Tara Stillions Whitehead

Tara Stillions Whitehead is a writer and filmmaker from Southern California now living and teaching in Central Pennsylvania. Her work has has appeared in or is forthcoming from a variety of journals, and magazines including Fairy Tale Review, The Rupture, and PRISM international. Her full-length collection of stories, The Year of the Monster, will be published with Unsolicited Press in 2022, and her hybrid chapbook, Blood Histories, is forthcoming at Galileo Press.

UNDERTOW by Tara Stillions Whitehead

We pinned their name tags to our knitted sacks. Reynolds. Solomon. Childs. Kennedy. We wrote their room numbers on our wrists and waited for them on the cement benches near the commandant’s office. We sat with our legs crossed, condoms in our back pockets, while they marched the line in their parade uniforms. We tracked sand from dorm to bedroom sheets. Someone’s mother washed their civvies and kept them in the guest room or the pool house, convinced we were the ones doing the civilizing. There were boys whose names we couldn’t share. Boys whose names we’d seen taped inside…

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