North Carolina Literary Review Online Fall 2024

NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY

Vivian I. Bikulege essay inspired by Camille Shafer n Paula Gallant Eckard writes about Lee Smith’s On Agate Hill n creative nonfiction by Ashley Harris n Priscilla Melchior poem inspired by Marty Silverthorne n Robert West reviews James Seay’s new essay collection

COVER ART

Mountain Song (acrylic, 8x10)

by Nysie Hurst

Cover artist NYSIE HURST , a longtime resident of Boone, NC, finds her inspiration in her surroundings in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her work is on permanent display in the BE [Banner Elk] Artists Gallery, and her art has been shown in numerous exhibits, including a solo exhibit titled Figuring It Out HealthCare Facilities in Morganton, NC. Additionally, she donated her time to create a wall mural for the North Carolina Outward Bound school at Table Rock basecamp. A former science teacher, she found her way to art via her diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis (MS). A lifelong lover of nature, she was inspired to take up art to express the strength and beauty of the region, as well as to find her own strength to navigate the changes in her life.

COVER DESIGNER

NCLR Art Director

Professor at Meredith College in Raleigh. She has an MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Her design work has been recognized by the CASE Awards and in such publications as Regional Design Annual, the Applied Arts Awards Annual, American Corporate Identity, and the Big Book of Logos She has been designing for the fifth issue, and in 2009 created the current style and design. In 2010, the “new look” earned for Best Journal Design from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. In addition to the cover, she designed the fiction, Harris and Bikulege essays, and Shields piece in this issue.

Produced annually by East Carolina University and by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association

© COPYRIGHT 2024 NC LR

Mountain Poppies (acrylic, 11x14) by Nysie Hurst

NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY

IN THIS ISSUE

6 n North Carolina Disability Literature includes essays, a poem, and a book review

Vivian I. Bikulege

Paula Gallant Eckard

Ashley Harris

Priscilla Melchior

James Seay

Marty Silverthorne

Lee Smith

Robert M. West

37 n Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues includes poetry, fiction, essays, book reviews, and literary news

Robert G. Anthony, Jr.

Joseph Bathanti

Loss Pequeño Glazier

Ronald Jackson

Ena Jones

Karen Jones

David Joy

Amber Knox

Nikolai Mather

Lenard D. Moore

Maria Rouphail

John Charles Ryan

E. Thomson Shields, Jr.

Elaine Thomas

Wendy Tilley

C.L. Willis

89 n North Carolina Miscellany includes poetry, fiction, and an essay

Brenda Bailey

Regina YC Garcia

Jeremy Griffin

Marcial CL Harper

Jess Kennedy

Edward Mabrey

Alessandra Nysether-Santos

Kaylie Saidin

Gabi Stephens

Tommy Tomlinson

n North Carolina Artists in this issue n

Barb Cherry

Jimmy Fountain

Michael Galinsky

Bill Griffin

Nysie Hurst

Chris Liberti

Sherry O’Neill

James O. Reynolds

Paul Rouphail

Camille Shafer

North Carolina Literary Review is published annually in the summer by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by East Carolina University with additional funding from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. NCLR Online, published in the winter, spring, and fall, is an open access supplement to the print issue.

NCLR is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, and it is indexed in EBSCOhost, the Humanities International Complete, the MLA International Bibliography, Proquest, and the Society for the Study of Southern Literature Newsletter.

Address correspondence to Dr. Margaret D. Bauer, NCLR Editor ECU Mailstop 555 English Greenville, NC 27858-4353

252.328.1537 Telephone 252.328.4889 Fax BauerM@ecu.edu Email NCLRstaff@ecu.edu

https://NCLR.ecu.edu Website

NCLR has received 2023–2024 grant support from the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, and from North Carolina Humanities.

Subscriptions to the print issues of NCLR are, for individuals, $18 (US) for one year or $30 (US) for two years, or $27 (US) for one year, $30 for two for institutions and foreign subscribers. Libraries and other institutions may purchase subscriptions through subscription agencies. Individuals or institutions may also receive NCLR through membership in the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. More information on our website

Individual copies of the annual print issue are available from retail outlets and from UNC Press. Back issues of our print issues are also available for purchase, while supplies last. See the NCLR website for prices and tables of contents of back issues.

Submissions

NCLR invites proposals for articles or essays about North Carolina literature, history, and culture. Much of each issue is thematically focused, but a portion of each issue is open for developing interesting proposals, particularly interviews and literary analyses (without academic jargon). NCLR also publishes high-quality poetry, fiction, drama, and creative nonfiction by North Carolina writers or set in North Carolina. We define a North Carolina writer as anyone who currently lives in North Carolina, has lived in North Carolina, or has used North Carolina as subject matter.

See our website for submission guidelines for the various sections of each issue. Submissions to each issue’s special feature section are due August 31 of the preceding year, though proposals may be considered through early fall.

2026 issues will feature Literature by Veterans, Active Military, and their Families guest edited by Anna Froula

Please email your suggestions for other special feature topics to the editor.

Book reviews are usually assigned, though suggestions will be considered as long as the book is by a North Carolina writer, is set in North Carolina, or deals with North Carolina subjects. NCLR prefers review essays that consider the new work in the context of the writer’s canon, other North Carolina literature, or the genre at large. Publishers and writers are invited to submit North Carolina–related books for review consideration. See the index of books that have been reviewed in NCLR on our website NCLR does not review self-/subsidy-published or vanity press books.

