When my car breaks down, my mother reminds me that bad things come in threes. “Be extra careful,” she says. She means, Fate’s watching you.
“How will being careful help?” I ask. I mean, If we can’t change our fate.
I buy a new canister of mace, just in case.
Larina Warnock works at a large school district in Southern Oregon helping young people prepare for work or college. She enjoys writing for 50-Word Stories while tossing a squeaky for her fetch-obsessed Boston terrier.
The weather report says low air quality. On the east side of the mountain, we bicker about the mundane: what’s for dinner, who’ll take out the garbage, why the Internet stopped working. We learn too late that the wind shifted, that the cell towers and more are in the way.
Larina Warnock is an educator in Oregon where she lives with her husband, three dogs, and a turtle older than she is.
Prayers clung to her throat, a hot lump of hope and hopelessness. She’d prayed before, years ago, but she’d given up on gods and goddesses and grand plans for the universe.
She swallowed hard, forcing the prayer into her center where somebody’s–anybody’s–deity might take it seriously.
“Please, just let him live.”
A one-time teen mother and high school dropout, Larina Warnock holds a doctorate degree and is an educator in rural Oregon where she lives with her husband, three dogs, and a turtle older than she is.
There are things they don’t tell you about living on this coast.
How the fog can roll in at any time, day or night. How the wind carries in long-dead souls who cling to your skin like mist. How the different life you wanted becomes the last life you lead.
A one-time teen mother and high school dropout, Larina Warnock holds a doctorate and is an educator on the Oregon coast. She lives with her husband, three dogs, and a turtle.
She cast enchantments throughout the house: the closets to appear larger than reality, the refrigerator to always smell like a favorite food, the living room to be the perfect temperature for whoever stood within. But it wasn’t until she enchanted the mirrors that someone made an offer on her house.
A one-time teen mother and high school dropout, Larina Warnock is an educator with a doctorate degree in rural Oregon.
She needed a safe place, so she shapeshifted into a mouse. She crawled beneath the blankets, chewed through the mattress, found a hole under the bed and slipped beneath the floorboards. There she fell fast asleep in the space between reality and imagination, her parents’ fighting muted, distant, and small.
A one-time teen mother and high school dropout, Larina Warnock holds a doctorate from Creighton University and teaches high school in rural Oregon where she lives with her husband, foster children, and a small zoo.