The new Air Jordans she’d been flexing at crew call on shooting day 41 of 59 are missing their treads, have been shoved into a plastic bag with her name on it hanging at the end of her hospital bed.
Tara Stillions Whitehead
Tara Stillions Whitehead is a writer and filmmaker from Southern California now working as Assistant Professor of Film, Video, and Digital Media at Messiah University in Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in several dozen journals and magazines, including Hobart, Fairy Tale Review, Cream City Review, and The Rupture. Her story, "Seven Bodies I Didn't Leave Behind" was included in Wigleaf's Top 50 in 2021, and she has received various Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions nominations. Her hybrid chapbook, Blood Histories, was released by South Carolina's Galileo Press/Free State Review, and her debut full-length collection, The Year of the Monster, which has been nominated for the Maya Angelou Book Award, is forthcoming with Unsolicited Press 9.27.22. A second collection of stories titled They More than Burned will be released by ELJ Editions in early 2023. "None of This Is Real" comes from that collection.