I tore the name from the act first. Then it was a tongueless bell, a lone exodus I made from a night, my unassembled limbs pinned like sky on glass.
In the morning I stood beside myself as a mangled dream twisting in fever. The sun was a knife slanting in near the foot of my bed. I had no interest in being found—by the name, the truth day brings—so I stripped and under wet heat I began the process of burial.
First, I refused to name what happened. Then it did not have a story.
Daniel Garcia's essays appear or are forthcoming in SLICE, Denver Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Guernica, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. Poems appear or are forthcoming in The Puritan, The Arkansas International, Ploughshares, Zone 3, Gulf Coast, and others. A recipient of a Short Prose Prize from Bat City Review and a Poetry Prize from So to Speak, Daniel has received awards and scholarships from Tin House, Just Buffalo Literary Center, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and currently serves as a reader and editorial assistant for Split Lip Magazine. Daniel’s essays also appear as Notables in The Best American Essays.
