Finally published!!! After lots of hard work and writing and research, Foliate Oak published my tiny little flash fiction story, No Need For Tommy Guns. It’s in their December 2014 edition, but last fall/holidays were pretty awful and crazy for me, this is the first chance I’ve had to celebrate it.
You can check it out here: http://www.foliateoak.com/rachel-bjerke.html

Sometimes I get sad, when I think about my old, dented, un-cool car, and my ratty clothes. I feel bad that I only have one child (even though people think I should have two), I get depressed when I think I’ll never be rich, I’ll never be famous, I’ll never drive a ferrari.
And then I see the sprinkler—the one my daughter plays in—and I think of the gallons of clean, drinkable water that I am wasting just so my daughter can play.
And I remember that millions of people haul their water on their backs for miles, I remember that millions of people drink water scraped from muddy, diseased puddles. I remember that factories dump toxic chemicals upstream from untold numbers of human being’s drinking water, that water in some places will kill you, that some children don’t bathe, don’t brush their teeth, don’t drink their water because they know it will make them sick, and millions of others are literally dying for clean water. I remember that even in my own country clean water isn’t abundant everywhere. Clean water is a treasure denied to billions…
…and my daughter has the privilege of running through streams of clean water, just for fun, just for nonsense, just to make her smile.
And then I can’t think of a single thing to be sad about.
