Aleta Davis
Bio
Policy analyst, mother, and aspiring gardener trying a hand at short fiction. On twitter @aleta_rose.
Achievements (1)
Stories (12/0)
Meltancholy
Trash is strewn across our driveway where it meets the dirt road. Take-out containers, crumpled paper towels, old banana peels that would more properly be in the compost. The trash can itself lies on its side, its heavy black lid splayed open to reveal a pile of white 20-gallon bags, several of them recklessly torn.
By Aleta Davis6 months ago in Fiction
Alight
“After the mother lays the egg, the father balances it on top of his feet for a full two months, using a pouch on his lower belly to keep it warm. They can’t even leave the egg to eat. In the meantime, the mother goes off to hunt for fish, sometimes traveling up to 50 miles away.”
By Aleta Davis2 years ago in Fiction
Onward
Around the time they’d moved to Montana, Sarah started having a recurring dream that she was driving a car she could not slow down. The dreams typically took place back in LA, where the freeway traffic was a supporting character in everyone’s personal drama. It wasn’t exactly a Speed situation; the brakes worked and she could use them, but they were about a tenth as effective as normal. She’d find herself crossing four lanes on the 405, hunched forward in an intense focus with both hands on the wheel, narrowly avoiding collisions left and right as she urgently sought to reduce her velocity. Sarah never got in an accident in the dreams, somehow, but would wake sweat-soaked and breathing heavily, her heart still thumping from the effort required of each near-miss.
By Aleta Davis2 years ago in Fiction
Read All Over
The summer Melissa turned 12 was when the murders happened. Or more precisely, when the two victims disappeared. At least a handful of Wilston’s 5063 residents stubbornly held out hope until both bodies had been recovered. In early June, Marissa Johnson, the 32-year-old, had gone missing after she left for her receptionist job at a veterinarian’s office. Just a few weeks later, Melinda Gacy never came home after going go-karting with her uncle and some friends. As the haze of Independence Day weekend set in, hushed conversations about the disappearances thrummed alongside the cicadas.
By Aleta Davis2 years ago in Fiction
From This Day Forward
The drive to her parents’ house felt like a trip back in time, in more ways than one. The semi-urban sprawl gave way to strip malls, then the strip malls to cow pastures.The main highway, named for a Confederate general, traversed Civil War battlefields that stretched miles. The historic landmarks were interspersed with the personal: the taco stand where Janelle had worked her first job, her hair perpetually tinged with grease; the tattoo parlor she’d tried to talk her way into with a brash teenage confidence that now seemed unthinkable; the 24-hour diner all the cool kids descended on after prom. All left her with a subtle feeling of unease.
By Aleta Davis3 years ago in Fiction
- First Place in SFS 4: Golden Summer Challenge
In BloomFirst Place in SFS 4: Golden Summer Challenge
The first six weeks after the baby was born were the hardest, as everyone had told Estelle they would be. The days ran together and her body felt foreign, raw and reapportioned. She tried to nap alongside her daughter, heeding the separate urgings of all four of her aunts to sleep when the baby sleeps, but instead found herself lying tired but wide-eyed, scrutinizing every rise and fall of Mona’s tiny stomach. The nights brought no reprieve. Mona rarely slept for longer than a three-hour stretch, and the 5:00am thunderstorms inevitably woke her, ushering in a new day before the last had had a chance to settle into memory.
By Aleta Davis3 years ago in Fiction
