Timmy Reed

Rendezvous 

Things occur to me from time to time. My brain works on its own. I’m not always telling it what to do. I’ll be sitting outside the laundry with a cigarette and I will see two ants walking alongside a reservoir of grape soda that has filled a crack in the sidewalk. They will stop to visit the lake and I will be watching them, not thinking anything at this point, until they turn their little bodies around and walk off in divergent paths. Then I will find myself wondering: Will they ever see each other again? I’ll want to know if the ants share my concern. Do they wonder if they’ll ever see each other again? How far does an ant travel in its lifetime? It’s hard. I think about how small an ant’s legs are, how low the horizon appears to their eyes. 

Timmy Reed is from Baltimore, Maryland where he attends the University of Baltimore's MFA program in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts. He has served as a reader for Crazyhorse and was awarded third place in the 2011 Baltimore City Paper's Fiction Contest. He has stories forthcoming from Connotation Press, Black Heart Magazine, The Rusty Nail, and the Pure Slush print anthology, gorge.