Writer
L.L. Madrid lives in Tucson where she can smell the rain before it falls. She resides with her daughter, an odd cat, and on occasion, a scorpion or two. She likes food spicy, beer sour, and words whispered.
She was awarded Alternating Current's 2017 Luminaire Award for Best Prose for her short story, Ephemeral Girls.
Aiming for God is nominated for Best of the Net 2017.
Summertime Dusk won 101 Word's 17th writing contest.
What Groupon Says was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2016.
Her short story, "The Rat Girl of Saint Bruno's," received honorable mention in The Speculative Literature Foundation's 2015 Working Class Writers Grant.
When she's not writing her own stories, she's reading for Speculative 66, where she is Editor-In-Chief. (http://speculative66.weebly.com/)
Look for L.L. Madrid's forthcoming story Aural Love, in Factor Four Magazine.
Links to additional stories can be found at her website.
Portfolio
In seventeen years, little has changed on Catalina Avenue. The cars that line the narrow, curling street are coated year-round with desert dust. Old pictures reveal that our...
Red Touches Yellow by L.L. Madrid
Though lifeless, the onyx eye of the mourning dove reflects dawn's sunburst. My sister Vera discovered the bird, and she wants to know what I think of it. We sip from mugs of...
An alert chimes on my phone. Like one of Pavlov's dogs, I react instantly. It takes only a swift click to read the breaking news. Active shooter. Fifteen to twenty hostages....
Mara twisted the lid from the old pickle jar, releasing its tangle of vinegar, yeast, and rust. She reached in and plucked out the first bottle cap. Heineken green....
Tiny Stitches Few people in the world find growth charts as interesting as I do. Madeline certainly doesn't. She's my half-sister and my favorite person. Even though I'm seven...
Music from the B-side by L.L. Madrid | Bartleby Snopes
To occupy my mind, I play the only game I can. Lenses. Pretending my eyes are twin cameras I pan them from my left side peripheral to my right and select my target. Today it's...
Here Fishing Every Sunday my grandfather fishes at Ripple Pond. It’s an old habit, one anchored in boyhood. His mother allowed him to forgo church for fishing, as he was more...
Wild Bruises and Mechanical Birds in the Blackened Hours by L L Madrid - Reflex Fiction
Every night, the great rock face puts on a show depicting the lifetime of a bruise. First, the sun melts over the cliffs, wounding them with a bright red glow. The hue deepens...
Nineties Girlhood No one ever praised me for being smart, only for being good. Good meant pretty and quiet, pressed like a flower in the middle of a bell curve. The first time I...
Marisol turns eight in the midst of a wildfire summer. The mountains burn, and the valley smells of mesquite and smoke hovers, always in your eyes. Even lifelong desert...
A gathering of bleary-eyed people waited for the number seven bus. Nods of acknowledgment bobbed from chin to chin. Though Marin stood at the corner every weekday for the past...
Gila woodpeckers forged a hollow at the heart of a great saguaro. It was a water witch who first filched the three-eyed coyote skull and secreted it in the hole, nestling the...
It’s hard to fall asleep. It’s been that way for awhile, but tonight is especially bad. Annalise Yancy showed up to English with her hair cut almost all off. Sitting behind her,...
The Rat Girl of Saint Bruno's |
Sister Mary Elizabeth acts cheerful, but she's afraid. My nose crinkles. Underneath the mildew, I can smell her fear. She calls me sweetheart and is careful not to look at me....
In the early hours of a not-so-long-ago Christmas Eve, snow blanketed the prairie patchwork and rolled through the wide, empty streets of Buck, South Dakota. In some other place...