One cricket was noticeably louder than the others.

“Eddie!” cried its housemate. “Bring it down a notch!”

The cricket named Eddie continued with his song.

“For Pete’s sake, Eddie—you win already! Every female and her ovipositor can hear you. You’ve got the loudest forewings, we get it! Now, please...”

Eddie’s song rose into a boiling crescendo.

“Eddie...Eddie! Did you hear me? This is a team effort!”

Eddie broke off, mid-chirp, and turned to the claimant.

“Over there, on the other side of the hill...” Eddie gestured. The housemate moved his compound eyes and looked. Over there looked like nothing. A sea of darkness.

“...a man moved to be alone with his broken heart. And yet, despite this conviction, each night he walks outside and to the end of his driveway. He stands there, silent, and waits for a voice.”

Laton Carter’s

first collection of poems, Leaving (University of Chicago Press), was selected by Mark Doty for the Oregon Book Award. His work appears or is forthcoming in Bear Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Jet Fuel Review, phoebe, The Brooklyn Review, The Citron Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and Shift: A Journal of Literary Oddities. His poem “The Starling” was selected by Dan Beachy-Quick as the winner of The Winter Anthology Contest 2017.

Carter’s short fiction has appeared in Brilliant Flash Fiction (Wow Us Third-Prize Winner: “Gustav Mahler’s Nipples”), Necessary Fiction, and in The Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2018.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ The Birds: 4 Poems by Carter in Entropy (11 December 2018)

⚡ Mountains, micro-fiction by Carter in Split Lip Magazine (October 2017)

⚡ Natural Disasters, two prose poems by Carter in profane (Winter 2016); includes audio reading