"INDIANA PROBLEM (THREE STEAKS)" By Julia Story

The babysitter came with a suitcase full of crap we liked: old clothes, naked Barbies with limbs scratched by some unknown girl. We ate TV dinners; mine rubber corn, burnt square of chocolate, spongy metallic rectangle.*At The CamelotI would eat the entire prime rib on its bed of soggy toast before taking my ice cream cone into the bar with its full suit of armor, drunksI’d recognize in daylight.*I left the charred fat in a little wall, left the camper and walked into the firefly-packed dark green dark and no one looked for me. 

Julia Story is the author of Post Moxie (Sarabande Books), winner of the Ploughshares 2010 John C. Zacharis First Book Award, and a chapbook, The Trapdoor (dancing girl press). Her recent work can be read at Sixth Finch, H_NGM_N, and Gulf Coast. She is 2016 recipient of a Pushcart Prize and lives in Somerville, MA with her husband and Dachshund, Edie.