EDITORIAL

BOARD

Dasan Ahanu

Black Poetry Theatre, Durham, NC

Rebecca Bernard

English, East Carolina University

Brent Walter Cline

English, Hillsdale College

Meg Day

English, North Carolina State University

William Eddins

English, East Carolina University

Gabrielle Brant Freeman

English, East Carolina University

Rebecca Godwin

Emeritus, Barton College

Marame Gueye

English, East Carolina University

Editor

Margaret D. Bauer

Art Director

Dana Ezzell

Guest Feature Editor

Casey Kayser

Digital Editor Devra Thomas

Art Editor

Diane A. Rodman

Poetry Editor

Jeffrey Franklin

Founding Editor

Alex Albright

Original Art Director

Eva Roberts

Graphic Designers

Karen Baltimore

Sarah Elks

Senior Associate Editor

Christy Alexander Hallberg

Assistant Editors

Desiree Dighton

Anne Mallory

Randall Martoccia

Managing Editor

Lyra Thomas

Senior Editorial Assistants

Amber Knox

Kristi Southern

Editorial Assistants

Onyx Bradley

Kenly Corya

Shelby Hans

Wendy Tilley

Interns

Abby Fletcher

Abby Trzepacz

Rebecca Hardin-Thrift

English, Wayne Community College

Kate Harrington

English, East Carolina University

James Tate Hill

Association of Writers & Writing Programs

George Hovis

English, SUNY-Oneonto

David Joy

Writer, Tuckasegee, NC

Amanda Klein

English, East Carolina University

Rebecca McClanahan

MFA Creative Writing Program,

Queens University

Kat Meads

Red Earth MFA program, Oklahoma City University

Sean Morris

English, East Carolina University

Tracy Morse

English, East Carolina University

Angela Raper

English, East Carolina University

Paula Rawlins

Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, Yale University

Kirstin L. Squint

English, East Carolina University

Scott Temple

English, Pitt Community College

Amber Flora Thomas

English, East Carolina University

Dean Tuck

English, Wayne Community College

Signing Off

by Casey Kayser, Guest Feature Editor

I am pleased to introduce the special feature section on North Carolina Disability Literature for the North Carolina Literary Review’s Fall 2024 online issue. I have mixed feelings as I do so, since it is the final special feature section of my guest editor role. The hard work is over, but it also means the end of my collaborations (for now!) with NCLR’s wonderful editor Margaret Bauer, the fantastic NCLR staff, and all the inspiring contributors to our special feature sections.

The section begins with Ashley Harris’s beautiful essay “Year of the Acorns” alongside art by Nysie Hurst, whose compelling artwork also graces the cover. Both Harris and Hurst are artists with multiple sclerosis. In “Year of the Acorns,” Harris connects the ecosystem of her body with that of her yard, in a mast year in which her oak trees released massive amounts of acorns. That same Fall, she learned that she had chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), a diagnosis that coupled with her multiple sclerosis felt like an excess of illness parallel to the acorn surplus. She writes about how she picked up those acorns, envisioned and built a new beautiful garden, and came to terms with the CLL diagnosis that year.

Next is an essay called “Singlehanded Wisdom,” by Vivian I. Bikulege, which highlights the life of Camille Shafer and the place Azule, Shafer’s home and artists’ residence on the crest of Troublesome Gap in North Carolina. Though she has made North Carolina her home, Shafer was born in Normandy, France, and at the age of two, her right hand and

much of her forearm were blown off by an explosive that her sister mistook for a silver toy. As Bikulege outlines in her essay, her own residency at Azule and her interactions with Shafer provided the inspiration she needed to finish her debut chapbook. Later, Bikulege returned to Azule to reconnect with Shafer and discuss life, art, and disability, and she shares pieces of Shafer’s wisdom throughout her essay. The essay closes with a beautiful poem from Bikulege’s chapbook called “Left Behind.”

In “War, Motherhood, and Disability in Lee Smith’s On Agate Hill,” Paula Gallant Eckard analyzes how those major themes function in Smith’s novel, which follows the life of Molly Petree from thirteen years old to adulthood in various settings, but beginning and ending with her life at her first home, the dilapidated plantation Agate Hill. Eckard draws on theoretical ideas in the field of narrative medicine from scholars such as Arthur W. Frank, Rita Charon, and Howard Brody to illustrate how Molly and other characters’ use of narrative and storytelling aid in healing, growth, and recovery from illness, disability, and trauma. Barb Cherry’s art punctuates Eckard’s piece, adding affecting images in oil on canvas that resonate with the essay’s themes.

In “How else not to be lost,” Robert M. West reviews James Seay’s first book of prose, Come! Come! Where? Where? West praises the consistency of Seay’s voice in light of the fact that the essays in the book were written over the span of half a century, since it includes recent material alongside his earlier work in the nonfiction genre. Seay’s

collection of personal essays focuses on topics such as his childhood interest in pocketknives, the illness and death of his son, and his travels to places like Alaska and the barrier islands off the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Ultimately, West says that Seay’s book balances sad topics with “an inspiring kind of philosophical good humor,” and calls the collection “life-affirming.”

The feature section closes with the moving “Elegy for a Friend,” a poem by Priscilla Melchior inspired by her friend and fellow poet Marty Silverthorne (1957–2019), quadriplegic since a 1976 motorcycle accident. Bill Griffin’s beautiful photograph “Purple Dwarf” accompanies Melchior’s words of devotion for her friend and his life.

As I sign off, I would once again like to thank NCLR editor Margaret Bauer, the NCLR editorial staff, and all of our contributors. It has been an honor to serve as guest editor for the 2024 special feature sections and I am grateful to have had this opportunity to learn about and honor the voices and experiences of people with disabilities. In the process, I have discovered new North Carolina artists and writers whose work I will now follow with great interest!

I am also pleased to be passing the baton to Dwight Tanner, Visiting Assistant Professor at Appalachian State University, who will be the guest editor for the 2025 special feature sections of NCLR focusing on North Carolina LGBTQIA+ Literature and its impact on literary and cultural studies. Please stay tuned for those exciting issues in 2025! n

Disability Literature NORTH CAROLINA

8 Year of the Acorns an essay by Ashley Harris art by Nysie Hurst

16 Singlehanded Wisdom and Left Behind an essay and a poem by Vivian I. Bikulege

22 War, Motherhood, and Disability in Lee Smith’s On Agate Hill by Paula Gallant Eckard art by Barb Cherry

34“ How else not be lost” a review by Robert M. West n James Seay, Come! Come! Where? Where?

36 Elegy for a Friend a poem by Priscilla Melchior photography by Bill Griffin

BELOW Marty Silverthorne with his wife, Sylvia L. Bullock, at R.A. Fountain

37 n Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues poetry, fiction, essays, book reviews, and literary news

89 n North Carolina Miscellany poetry, fiction, and an essay

PHOTOGRAPH BY TOM WHELAN

YEAR

with art by Nysie Hurst

OF THE ACORNS

BY ASHLEY HARRIS

ASHLEY HARRIS lives in southwestern Randolph County, NC, surrounded by the mystical Uwharrie Mountains. She is a regular contributor to Healthline Media and has written on topics such as gardening, exercise, entertaining, self-care, and writing while living with Multiple Sclerosis. She has also written for Real Simple, Wired, and The Independent and is the author of a poetry collection, Waiting for the Wood Thrush (Finishing Line Press 2019). She is currently working on a memoir of linked essays exploring love, faith, and serenity while living with chronic illness. Read more of her creative nonfiction in the 2024 Winter and print issues of NCLR

A longtime resident of Boone, NC, NYSIE HURST finds her inspiration in her surroundings in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her work is on permanent display in the BE [Banner Elk] Artists Gallery, and her art has been shown in numerous exhibits, including a solo exhibit titled Figuring It Out at Carolina HealthCare Facilities in Morganton, NC. Additionally, she donated her time to create a wall mural for the North Carolina Outward Bound school at Table Rock basecamp. A former science teacher, she found her way to art via her diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis. A lifelong lover of nature, she was inspired to take up art to express the strength and beauty of the region, as well as to find her own strength to navigate the changes in her life.

