"This is the last straw," Alma said. She had just opened the mail at the kitchen table. Sitting opposite, Walter peered over the top of his newspaper. "What straw is that?" "It's anothe ... [+]
Mountain Nose's story, "While We Breathe," was selected a finalist in the fall 2018 Set Stories Free Contest, a creative project funded by the Knight Foundation and co-hosted by Short Edition and the Public Library Association.
One March afternoon in 1969 I was on the deck of a Chinese junk listening to the water clop against the wooden hull and enjoying a breeze that blew toward the South China Sea. The junk bobbed rhythmically with twenty other boats tethered to the Phan Thiet wharf. At sunset, Paul Dettman and I would sail for Phu Qui Island fifty-two klicks and twenty-four hours away to reconnoiter that sandy speck, so tiny and remote the Hueys refused to go looking for it because the ocean winds were strong and they might run out of fuel before finding it.The boat beside me rocked with the wake while its crew lo