The Bath

by Jordan Sanderson

Bathing in possum milk, we were on the verge of deliverance. Light fell in scales from our eyes. We hissed like babies. We were torn between the branches of a birch and the plums rotting in a shirt someone left on the riverbank. We made it past the owls and big rigs into a shopping center, where we knew people who sold perfume, lingerie, and smoothies. They could tell we were different. They said we had that glow you see coming from white sheets on empty beds in an emergency room.

Jordan Sanderson earned a PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi. His work has appeared in Better: A Journal of Culture and Lit, Fiction Southeast, Bird’s Thumb, Scapegoat, Caketrain, and other journals, and he is the author of two chapbooks, Abattoir (Slash Pine Press, 2014) and The Formulas (ELJ Publications, 2014). Jordan lives near the Gulf of Mexico.