When I was writing my young-adult short-story collection, Killing Miss Kitty and Other Sins, I couldn’t quite decide whether I was writing memoir or fiction. Sometimes what I wrote was authentically memoir, but the longer, more shaped pieces tended toward fiction. Because I had to decide to go one way or the oher, I chose to present the longer short stories as fiction and to take the authentically memoir pieces out for another collection.

I have several other projects I need to complete before I can return to the memoir pieces to decide exactly what to do with them, but in the meantime, I thought it would be fun to share them. So I’m putting them in here, one at a time. Here's the latest chapter:

Walking home from school. The journey from school to the mill and the mill houses where I lived was a little more than a mile, a leisurely mile that stretched almost the full length of Walnut Street, Oglesby’s main street. A mile with lots of time for thinking.

I passed the two-story stucco building that housed the City Offices, the Police Department, and, at the top of the stairs, the Library, and thought about the books waiting for me there. Next time I went to the library I’d get another of the stories about twins from other lands, maybe The Eskimo Twins this time. I’d always wanted to live in an igloo.