.
Up at the cabin, cars drive to the dump to see miracles.
Up at the cabin, windows like to look important.
Up at the cabin, Pullman train car blueprints wallpaper pine hallways.
Up at the cabin, gratuities fester.
Up at the cabin, water balloons explode and leave a desert stain.
Up at the cabin, paddle a kayak and never again vote.
Up at the cabin, fish snorkel over listless, camouflaged humans hovering until nightfall.
Up at the cabin, ecstasy flits back and forth like a hummingbird foreshadowing blossom thrust.

Richard Holinger’s prose and poetry has appeared in The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, Boulevard, Witness, and elsewhere. He has received three Pushcart Prize nominations. His chapbook of innovative flash fiction, “Hybrid Seeds: Little Fictions,” was published last year by Kattywompus Press. This summer he won the 2012 Split Oak Press Flash Prose contest for his chapbook titled, “Not Everybody’s Nice,” about which novelist Cris Mazza described as Alice Munro meets Frederick Barthelme. He lives in Geneva, Illinois.