With Wings and Trumpet

Stephen Gibson

With Wings and Trumpet

After Arturo Rodríguez’s Sin Título, from the series La Tempestad, 1998, oil on canvas

You shall not visit the three empty houses, my grandmother said. She stared at me, not to be questioned, vowing to never forgive me should I disobey, and then I watched, envious of her driver’s license, months away from my own, as we drove to each house so she could carefully point them out. That year, I was trying to choose, as young boys feel they must, between sitting in seminary and wearing a black mask into liquor stores. When I went looking for the houses, two were filled with earthly things: first, the girl— we taught each other about our bodies—and second, those dear drugs that yanked me so high out of school, off my chair. In the third, during the weeks of my grandmother’s passing, the angel of comfort found me: while I hid in the dust on that floor, with a touch like lightning, it anointed me with blood, water, the peace of roots held tight.

Stephen D. Gibson received his MA in Creative Writing from Purdue University and his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. His fiction has won an Associated Writing Programs Intro Award for Short Stories, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice, and appeared in The Southeast Review, Quarterly West, Story Quarterly, and elsewhere.