Last Remains – Catherine Moore

She begins at five in the morning to make the dead man’s doughnuts. This is the only domesticity she can add to these morbid moments; sweet in the face of neglected steel, disinfectants, numbness. Everything else permeates death. Other prisoners ache in the cinnamon scent and they covet the fried confection, for a brief moment. Until remembering the pastry crumbs that remain on the tray she walks through the corridor, after the executed body is removed by the warden.

Catherine Moore is the author of three chapbooks and the forthcoming ULLA! ULLA! (Main Street Rag). Her work appears in Tahoma Literary Review, Caesura, Southampton Review, Still: the Journal, Mid-American Review, Appalachian Heritage, and various anthologies. A Walker Percy and Hambidge fellow, her honors include the 2015 Best Small Fictions and Pushcart nominations.