This Endless Road

By Michael Overa

THIS ENDLESS ROAD is Michael Overa's second short story collection published by Unsolicited Press. In the story TEMPORARY HOME, Michael Overa writes,

"The turn off to Sunny Groves Trailer Park lies just off Route 82 and is shy of town by three or four miles. At the crest of the hill the road seems to stretch interminably towards the horizon. As a kid, Selena had looked forward to the monthly treks out there to visit her uncle, Patrick, but at some point, she realized that the whole place was atavistic. A place captured in the ambered kitsch of the last half of the 20th century. Everything in the park is a fragment of one forgotten era or another. The short, paved driveway quickly dissolves into gravel and the gravel quickly dissolves into a patchiness that is more dirt than gravel. It was a thing that had seemed almost fairy-tale-ish when she was younger. Now she sees it for the tattered relic that it is, and it depresses her, mostly because she holds it up against the quaint suburb where she grew up in.
Endless summers of her youth are marinated in the nostalgia of dust clouds chasing car tires until everything was coated in a chalky film that seemed to insulate the park from the rest of the world. It felt like being marooned on a tropical island. She can still remember the delightful disgust of Patrick’s neighbor, a piratical and ancient man who liked to pop the glass eye out of his socket and roll it around in his mouth. But he was gone now. He’d been gone long before she was old enough to drive to the park on her own."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unsolicited Press
• Release date: Mar 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370289189

Michael Overa

Michael Overa was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. After completing his MFA at Hollins University Michael returned to Seattle where he currently works as a writing tutor and is a writer-in-residence with Seattle's Writers In The Schools Program. His work has appeared in the Portland Review, East Bay Review, Fiction Daily, Inlandia, and Across the Margin, among others.

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