Karen Toralba

Karen Toralba is an American working as a school administrator in Bangkok, Thailand. She has a master’s degree in English from William Carey University and has worked in education for 20 years. Her fiction has been accepted in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Fiction on the Web, The Fictional Café and Buddy lit zine. Find her at facebook.com/southernerabroad. She also published a memoir of her time in China called A Year There available on Amazon.

Crystal Spirit

I can’t recall if I’ve ever been down such a long, narrow road—if you can call it a road—before or since. The word rural just doesn’t seem to accurately describe the area. Think the middle of nowhere but then go behind the shed of middle of nowhere, down by a creek, into the woods, and get lost, and that’s where I ended up.