Forty Minutes Outside of La Pine, Oregon by Lizzy Acker
Forty Minutes Outside of La Pine, Oregon
There was so much snow. Your bag was in the back of the truck and we took it out and shook it off and I went to the motel office to ask for a blanket because the heater didn’t seem to be working and our room was freezing cold. You got into the thin, springy bed but you wouldn’t take your jeans off. You didn’t want to fall asleep because you wanted to get back on the road as soon as the snow stopped. All you wanted was for the snow to stop so we could get back on the road, and all I wanted was for you to take your jeans off. You turned on the TV to Planet Earth and we watched spiders climb cave walls in Central America. The snow was so thick it seemed to replace the air outside. You fell asleep and I took my jeans off anyway.
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LIZZY ACKER'S work has been published in Nano Fiction, Tramp Quarterly, We Who Are About To Die, sPARKLE & bLINK and elsewhere and she is a blogger for KQED Arts.
She was the co-creator/curator of the San Francisco reading series Funny/Sexy/Sad and she has read with Bang Out, RADAR, Quiet Lightning and others.
Her first book, Monster Party, was released in December 2010 by Small Desk Press.
She was born in Oregon but now lives in San Francisco where she writes status updates for public media and blogs daily at lizzyacker.com.
She participate in Small Doggies Reading Series PDX011 last July 2011, and this piece was published in the 3rd Reading Series Chapbook, available for sale now.