The Tall House
This short story by Amanda Rodriguez was published in the 2016 Fiction Issue #25 of Mud Season Review. With folkloric qualities, “The Tall House” is a coming-of-age story that draws on the traditions of magical realism to interrogate gender roles and interpersonal as well as societal gender-based power dynamics. It’s about the loss inherent in growing up and about how sometimes the loss is greater than the gain of staying in a safe, stable system. It’s about human frailty, breaking faith with sisters, and unhealable wounds. Be sure to read Mud Season Review’s interview with Rodriguez “Cracking Open and Rewriting Reality”.
Mud Season Review seeks to celebrate the full process of artistic creation, from inspiration to publication— welcoming into their open and collaborative community wide-ranging voices that tramp and track in the mud of human experience.
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The teenage ones would sit in circles listening to the latest in pop music on a static-filled radio, while butterflies flitted around them. Almost too quick to see, one of them would snatch a butterfly out of the sky. She would take the struggling creature and press its frantically beating wings to her eyelids, leaving a sheen of colored dust behind.
The Tall House