xTx, On Reading

"Reading, for me, is a place to go, a place to be. It’s sitting on the bottom porch step, bare feet in the dirt, looking up at my still-young mother sitting on the top step in shorts and tank top, hair falling forward, legs crossed, long and bare, paperback in her lap, ignoring me for the words. Reading is a dirt-floor basement, with a hidden corner filled with boxes turned sideways, crammed full of well-worn paperbacks, spines lined with white vertical fold marks obscuring titles, authors. Reading is the smell of the musty dank and the damp of the pages waiting for time to turn them yellow. Reading is taking from those boxes, sitting cross legged in the basement dirt, turning page after page, finding out and then understanding what kept my mother ignoring me, summer day after summer day after summer day."


{xTx is a writer living in Southern California. She has been published in places like PANK, SmokeLong, Monkeybicycle, elimae, kill author, and Wigleaf. She has a free e-book entitled Nobody Trusts a Black Magician available at Nonpress. Her new chapbook He Is Talking to the Fat Lady was released November 15th from Safety Third Enterprises. She says nothing at No Time To Say It.}