The faintest click, just barely audible, of fall leaves launching from the ash tree, where my daughter used to swing some thirty years ago, reminds me of the summer morning when a red-tailed hawk perched, silencing the songbirds with faint clicks of his scimitar beak, until my phone rang and I learned that, overseas, too long disowned, my daughter had that very morning died.
Max Harris was born in England, received his PhD from the University of Virginia, and now lives in Wisconsin. His short stories have been published in A capella Zoo, Amoskeag, and/or, Flash Fiction Magazine, HOOT, and other journals later in the alphabet. He has won the Wisconsin Academy Review/Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops Short Story Contest and the rather more scholarly Otto Gründler Book Prize.
A Quiet Courage 