Kami Westhoff

Kami Westhoff is the author of Sleepwalker, winner of Minerva Rising’s Dare to Be Chapbook Contest, and Your Body a Bullet, co-written with Elizabeth Vignali. Her work has appeared in Meridian, Carve, Third Coast, Passages North, The Pinch, West Branch, Waxwing, and others. She teaches creative writing at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wa.

DEADBOLT by Kami Westhoff

March 31, 2020 · Fiction

In her dreams, she can walk. She unclips the cord that connects her to the Emergency switch, swings her bloated-log legs from the bed until her feet find her one-in-a-million prints in her purple slippers. Though it’s been over a year since she’s stood unassisted, her legs neither quake nor collapse. Her wheelchair sits next to her nightstand, a foam donut pillow the color of bile positioned just-right by her caregiver. She thrusts her foot forward. It meets the earth as though it’s the ice she and her first husband carved into arcs and spirals, tufts of ice fluffing the…

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