In September 2022, the trees on our property declared war on us. The mountain oaks fired first. Gigantic green-capped oval acorns struck our metal roof with such force it sounded like an automatic rifle. Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat . . . Rat-atat-tat-tat-tat TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT

The red oaks struck next, then the post oaks, and later, the white oaks. The combined cacophony rattled me to the bone. Sometimes acorns hit the car, the roof of our camper, and sometimes they hit each other and ricocheted across the yard. Our dogs felt it too, often scampering at the sound and ducking for cover.

Soon the acorns blanketed our gravel drive, turning it into a rolling carpet. With legs already wobbly from MS, I frequently stumbled. What in the world was going on? My husband J.P. and I’d lived in this part of western Randolph County, North Carolina for six years, and we’d never seen such a crop before.

By late November the trees called a truce and ceased their assault. It was quiet again. We took advantage of the cooler temperatures to brick the weathered plywood surrounding our house, which had been in varying stages of construction since we moved here. For my part, I brushed mud off the long-neglected bricks and stacked them close to the scaffold J.P. erected around the house.

That’s when I had my vision. Among the dried cement clods and brick shards, I saw a magical garden on the peninsula of land surrounding the northwestern front

MS.HARRIS,THISISDR.SINGH,”SAID THEVOICEONTHEMESSAGE.“JUST FOLLOWINGUPONOURVISITONTHE

of the house: fragrant rose bushes edged by tidy boxwoods, hydrangea blossoms bobbing in the breeze, with little carousels of purple verbena meandering in between.

But first those pesky acorns had to go. Over the next few months, I gathered as many nuts as I could and dropped them into buckets that I dumped deep in the woods, to the delight of the squirrels.

While I dreamed of my garden, the weather grew even cooler, and before long, frost sparkled on the grass. We paused the brickwork, and I gave up hunting acorns, leaving them to settle in a soft nursery of rotting leaves.

One night in March 2023, my phone flashed with the notification of a missed call. I groaned. Everyone who knows me knows better than to call at six p.m. It was dinnertime, not just for us, but also for our three dogs: Finn, a beagle-terrier mix; Max, a Siberian husky; and Tulsi, a corgi puppy. Utter chaos.

“Ms. Harris, this is Dr. Singh,” said the voice on the message. “Just following up on our visit on the twelfth. No reason for any alarm. I’ll try again later.”

His voice was strangely affable. As if we were friends. As if he were calling just to say “hi,” which was a little strange. The hematologist had been cordial enough, but I couldn’t remember if we’d even shaken hands.

I’d been to see him at the urging of Dr. Weaver, my neurologist. In the test she periodically ordered to monitor the effects of the medication I took to treat my MS, she’d noticed a dramatic uptick in my white blood cell count (WBC). Because I didn’t feel any different, I wasn’t overly concerned. “What could be wrong?” I asked. To myself I was thinking: I already have MS. I might end up in a wheelchair one day or worse, lose cognitive functions. What could be as bad as that?

“I don’t know,” Dr. Weaver said evenly. “This is not my specialty.”

To make her happy, I scheduled an appointment with the doctor she referred me to, Dr. Vihaan Singh. But when I arrived at his office, I noticed a sign that read Cedar Square Hematology and Oncology. Oncology? That’s a fancy word for cancer!

IREMEMBEREDWALKINGPASTSEVERAL

PATIENTSINTHEWAITINGROOM,AND SOMEWORECAPSANDSCARVESTO COVERBALDINGHEADS.THEYWERE CLEARLYHAVING CHEMOTHERAPY. OHGOD,NO,ITHOUGHT.NOTME.NOTTHIS.

I had to be in the wrong place. When I stopped by the reception desk, however, I learned that they were expecting me.

After checking in, a nursing assistant drew three vials of blood, and although she attempted the usual small talk, I barely engaged. In a few minutes, a slight, dark-haired man, mid-thirties, entered the room and sat across from me on a rolling stool. Did he even introduce himself? I do not recall.

“The number of lymphocytes in your blood is out of range,” he said.

“Lymphocytes?”

“A type of white blood cell. Most people have five thousand or less per microliter of blood but you have eleven thousand. You have what is called lymphocytosis.” Then he asked me if I had recently experienced night sweats, fever, and chills, or unexplained weight loss.

“Night sweats, yes,” I admitted. Now fifty-five, and in menopause, I felt much hotter than usual and often woke up with a sweaty back. But nothing else.

Dr. Singh then rose and felt my back and under my arms. “Any pain?”

I shook my head. “Look, except for the MS, I’m fine.”

“We need to run more tests,” he said. “That’s why we drew blood today.”

I remembered walking past several patients in the waiting room, and some wore caps and scarves to cover balding heads. They were clearly having chemotherapy. Oh God, no, I thought. Not me. Not this.

“Your lymphocytosis could be caused by any number of things. Infection, a virus, mononucleosis.” He then ran through a litany of other conditions, even more fancy words. Looking back, I don’t remember hearing the word “leukemia.” However, to be fair, I was already moving past him, going down the elevator, and getting back to the car, where J.P. waited with Max. I had other things to do.

As if reading my mind, Dr. Singh opened the door. “Schedule a follow-up and we’ll talk about it then.”

And that was that. In the parking lot J.P. was walking Max, who greeted me with his typical melodic greeting: “Woo, woo, woo.” It was his way of saying: I’ve missed you!

We’d found the blue-eyed wanderer in our church parking lot the year before. He’d been more than happy to come home with us and, more importantly, stay.

“Who do you think you are?” I grabbed his wedge-shaped head and nuzzled him. “Sinatra?”

It was three days after this first appointment that Dr. Vingh called me at home.

“What’s up with all the acorns?” I asked my neighbors that past autumn. We lived on the edge of the old Cape Fear Trading Path in the middle of the Uwharrie Mountains.

“I don’t know,” they said. “We wondered the same thing!”

