On "Dear England, Please Send Me a Redheaded Boy" by Kate Hill Cantrill (972 words) ***

Some shorter stories are like long poems--or perhaps a better, more interesting analogy would be a stretching exercise, only here the stretching that's taking place is in words and phrases and sentences rather than in the muscles. I'd love to hear someone read this aloud. Act it. Fill my ears with it. For now, I'll have to live with reading it to myself, here, at Blackbird.