Homesteading

“What can you do, woman?” The man in the doorway addressed me, but he was looking at Lily. His stomach poked out between his greasy pants and hole-ridden sweater. One of his hands was out of sight behind his back; it probably held a gun.

This story originally appeared in 2008 in PS Showcase No. 2: Conscientious Inconsistencies from British publisher PS Publishing. This is the story’s first publication in North America.

I’m taking a break from flash fiction this week. Instead, I’m posting this story from my collection, Conscientious Inconsistencies, because it represents in fictional form some of the ideas I have about warriorship. As Lyndon Perry said in his review of this story on The Fix, tying this story to another piece from the collection, Thirty-One Rules for Fulfilling Your Destiny: “The new dynamic is not the byproduct of the typical male way of warriorship. But, then, as the clan discovers, Isabel is not your typical warrior.”