Then I learned about “masting,” a singular event in which some oak trees produce colossal crops of acorns for reasons not entirely understood. Sometimes a “mast year” comes after an unusually dry summer or cold winter, and the trees make

extra seeds to ensure their survival. In the shrewd algorithm of nature, the crop also bolsters area wildlife. The year of the acorns would also be the year of the squirrels.

In the spring of 2023, even before the last frost of the season, I started plucking up the acorns that had already sprouted. There was an art to it, digging your fingers deep enough into the dirt to grab the little handle created by the baby tap root and jerking it up. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. But for the ones I couldn’t easily dislodge, there were countless others, and I zigzagged across the area planned for my garden, tugging and tossing the split nuts aside.

All the while, I mused about my own ecosystem. What was my blood up to? Human biology had never been of much interest to me, but I did know that white blood cells fought infection. And I had more than I needed. I wondered if my own body was trying to make up for something.

I missed Dr. Singh’s second message too. Although I’d left my phone out on the counter and turned up the volume; again, it was dinnertime. With three-month-old Tulsi, our latest addition, I’d underestimated the challenges of

ALLTHEWHILE,IMUSEDABOUT MYOWNECOSYSTEM.WHAT WASMYBLOODUPTO?HUMANBIOLOGYHADNEVERBEENOF MUCHINTERESTTOME,BUTIDID KNOWTHATWHITEBLOODCELLS FOUGHTINFECTION.

training yet another dog to “sit” and calmly wait for her dinner. And Tulsi was an assertive little minx. Still, I wondered if I hadn’t wanted to hear the phone.

This time Dr. Singh’s voice sounded even friendlier. “Just trying to reach you again. But nothing at all to worry about, Ms. Harris.”

Now I did worry. So I called his office first thing in the morning and left a message, and to my surprise, his nurse called me back right away. She sounded as genial as Dr. Singh, which was odd since I didn’t recall even meeting her.

“What’s going on?” I asked, hoping she’d pass on the news that the doctor had been trying to share. But she wouldn’t.

“He’ll go into that at your follow-up. But before then, he wants you to get a CT scan of your

Sunset on the Mountain (watercolor, 4x5 in.) by Nysie Hurst

chest, abdomen, and pelvis. I’m calling to set that up for you.”

One of the mixed blessings that comes with being a writer is an enhanced sensitivity. I wouldn’t describe myself as psychic, but I could tell that beneath the nurse’s kindly officiousness, she wanted to get off the phone as soon as possible. What was she afraid of?

I need to confess something else. My intellectual curiosity does not extend to the medical field. Diseases and other ailments were like the weather, elemental and completely outside my control. Having MS meant I had to learn far more than I ever wanted about the intricacies of the neurological system, how my own immune system attacked the sheaths covering my nerves and the never-ending cycle of tingling, numbness, and shaky legs.

Wasn’t that enough? It wouldn’t have done much good to learn more because no one knew what caused MS and it had no cure. Besides, I’d been retired from a marketing job since 2017, the same year I exchanged vows with J.P. After enduring a difficult first marriage, I’d found love again and was determined to enjoy it. I had raised a son to adulthood, and I relished our relationship. I also lived to write, to bake, and to plant. To construct worlds of my very own. Not to mention cuddle my dogs, especially Max, who even at forty-eight pounds needed to be held and rest his head on my chest at night.

To distract myself between medical appointments, I browsed catalogs and websites, searching for rose bushes known for beauty and fragrance. I settled on “Earth Angel,” a rose with light pink peonystyle petals that clung tightly to the bud and smelled of baby powder; “Summer Romance,” a medium pink rose with nearly one hundred petals and a classic myrrh fragrance; and “Souvenir de la Malmaison,” an heirloom variety first cultivated in 1843, a quartered blush rose often found in old gardens. Never mind the extreme humidity and heat, pests, and of course, that famous rock-hard Carolina clay.

The vendor recommended that I prepare holes at least two feet wide by two feet deep and fill them with dirt that resembled the loose and rich soil of Oregon, where the roses had first been rooted. This would be a mixture of clay, peat moss,

topsoil, and I’d need to add nutrients such as alfalfa and bone meal.

Unlike my first marriage, J.P. and I shared many hobbies – a trifecta of “P” words – poetry, pets, and plants. We’d labored together to plant an orchard of cherry trees and a vegetable garden. The sturdy DIY’er and retired sculptor dug the holes, and I helped with the less strenuous work, such as weeding, mulching, and watering.

But when the young roses, just green canes in a pot, arrived that spring, a cruel bout of sciatica rendered J.P. helpless. He was happy to advise from a reclining swing on our porch, but he could

ONEOFTHEMIXEDBLESSINGSTHAT COMESWITHBEINGAWRITERISAN ENHANCEDSENSITIVITY.IWOULDN’T DESCRIBEMYSELFASPSYCHIC,BUT ICOULDTELLTHATBENEATHTHE NURSE’SKINDLY OFFICIOUSNESS,SHE WANTEDTOGETOFFTHEPHONEAS SOONASPOSSIBLE.WHATWASSHE AFRAIDOF?

not assist. “Meet your new best friend,” he said, pointing to the mattock, a tool with a sharp, vertical blade on one side and a blunt, horizontal edge on the other, mounted on a long wooden handle.

I worked with a mattock to lightly score the earth when planting grass, but I had never used one for truly hard labor. I had to laugh. How could I, already saddled with weak legs, use this monster to dig three deep holes in solid clay?

This is how you do it, I soon learned. Work five minutes at a time. Refresh yourself with water frequently. Imagine yourself leaning over a lush rose one day and losing yourself in the aroma. And whatever you do, don’t hurt your own back.

“Don’t try to pull the mattock through the dirt,” said J.P. time and again. “Let the leverage of the handle break it up.”

Before my CT scan, Dr. Singh and I finally connected on the phone. “Do you remember us talking about CLL?”

I gulped. Maybe, maybe not. You see, my health history was a minefield of ominous abbreviations.

In addition to MS, there was the CMP (or comprehensive metabolic panel), a number of blood tests to check my organ functions, the JCV test to detect the obscure John Cunningham virus, which might trigger PML (progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy), a dangerous viral infection sometimes caused by the medicine used to treat my MS. And now here was a new one – CLL and all its associates. Welcome to the club.

“It stands for chronic lymphocytic leukemia,” he said slowly.

No wonder he preferred the abbreviation. Who wanted to have anything to do with the word “leukemia”?

“CLL is a type of cancer that starts in your bone marrow and moves into your blood. I looked at a smear of your blood under a microscope and recognized the markers.”

