Cartin's Brick, fiction by Jarrid Deaton

My daughter, Laney, she got pregnant not long after her sixteenth birthday.  Me and Nora were disappointed, sure, but we didn’t come  down on her with lectures or anger. We just told her that we’d help out as much as needed, but she had a whole new world of responsibilities getting ready to crack open on [...]

Bonding, by Jarrid Deaton

My father, an old slaughterhouse man, decided to keep hens on our property around my twelfth birthday. The coop was an unbalanced structure that sat close to the cold white bricks of the slaughterhouse and just down from our garage. One night, not long after trading for some chickens with a hunter who wanted [...]