Neil’s birthday cake tumbled from the roof of the car, exploded on the windshield. I pulled over on the shoulder, extracted what cake, plastic domed cake tray shrapnel I could; I knew I had to get a new birthday cake. It didn’t matter to Helen that Neil would turn the slice we gave him into a smear. She wanted to capture the moment, give Neil an answer when he started questioning what he was like growing up. “Memories are overrated”, my father said.

J. Bradley is a writer based out of Orlando, FL. His chapbook, Neil, won the 2015 Five [Quarterly] e-Chapbook Contest for fiction. He runs the Central Florida based reading series/micro chapbook publisher There Will Be Words and lives at iheartfailure.net.