“Ms. Harris, this is a serious disease,” he added, “but it is not acute. It advances very slowly. And it’s highly treatable. That’s why I ordered a CT scan. I need to look at your lymph nodes and spleen to see if there’s any swelling. If not, you could be at Stage Zero, and you could stay there for a very long time.”

I knew the answer before I asked, but I had to hear it from him. “Will it ever go away?”

“There is no cure. CLL will be with you for the rest of your life.”

When I was ten, my mother informed me that I was a Cancer. “Here,” she said, handing me a thick silver bracelet etched with an illustration of a crab.

To a child, the words “You are a Cancer” sounded suspiciously like “You will get cancer.”

“No, silly,” she said. “The word means ‘crab.’ You and I both are

THISISHOWYOUDOIT,ISOON LEARNED.WORKFIVEMINUTESATATIME. REFRESHYOURSELFWITHWATERFREQUENTLY.IMAGINEYOURSELFLEANING OVERALUSHROSEONEDAYANDLOSING YOURSELFINTHEAROMA.

Cancers because we were born in July. We’re beach babies!”

Later I learned that there was indeed a connection between crab and cancer. The disease was given its name by early physicians from the Latin word for crab (cancer) because the tumors resembled the claws of a crab.

The word “leukemia” was cobbled together in 1848 by a German scientist who merged the Greek word for white (leukos) with the word for blood (haima).

Leukemia flowed off the tongue quite beautifully, this English major had to admit, but there was nothing beautiful about its meaning – illness and often death.

I prayed regularly. Especially for other people, which was a regular practice at my church, Science Hill Friends Meeting. I felt guilty asking for prayers for myself, considering the many urgent traumas that affected so many people in our church family – heart attacks, diabetes, COVID.

Then there was drug addiction, house fires, or deadly traffic accidents. My faith reminds me that we live in a broken world and while God can’t prevent bad things from happening to us, we could count on God to be there. At night the two of us had many conversations.

Reasons Why I Shouldn’t Have CLL (in no specific order)

From Me to God

I have three dogs. I won’t have time for the extra medical appointments and of course, the worry. Finn, Max, and Tulsi need me. And I need them. As trivial as it sounds, I just learned how to make homemade pie crust. I want to spend my time using what I’ve learned to enter the hallowed realm of “Tartdom.” I want to make exquisite confections, especially a mixed fruit tart with light and airy pastry cream.

I am now a rosarian. I want to grow roses. The most beautiful flowers in the world. This will take even more patience and care. Roses in the South will be afflicted with problems of their own – powdery mildew, aphids, beetles, to name just a few – that will require so much of my attention. Okay, I’m about to get real. As you and I both know, there are eight billion people in the world. Can’t someone else get CLL? Please forgive me, but I’m thinking of Craig Ballard, my seventhgrade nemesis, the bully on the bus who sat beside me and leaned his sweaty body into mine at every curve. He hurt and humiliated me. Now

there is someone who deserves leukemia. Give it to him.

CLL sounds like something you use to clean your toilet or a rock group from the 1960s. Heard the new one from CLL? If I must have a second condition, couldn’t it be a simple one-word disorder? Maybe something between halitosis and a hangnail?

Let’s face it. I already have MS. Isn’t that enough?

J.P. and my mother accompanied me to my follow-up with Dr. Singh. Mom had been wringing her hands for weeks, and she had her own theory about this leukemia business.

When Dr. Singh entered the room, he appeared to embody the same cheerful persona conveyed

Illumination (watercolor, 4x5 in.) by Nysie Hurst

on his voice mail messages. For the first time, he revealed a brilliant smile. “Your CT scan revealed no enlargement of the lymph nodes or spleen.”

I relaxed, leaning back in my chair. “So I’m at Stage Zero?”

“Yes. There is nothing we need to do right now. Unless you get any unexplained fevers, I will only need to see you every six months, and we’ll run tests to monitor any changes. Thanks to advances in medicine, we can take little steps, such as infusions or medications, that might prevent future progressions. As they say, we will watch, and we will wait.”

J.P. squeezed my hand, and I said a silent prayer for him. The man who put up with all these new abbreviations and appointments.

“Did she get this thing because of stress?” Mom suddenly asked. “I think she does too much.”

Dr. Singh pursed his lips, as if he was trying to suppress a laugh. But it didn’t work.

“Sorry, Mom,” he said. “This is just something that happened to her.” He looked at me, serious again. “Don’t change anything about your life. Doctor’s orders.”

Reasons Why You Can Manage CLL (in order of divine importance)

From God to Me

Yes, you already have MS. But you have handled it quite well. Hasn’t having MS taught you to be grateful for all the things that go right in the human body? Plus, wouldn’t learning about your blood be kind of cool?

For all you know, Craig Ballard might have something even worse than you – pancreatic cancer or liver disease. Do me a favor. Leave the other 7,999,999,9999 people in the world to me.

You already have three dogs. As you’ve said yourself, having three is no more work than two. You can handle this. But don’t get a fourth. Please.

You haven’t mastered pie crust yet. That hazelnut tart shell was a disaster, and you know it. Pardon the pun but keep rolling.

Did I not create the rose? Don’t worry about it.

In The Emperor of Maladies, a Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee writes: “Cancer cells can grow faster, adapt better. They are more perfect

AS ISTOOD INMYNEW GARDEN,IFELTTHE BLOODPULSINGTHROUGH MYVEINS.ATTHISVERYMOMENT, MYMARROWWASRELEASING MILLIONSOFABNORMALCELLS INTOMYBLOODSTREAM.YETI FELTSTRANGELYPOWERFUL.

versions of ourselves . . . to confront cancer is to encounter a parallel species, one perhaps more adapted to survival than even we are.”

As I stood in my new garden, I felt the blood pulsing through my veins. At this very moment, my marrow was releasing millions of abnormal cells into my blood stream. Yet I felt strangely powerful. I had used a monstrous tool to dig three very deep holes and plant three new rose bushes on my own. Their roots were now luxuriating in soft, rich dirt, and a few of their canes had already sprouted new leaves. Buds would follow.

Roses sleep in their first year, the old-timers say. In the second, they creep. And in the third, they leap. I would watch, and yes, I would wait.

Max peered over the deck, cheering me on. “Woo, woo, woo.” Look at you.

Below I spied a stray oak seedling. I tried to jerk it out, but it wouldn’t budge, and I fell to the ground trying. For this tiny tree, with just two nascent leaves, the urge to live was too strong.

“Alright,” I said. “Stay where you are.” n

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

WE ARE ONE BODY PUSHING THROUGH THE NIGHT WITHOUT THOUGHT OR GENDER, PAST OR FUTURE: SPIRIT IN FLIGHT.

