Janelle Bassett

Janelle Bassett‘s writing appears in The Offing, The Rumpus, Southern Humanities Review, Slice Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere. Her story collection, Thanks for This Riot, was short-listed for the 2019 Santa Fe Writers Project Award. She reads fiction for Split Lip Magazine and is online at janellebassett.com.

Content by Janelle Bassett

Fiction,

Garden Throne

BY Janelle Bassett

The man is collecting twigs and vines from around the yard and along the fence line, and the woman is twisting them together and then affixing them to a base they’ve made from concrete blocks. The blocks are the chair’s legs, and the seat is a garden hose coiled like a snake, or like a cinnamon roll, and then kept coiled with tied rope. The hose sits upon the legs, so if someone sat down they’d fall into a crevice. Maybe it’s a trap.