I just read a story by Katrina Denza. “Snake Dreams“. It’s up at the Storyglossia site. It came 1st Runner Up in the Storyglossia Fiction Prize 2006. It starts off like this:

As soon as I pull into my father’s driveway, a light goes on inside the condo. I don’t have to wonder what he’s doing up this time of the morning; he’s always had a knack for knowing what I’m up to.

“Snake Dreams” is about a lost young woman, who gets kicked out of her apartment for sleeping with her flatmate’s boyfriend. She crashes at her father’s house. He’s alone, has been for fourteen years, ever since his wife, the young woman’s mother, left the both of them. Or so the story goes. On the surface the story is about action, about life choice. The choice to leave a family or to stay. That action affects the other members of the family. Affects them so much, it is like a recurring dream, a nightmare. But it isn’t the action itself, really, but the concealment of the true nature of the action. Katrina writes about concealment and how uncovering what was once hidden changes everything.

Read the rest of Katrina Denza’s “Snake Dreams” at Storyglossia.