—Teresa Staley,

SINGLEHANDED

Camille Shafer creates new things from broken things. It is her aesthetic “to rebuild, reassemble what has been exploded.”

Born in Normandy, France, in 1942, her right hand and much of her forearm were blown off by an explosive that her sister mistook for a silver toy. Camille was two years old. She spent the next eight years in a Red Cross rehabilitation hospital for children. She remembers none of it. She has no resentments. No blame.

Camille made a conscious decision to return to her family as Able, as a survivor. Trying to be Able, she denied her Disability. Camille questioned what she would do with her life. “Where do I fit?” She was told the world is impossible. This is impossible for you. At every juncture, she confronted real or imposed limitations.

VIVIAN I. BIKULEGE is a poet and essayist in Brevard, NC. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is published in The Fourth River, Broad River Review, Presence 2022, and Pinesong. She was a semifinalist for the 2023 James Applewhite Poetry Prize and received

honorable mention in the 2022 Randall Jarrell Poetry competition. The 2022 Gilbert-Chappell emerging adult poet for western North Carolina, Vivian holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Queens University of Charlotte.

ABOVE Camille Shafer in front of Azule, her home and artists’ residence

“Poem for Mattie”

WISDOM

Disability can make a person invisible. If you don’t produce, you have no value. If you can’t produce, you should disappear. Being Disabled is a kind of disappearing act. To be Able is to belong.

—Camille Shafer

Ableism is a nuanced sort of colonialism that assimilates the Disabled into society with rules that do not fit the circumstances. Ableism rewards productivity and shuns those who seem to take

by Vivian I. Bikulege

up space. In response, Camille built her home and named it Azule, a place of seasons and perseverance, her endeavor to reframe Disability.

Camille moved from France to Canada and settled in the United States. She married Dave Shafer, a free-spirited musician. They moved to Hot Springs, North Carolina, where Camille assumed her self-proclaimed identity as a “French Radical Appalachian Hillbilly.” She and Dave cultivated community around their rural home.

ABOVE Azule

After Dave was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis that led to his eventual death, she was his caregiver for years and years, becoming pragmatic in making their home accessible in new ways.

Camille envisioned a retreat on the crest of Troublesome Gap. She set out to remodel the land, her cabin, and her life. She chose poverty but has never felt poor. She is a self-realized architect. The result: Azule, an artist’s residence and Camille’s Sagrada Familia, her cathedral. Camille is its missionary.

Its blue bones are stained glass and timber. A winding staircase leads to a dance studio, and a music chapel was built as a golden spiral, logarithmic, growing in every quarter turn like a curled galaxy or a nautilus shell.

There are spirals hidden and found everywhere at Azule. It is open, not closed – bedecked in fractals – a living chaos of tile, metal, concrete, stone, books, albums, old chairs, pillows, plants, and light. Azule is organic and random.

Art is art. It’s what saved the young Camille, the feminist Camille, the activist Camille. She studied oil painting at École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and morphed into a quilt and mosaic artist.

She will tell you, “Art is complex. Art is how we make a better world and that may be the only thing we have to do in this world. It is a given for us to do something. Make art because you have to.”

Azule sits on the crest of Troublesome Gap. Upon your arrival at the top of Rabbit Den Road, Camille greets you and provides a brief tour. She welcomes your questions. You can ask about her hand. She will tell you that when parents coax their children not to stare at people with a disability, it is a kind of killing love. “We ignore with love.” Able people internalize disability as abnormal. There may be another way to craft a new definition of normal.

As a valued member of Alternate ROOTS, a southern, community-based, civil rights organization, Camille funded “ARTABILITY,” a scholarship specifically geared toward helping differently-abled people in the arts. Her goal is to uproot the discriminatory nature of Ableism: “The scholarship was as much to benefit able-bodied people as to benefit people with disabilities. With the influence of people with disabilities, I make better art.”

Maybe someone who is disabled has an advantage over an abled person who is unconscious.

—Camille Shafer

For Camille, nothing is binary. There is no either/ or, disabled/able, colored/colorless, whole/part, healthy/sick, old/young. She tells me we are living in a nonbinary century. “We are part of something bigger than us.” Camille is a voice in the Blue Ridge mountains encouraging others to prepare a new way. She is a mountain prophet, a quasi-John the Baptist with a French accent.

Camille understands that literature and the arts are messy, a constant quest to inquire and discover. She advocates the same questions for the disabled and abled: What am I doing? Where am I going? How will I make a better world?

I applied to Azule for a summer residency in 2023 to finish my debut chapbook. I needed to shape twenty-one poems into a form that was proving elusive. I did not know how the poems were talking to each other, although I never doubted they were – whispering about my journey into aging. At Azule, I found a place to spread out my words and an ear to listen if I wanted to read aloud.

AT AZULE, I FOUND A PLACE TO SPREAD OUT MY WORDS AND AN EAR TO LISTEN IF I WANTED TO READ ALOUD.

—V ivian I. Bikulege

Camille was firm in her counsel that my poetry does not need to be sanctified by any outer voice. We own our creativity in all its forms. Inside any artistic medium is a soul balanced on the edge of risk. She especially liked my poem “Left Behind” about a widowed friend in Santa Fe. A barn house as a shrine to a deceased husband resonated with her. The vacancy of loss is something she understands. “We make the best we can out of our lives.” Azule and Camille gift wisdom to residents willing to receive.

What is this place really? People are still figuring it out, and it is different for everyone. Maybe it is best defined as a center for creative placemaking. The first residents arrived at Azule in 2011. Today, creative pilgrims journey to Azule because they are just beginning to become artists, in the throes of a living project, or burnt out by a work in stasis. Their residency is a work of art in its own right, a collaboration with the space or with other artists. The hope is for a writer and artist’s stay to be impactful, that they leave Azule with a desire, as I did, to do their work because they are replenished: what residency is supposed to do.

For me, Azule was an answer to possibilities. I am only now accepting myself as a poet. It is something I’ve grown into – a lover of words, of concision, and a person intrigued by the arrangement of sound and meaning on the page. My chapbook, How to Pray in Pittsburgh, will be published in 2024. It is less of a poetic instruction manual and more of a seeker’s lyrical exploration into self, time, and awareness.

Three months after my residency, when I returned to Azule to focus on Camille’s insights into disability, we enjoyed an afternoon of hot tea and dark chocolate. She drifted into a moment of vision and hope. “There must be a midpoint for the abled to meet the disabled. To create a world where disability and accessibility are not afterthoughts. The disabled teach us a way of acceptance. People labeled as disabled are fighting a damn great battle. Acceptable, accessible, acceptable, accessible. It’s a chain reaction.”

