HOWLING DOGS & CRINKLED WHISPERS

The first place we landed, upon immigrating to America, was Vallejo California, a trailer park. I had a funny accent. Part working class British and part Northern Irish. No one can understand me. We ate something Hamburger Helper every evening. And NBC movies, with so many adverts, with Clint Eastwood and monkeys, and also Lee Majors playing a stuntman. One day, with a hankering for chocolate, my mum and I wandered out of the trailer park to find some chocolate. It was a long walk over a bridge and down the edge of the great American highway. We found some chocolate but it was waxy. We were not fond of wax chocolate.

Here is a microfiction, from my novel in microfiction and prose poems, Never Mind the Beasts, forthcoming from Dostoyevsky Wannabe in May 2020. It is called “Howling Dogs and Crinkled Whispers.” It takes place in the 1980s as new immigrants in America (a trailer park in Vallejo, California).