Fiction | July 24, 2018
Ordinary Time
Carolyn Ogburn
The parking lot was light by six in the morning, but its streetlights still buzzed and flickered yellow in the gray-green dawn. House wrens flitted across the abandoned asphalt, little gray birds that had nested in the electric curl of the still-lit o’s and a’s, the crook of the G. The ditches hummed with crickets, frogs. In a few hours, Caleb knew, the parking lot would seem quiet again, full of everyday traffic: the occasional rattle of shopping carts bumping along the broken pavement, car doors opening and closing, the sounds of ordinary people doing ordinary things. It would seem quiet, but for the yellow police tape enclosing a broad empty space at the center of the lot, a space that still smelled of gasoline.
This story is not currently available online.
If you are a student, faculty member, or staff member at an institution whose library subscribes to Project Muse, you can read this piece and the full archives of the Missouri Review for free. Check this list to see if your library is a Project Muse subscriber.
Want to read more?
Subscribe TodaySEE THE ISSUE
SUGGESTED CONTENT

Fiction
Dec 11 2020
Murphy, Murphy
Murphy, Murphy One of my names is Cece. It has many iterations. When scolded, Cecelia. At my worst, Cecelia Rose. In bed, I am named to the rhythm of my… read more

Fiction
Dec 11 2020
Not All That White
Not All That White Everyone on the raising gang notices when the journeyman connector, Joseph Bogoslavsky, reaches into his fifty-pound leather tool belt for four massive bolts and then sinks… read more

Fiction
Dec 11 2020
Way Back, Well Before My Divorce
Way Back, Well before My Divorce There was this other thing that happened. Or really two things bundled. While visiting my then girlfriend’s older sister in New York City, I… read more