Camille coaches me to contribute to this world intellectually, artistically, spiritually, and physically. Idea to idea to idea. “The composting of thoughts and souls becomes shit for the next life.

Why are we on earth? To make better movement –dance, art, thoughts. To be open.”

I tell her I believe in God. She tells me her life has always been a struggle. “Do you rely on faith?” I ask.

“No. We are all gifted differently. Spirit. Fruits of the Spirit. Aging is the great equalizer of everyone. Live long enough, and you will be disabled. There is no guarantee on anything we do. We cannot sell our souls.”

I relish the wisdom of elders, peers really, as I continue my journey into old womanhood. It is where my poetry seems to sit. I am abled, but age is pruning my confidence and sculpting arthritis into my bones. Camille and I agreed that from the day we are born, we are dying.

“Age is creeping on me,” Camille says as she heads back to her apartment, one she is working toward making fully accessible. “Everyone has to function in the world,” she says. “We deal with things by the seat of our pants.”

When Camille dug the foundation of Azule, she did it with one hand, one shovel, one bucket at a time. She worked with craftspeople and local laborers. Today, she relies on a younger mosaic artist to finish her bathroom tile and a woodworker to build her shelving and countertops. Collaborative cooperation is a living part of Camille’s daily life.

Camille’s credo: choose a way of life, a way of service. Inclusion. Ally with one another. Look. Look again and see yourself in the mirror. Solving the problem of exclusion cannot be the task of the disabled alone. Say, I accept the responsibility of being in the world. Be a part of and seek to understand that inclusion becomes the responsibility of all of us.

We end our time together wrapping our three and one-half arms around one another, understanding the call to let go, sensing the brevity of our lives and the inevitability of our deaths. Let go every day. Let go for possibilities in our lives. Camille recommends mindfulness as survival. “The world tells you it is impossible. Another world is possible. We are always in process.”

On the day she dies, Camille wants to smile and say, “I made it.” I am unsure of my final goodbye. Maybe it will be “I paid attention.” n

BY VIVIAN I. BIKULEGE

Left Behind

A trace of road spurs to West Oaks, your home snug in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains where you loved him, made love with him, where your soul and his ashes are rooted. You tell me, This is the place I blossomed.

I visit to help pack your life into cardboard boxes. We were classmates in second grade, a weathered friendship of fifty-six years.

February daybreak, a snowstorm turns everything white, almost everything, invisible. You crank up the tractor and plow the road. I follow in your 4Runner in case you break down.

Saturday scatters sunlight on rusty garden tools. You plant me in your greenhouse to bundle dust, where your cat naps on stacks of National Geographics peppered with mouse droppings.

Your barn house is a shrine –his worn chair too sacred to sit in, his drafting board a makeshift shelf for stilled boots, his oil paintings – a horse, cacti, you . . . nude.

In atrium light where you make your bed, pots of red geraniums.

RIGHT The road to Azule

War, Motherhood, and Disability in Lee Smith’s On Agate Hill

by Paula Gallant Eckard

In On Agate Hill by Lee Smith, war and motherhood contribute to disabilities experienced by major and minor characters. These disabilities take various forms, including wounds inflicted by crude and brutal weapons used in the Civil War and maternal injuries, both physical and emotional, suffered during childbirth and postpartum. Frail and sick children, abused children, and children with birth defects also populate this Smith novel. On Agate Hill is largely told through the voice and consciousness of Molly Petree, whose story begins when she is thirteen years old and ends many years later at the ruined plantation of Agate Hill, which lies in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. For Molly, Agate Hill becomes emblematic of the human suffering caused by war, motherhood, illness, and other life events. At the same time, it offers her shelter and opportunity in her quest for survival. As Molly’s narrative shows, body, mind, and spirit are intertwined and deeply connected to time and place. Her story and embrace of life provide an edifying response to war, childhood trauma, and maternal loss.1

Molly is a “wounded storyteller” who describes her own hardships and suffering, from adolescence to old age, as well as those of others. The term, defined in Arthur W. Frank’s seminal work The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, refers to the individual’s ability to narrate his or her own illnesses, giving voice to the body, its suffering, and, in many cases, its recovery.2 According to Frank, the ill person “transforms fate into experience” and creates a shift from passivity to activity in response to disease and suffering (xi). Such narratives allow the teller to reclaim the voice that illness has taken away and enables the listener to pass on these stories to others, thereby “creating [a] circle of shared experience” that can aid in healing (xii).

2

Within

1 Lee Smith, On Agate Hill (Algonquin, 2006); subsequently cited parenthetically.

my discussion of On Agate Hill for this feature on disability literature, I draw on some material included in my book Thomas Wolfe and Lost Children in Southern Literature (U of Tennessee P, 2016).

Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (U of Chicago P, 1995); subsequently cited parenthetically.

PAULA GALLANT ECKARD is Professor of English at UNC Charlotte where she teaches American and Southern literature. A former registered nurse, her interests also include literature and medicine. Her books include Maternal Body and Voice in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Lee Smith (University of Missouri Press, 2002) and Thomas Wolfe and Lost Children in Southern Literature (University of Tennessee Press, 2016). She is the editor of The Thomas Wolfe Review

Rita Charon also stresses the value of narrative in human experience and the healing power of story in her book Narrative Medicine: “Narratives teach us where we come from and where we are going, allowing us to understand the meaning of our own lives.”3 Illness narratives, in particular, “demonstrate how critical is the telling of pain and suffering, enabling patients to give voice to what they endure and to frame the illness so as to escape dominion by it. Without the narrative acts of telling and being heard, the patient cannot convey to anyone else – or to self – what he or she is going through” (65–66). Autobiography, according to Charon, is central to the narrative process and represents “effort by a writer or a narrator to reflect on, recapture, reinterpret, and represent to readers the events in his or her life that, taken together in the particular sequence and frame in which they are provided, make sense (in one of many possible ways) of it” (74). Charon also asserts that corporeality, or bodily existence, has become “an urgent touchstone” in autobiography, given the body’s importance in understanding the self (76).

