When Everything Gets Back to Normal

By William Pruitt

We’re living in a bungalow

in Western Florida when Wolf Boy attacks.

My wife gets out of the house

while I distract

A second, larger

intruder joins the fray

we get in the car and tear down

the coast road past the causeway

We stop at someone’s painted lady

to use the bathroom on the second floor

by the time we get to Dunedin,

word has spread about our home invasion

Everybody’s talking about it as if we’re not the only ones

we meet friends and go out for breakfast,

there’s scattered diner talk, silverware reflecting

voices of amusement and anxiety

—Is Wolf Boy dead? —What about Skeleton Boy?

I keep thinking of the iris prints

in the stranger’s bathroom

and the osprey nests atop power poles you could

see from the road we sailed down in terror.

When everything is normal will anything be left.

I say to the waiter, —Isn’t it like

we’re living in Dick Tracy?

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William Pruitt

William Pruitt is a fiction writer, storyteller, poet, and an Assistant Editor with Narrative Magazine He has published stories and poems in such places as Ploughshares, Anderbo.com, Otis Nebula , Crack of the Spine Literary Magazine, Midway, Indiana Voice Journal, Hypertext, the Tipton Poetry Journal, Leaping Clear and Cottonwood.

His most recent book, The Binding Dance,is a sequence of poems thematically unified by the need for story in the dreams of time and the self.Characterized by direct speech, it avoids literary affectation, while preserving the values of sound and metaphor.

Latest posts by William Pruitt (see all)

• Late Fall 2020 - September 22, 2021
• When Everything Gets Back to Normal - September 22, 2021