David Cameron Writes

 This is my love letter to New Mexico. The chile harvest in Hatch, NM was always a statewide celebration as chiles were distributed through the state and roasted in large rotating metal baskets over gas flames in gas station parking lots and other sites throughout town. The fragrance of roasting chiles has recently been approved as the state aroma of NM.  Chlle Heaven was published in Rural Fiction Magazine. https://RuralFictionMagazine.com It was the farthest north she had ever been, but it was nowhere near as far north as Clementina wanted to go. She had learned from maps that north was up. She had learned from lying on her back looking at clouds that the sky was up. She had learned in science class that the moon was in the sky up beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. She had learned in church that heaven was up somewhere beyond the moon—even beyond the stars. Clementina wanted to go north to heaven and see her abuela; stand beside her again at the cracked Formica-topped ki

  On September 11, 2001, members of the terrorist group al-Qaeda, crashed airplanes into the towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, the third one heroically diverted by passengers. Twenty-two years later, I think of the families who were affected by this tragedy and know they still grieve. In no way do I mean to infer they should be over their grief, but I do wish for them rest. This short fiction was written in response to a prompt inviting me to use " As soon as Harriet entered the building, she headed to the seventh floor" as the opening sentence.                                                                                                       Rest As soon as Harriet entered the building, she headed to the seventh floor; the number seven corresponding to the seven bells and seven birds and seven brass horns that had summoned her to come. Harriet, or Hare, or Hettie as Mama Pat called her, was sure the summons to appear was the begi

  In late August, 2023, a white racist male murdered three black citizens at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, FL. The shooting claimed the lives of Angela Michelle Carr, 52, Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr., 19, and Jerrald Gallion, 29. CNN: The first 911 call went out at 1:09 p.m., seconds before the third victim, Gallion, walked into the store with his girlfriend.    Last Words Imagine the curtain is falling on your last day and you are down to the closing second of your life.   Imagine your last breath, the final pulsing zing firing the neural pathways of your desire and longing.   Imagine your last impression, the ultimate glance, the concluding image projected on your optic screen.   What words would you crave? What would be the crowning sounds you long to hear as ending comes?   A distinctly articulated declaration of love?   A soft, gentle whisper of peace and farewell?   A brave assurance your family will persevere?   A promise of eter

                  “I’m tired,” Lester said as he pulled his old heap to the grassy verge of the flat, two-lane country road. “You drive.” He slipped the manual gearshift on the steering column into neutral, left the car running, opened his door, and slowly unfolded to stand outside the car. He walked around to the passenger side, jerked open my door, and stood there as I looked up at him like a ‘possum caught in the headlights. I was 12 and had never driven anything but my Dad’s old tractor and a homemade go-cart. You’d think I’d be thrilled that my grandfather had just offered me the holy grail of adolescence. I was terrified.   Granddaddy was my mother’s father. He’d been in the battle of Meuse-Argonne in World War I, the largest and deadliest military offensive in U.S. history lasting from mid-September to Armistice Day on November 11, 1918. By the time I was 12, however, Granddaddy lived about seven miles outside Cleveland, GA in a shack down by the river.   Though my uncle

  Ronnie Biggers played an iconic role in my life. He was the first black child I knew in school. It was the fall of 1965, and we were entering the fourth grade, the first year Central Elementary in Gastonia, NC integrated. I wrote a poem recently about the opportunity to know Ronnie, who was, as I recall, the only black child in our class. My memory is fuzzy, but I clearly remember the day he and I put our arms side by side and reflected on the superficial identifiers “black” and “white.”   Yesterday I attended a lunch at The Free Clinics in Hendersonville celebrating Juneteenth. The Free Clinics is an organization that marshals the services of paid and volunteer health care providers to serve uninsured residents with physical and mental health care. I’ve been elected to their board, and I was there at lunch with my family and other board members and paid staff.   The director started off with a history of Juneteenth and the continuing racial injustice that pl

  Thoughts of my father are like a waking dream. I hear the whine of his lathe running in the garage at home where he and Mom lived nearly fifty years, and I see my father’s back in the dim glow of a bare, sixty-watt bulb. He’s wearing his old, faded work shirt and striped engineer’s hat, and he’s bent over the lathe making wood chips fly. He was often at his lathe creating small wooden gifts to give to newlyweds or young parents or anyone who might appreciate a set of three finely turned, highly polished walnut or maple or cherry biscuit cutters in graduated sizes.   One of my earliest memories of my father is from when I was four, maybe five. I’m sitting on his lap, peeling dried wood glue from his fingers. I didn’t know it then, but I realized later that he put extra glue on his hands and allowed it to dry before coming in from his workshop. It gave him an excuse to invite me onto his lap and “help” him get the glue off his fingers.   Dad was the oldest of