Lacy Loar-Gruenler
Bio
Lacy Loar-Gruenler worked for a decade as a newspaper journalist and editor. In March 2023, she completed an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature at Harvard University.
Stories (17)
Filter by community
One Minute to Noon. Top Story - May 2024.
“OK, guys!” I screech over the macaw-like chatter in my sophomore English class. My students are sharing mementos they accumulated during summer vacation. The assignment is to interview each other and write an expository essay about another student’s treasure: Misty’s coquina shells and sand dollars from Florida, Ruth’s two Navajo pottery mugs from New Mexico, Roxy’s perfume from Paris, Kevin’s chocolate from Hershey Pennsylvania, a picador’s sword from a bullfight in San Fermin Spain, where one of my favorite students, Manny Pérez, ran with the bulls at festival.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler2 years ago in Fiction
Pickled Herring with My Dad. Runner-Up in Snacktime Sonata Challenge. Top Story - March 2024.
When I was three, my dad sat on the edge of my bed many nights after placing a plate of our favorite snack by my ballerina music box, and then delved into Treasure Island or Nancy Drew.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler2 years ago in Poets
Dead Snow
The relationship lived and died in winter, born when the sun made the pristine snow glitter like gems flecking a magic white blanket covering Boston in a reverent, heavy silence. I was from New Orleans and had never seen snow. Garrett introduced me to the angels you make, the hot chocolate you spike with Irish whiskey, the icicles hanging from the skeletal trees like stalactites hanging in a cave. You can shoot them with BB guns, sending them crashing silently into the magic snow blanket. I learned to love it all, along with the chapped lip, chattering teeth kisses and finally, the lovemaking under thermal blankets in the meat locker cold apartment.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler2 years ago in Fiction
The Fallen Angel Murder. Runner-Up in the Whodunit Challenge.
A 10-year-old boy they call Hams found the body in a shallow grave in a wooded area just outside Norman, Oklahoma. It wasn’t a body really, just picked and bleached bones scattered among the fallen autumn leaves, as if scavenging animals had smelled the buried offal and made short work of digging up the meal. The incessant heat in late August had burned off the marrow and shrunk the bones, so it was difficult to know much about them. Hams picked up the skull with a hole in it and intact, almost perfect white teeth that the medical examiner later determined showed early signs of ravage from drug use. Tufts of dyed blonde hair clung to the top of it. Unearthed nearby, police discovered a patterned vinyl backpack, bright aqua with a worn handle, filled with moldering pictures of two children, a toothless newborn and a toddler, drooling and smiling. They also found a lone piece of what looked like a gold earring glittering under the late sun. It had been separated from its backing, and a few worn scratch marks caked in dirt may have been a faint initial, indistinguishable as a D, or B, or P.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler2 years ago in Criminal
Livelocity. Runner-Up in the Neolomicro Challenge.
My husband of 52 years snores lightly in his hospital bed, wincing occasionally from the fall that landed him here. I dab a white washcloth in the ice bucket on the little wheeled stand separating him from the blinking lights and beeping monitors and his wheelchair. The cold to his temples makes him groan. Perhaps he’s dreaming and it’s not the pain. I kick off my shoes and climb into the mechanical bed, folding myself around him like a spoon. Don’t die, please, I whisper.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler2 years ago in Fiction
French Kiss Chapter 14 Hair
I nestled in Frédéric’s embrace at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, the cacophony of travelers’ voices, loudspeakers, and the squeaky wheels of dragged luggage fading as I tucked my head beneath his chin, willing his pulse to sync with mine, pretending I was breathing life into the cells he had dispatched against the cancer. He was thinner. The wig fit him like an inside-out fur cap without the ear flaps, more fur-hair than he ever had, more than his gaunt face needed. It was cut professionally, like some mirage of normalcy. His sooty eyelashes were gone, but the chemo and radiation had not completely erased his five o’clock shadow and caterpillar brows, now pencil lines above his doe eyes.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler2 years ago in Chapters
The High Cost of Living
Most of the members of the Oldtimers Club are gone by attrition, their ashes thrown to the wind and water, freed from their aches and woes. Only three of us remain. All in our 70s, we are more afraid of death as each year passes, but who isn’t? We avoid the end of the road by not thinking about it, by just traveling it in search of some small joy, beginning with waking another day. My sister, Ida Lupino, says it would be a joy if we enlist new old members. She decides we need a man to join our club, all the men have died, and so she finds Larry Sousa at the beach one day, dragging me there on a late afternoon to meet him. Our club has rules of course, not unfair but decidedly unconventional, and loyal members can’t be squeamish.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler2 years ago in Horror
Nabokov's Lolita
My mom taught me to read when I was two. I toddled around the neighborhood reciting Dr. Seuss to anyone who would listen. By six, I had inhaled Nancy Drew, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and anything Robert Louis Stevenson. By eight, I had blown through my dad’s library of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, much of Steinbeck, and a lot of private detective novels like Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler2 years ago in BookClub
