Brandi Wells has a BA in Creative Writing and her fiction appears in or is forthcoming in Pear Noir, Monkey Bicycle, Decomp, and Vulcan. She has a chapbook forthcoming as part the chapbook collective Fox Force 5, which is being released by Paper Hero Press. She blogs at http://brandiwells.blogspot.com/

Pizza Za’s

By the time we turned around, drove back past the church, and waited to turn left, the turtle was already blood splatter and torn pieces of shell on the side of the road.
“We should’ve cut through the parking lot,” I said. “Turned around sooner. Drove faster.”
He nodded. “You still want pizza?” he asked.
Burnt crust covered in bright red sauce. Carcasses piled atop.
“Sounds delicious,” I told him.
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Our Love

He told me the turtle in the box on my front porch symbolized our love.
“But it’s dead,” I told him. Slowest a turtle can be is dead.
He explained it was the empty space around the turtle that mattered. The way wind could blow against its shell.
I ran my finger over the shell and couldn’t tell the difference.

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Turtle Soup

After reading the story about making turtle soup, he began to stare into the aquarium, sometimes lifting the lid so he could stroke Sophie’s shell. He watched her crawl onto a rock. She felt like she was sunning herself, though only with the dull glow of my desk lamp. I could feel how nervous she was. I bought him vegetarian cookbooks, Italian cookbooks, and a video on ‘How to Roast a Christmas Goose.’