Doug Ramspeck

 
Overview

In the title story of The Owl That Carries Us Away, the young protagonist finds a possum skull in his back yard, washes it with a hose, carries it into the house, and sleeps with it in his bed. Only later does the reader come to understand how the skull connects to a recent near-tragedy in the household. In other stories, a newly-married woman imagines that mushrooms are growing from her husband’s body, a funeral director is robbed by a teenage boy outside of an NFDA convention in Chicago, a woman with memory loss falls back in love with her abusive dead husband, a child comes to believe that his father is a bear, and a woman absconds with her sister’s baby and envisions a life for them in Florida. Winner G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction. Bronze Winner Independent Publisher Award (IPPY).