Sarah Braunstein
Sarah Braunstein’s first novel is The Sweet Relief of Missing Children. She lives in Portland, Maine, teaches at Colby College and the University of Southern Maine, and works with elementary-school students through the East End Power Pens, a group she founded. She’s learning everything there is to know about car engines and clean energy from her eight-year-old son.
— From February 2016Night Of The Moose
Our car climbs a hill, and as we descend, we see it: A dinosaur. A swaying beast, disappearing into the woods. There’s a car stopped on the other side of the road, its doors open. Did it stop to see the dinosaur? No. The dinosaur stopped the car. A woman stands in the road, waving her hands. We see two young girls in T-shirts and shorts but no shoes, standing together in sparkling shards of glass, screaming. Billy slams on the brakes.
February 2016Benedicta
My ninety-two-year-old grandmother died on August 1, 2009, after a long decline. I wasn’t there during her last moment. Nobody was. The nursing home said she died at 1:45 PM, which is when the nursing-home attendants — underpaid women in practical shoes, with pictures of toddlers in their pockets — had gone about their routine bed checks, entered her room, and found she was no longer breathing.
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