Similarly, Howard Brody emphasizes in Stories of Sickness the importance of the life story in human lives: “At birth our narratives begin, and we are already placed within a familial, communal, and cultural context without our choosing any of it or even being aware of it. Later in life we gradually assume increasing powers to write our own narratives as we choose, although still within the constraints imposed by our beginnings.”4 He adds that other people also shape an individual’s narrative: “Our narratives contain a large number of supporting and bit players, just as we ourselves will be Rosencrantz or Guildenstern to somebody else’s Hamlet,” thereby establishing “a network of social reciprocity” in the creation of human narratives (71).Brody also argues for the inclusion of literature in the healing arts, saying it “has legitimacy when one understands the various ways in which storytelling can itself be a healing activity” (12).

The dynamics of narrative and the role of storytelling in healing described by Frank, Charon, and Brody play out in Smith’s novel. Molly’s writings and storytelling ability, through diary entries, letters, or other forms, aid in personal healing and facilitate growth. Her accounts span a host of conditions involving trauma, illness, disability, and maternal loss. They embody the fear, isolation, powerlessness, vulnerability, exhaustion, and pain associated with such narratives. Her writings show an empathic understanding of what it means to inhabit what Susan Sontag calls “the kingdom of the sick,” a

3

4

Brody, Stories of Sickness, 2nd ed. (Oxford UP, 2003) 71; subsequently cited parenthetically.

Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford UP, 2006) 42; subsequently cited parenthetically.

Howard

ABOVE Lee Smith

Molly tells not just her story of suffering and loss, but the stories of many characters – male and female, young and old, black and white, abled and disabled – thereby capturing the full range of human experience in her narration. In almost each instance, the stories are connected to motherhood, illness, war, or the sometime violent realities of possessing a physical body.

condition that befalls everyone in due course.5 Or, as Frank indicates, “Sooner or later, everyone is a wounded storyteller” (xiii). Throughout On Agate Hill, Molly creates a sense of human connection that comes from “the shared condition of being bodies” (Frank 35). She bears witness to what physician Albert Schweitzer calls “the Fellowship of those who bear the Mark of Pain,” an observation he made following his first medical missionary expedition to Africa and, later, after experiencing severe illness during his World War I internment.6 Molly tells not just her story of suffering and loss, but the stories of many characters – male and female, young and old, black and white, abled and disabled – thereby capturing the full range of human experience in her narration. In almost each instance, the stories are connected to motherhood, illness, war, or the sometime violent realities of possessing a physical body. As a witness to these experiences, Molly provides testimony that imbues her survival with a moral responsibility for telling what happened, for telling truths that are often “unrecognized or suppressed” (Frank 137).

At the same time, her life story is impacted by the actions and accounts of others, which function to further Molly’s story and to, a lesser degree, reveal their own hardships. For example, teacher Agnes Rutherford and headmistress Mariah Snow, both of Gatewood Academy, provide perspectives that shed light on Molly’s experiences at the school. Their stories and actions shape Molly’s learning and, eventually, her life choices. In another example, BJ Jarvis narrates much of Molly’s maternal experience and also saves her from a murder charge after her husband Jacky is killed. Other characters have similar, if less dramatic, roles in the storytelling. Through the give and take of the various narratives, Smith creates “a network of social reciprocity” that Brody describes and that furthers Molly’s life story, both the telling of it and the living of it (71).

The novel also demonstrates the power of narrative in helping Molly to “to reflect on, recapture, reinterpret, and represent . . . events” (Charon 74) throughout her life and, ultimately, to find healing and strength. In telling about her father’s death, Molly serves as the wounded storyteller on his behalf, giving voice to her father’s

ABOVE Anna Burwell, who, with her husband, ran the Burwell School, the school Smith based the novel’s Gatewood Academy on, (Smith read and was inspired by her diary.)

6 Albert Schweitzer, On the Edge of the Primeval Forest: Experience and Observation of a Doctor in Equatorial Africa, trans. C.T. Campion (Adam and Charles Black, 1922) 175.

5 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (Anchor, 1990) 3.

bodily experience, specifically his dismemberment and demise. In a larger sense, she also serves as a moral witness to war and to the experiences of soldiers who met similar fates in the Civil War.

On Agate Hill shows how war causes wounds of another kind as well. Brothers Lewis and Spencer Hall, the sons of Uncle Junius and Aunt Fannie, leave Agate Hill and go off to war together. At the Battle of Gettysburg, Lewis dies a valiant death, while Spencer survives the fighting. Spencer later goes missing at Petersburg and is presumed dead. In her diary, Molly describes how he eventually arrives home “[i]nsane,” a ghost of sorts who lives apart from his family (15). With wounds that are mostly hidden, Spencer appears to suffer post-traumatic stress caused by war. Although he remains able-bodied, he is unable to fit in with family and society. Spencer finds order and comfort through routine manual labor, working the fields with black sharecropper and friend Romulus.

In telling about her father’s death, Molly serves as the wounded storyteller on his behalf, giving voice to her father’s bodily experience, specifically his dismemberment and demise. In a larger sense, she also serves as a moral witness to war and to the experiences of soldiers who met similar fates in the Civil War.

Spencer suffers the same post-war/postbattle malaise affecting other characters in American literature, including Ernest Hemingway’s Harold Krebs in “Soldier’s Home” and Nick Adams in the “Big Two-Hearted River,” and Bobbie Ann Mason’s Emmett Smith in In Country. Although their eras and war experiences differ, none of the characters fit into the paradigm of work and family expected of them. For Spencer, work is a relatively solitary endeavor but provides purpose and order in his life, as well as an opportunity for healing the psychological wounds of war. Spencer’s healing and recovery, however, are cut short. Later in the novel, he is gunned down while defending Romulus from mob violence after he dares to speak to a white woman at a local country store. Romulus survives the attack, but Spencer receives shotgun blasts to the back of the head, resulting in a death similar to that of Molly’s father Charles in battle.

War contributes to the suffering and deaths of others at Agate Hill besides soldiers. The loss of mothers and children are particularly haunting and are tied to the deprivations caused by war and its aftermath. Molly describes her younger brother Willie’s small size and failure to thrive, conditions related to the lack of food during and after the war. Watching him waste away, she knows his death is imminent: “This is as old as he gets. He looks like an angel already” (120). Maternal and infant deaths also result. Uncle Junius’s wife, Fannie, delivers a stillborn son and soon dies from childbirth complications. The dead baby is given the same name as his older brother Lewis killed at Gettysburg, which prompts Molly to connect motherhood and war. The deaths of Fannie and her baby cause Molly to reject motherhood: “I will NEVER have a baby myself!” (8).

Molly’s rejection of maternity after Aunt Fannie’s death in childbirth is rooted in harsh realities of motherhood in the Old South. Southern women of the era were twice as likely to die in childbirth than women in the North. They were also more likely to lose children in infancy and early childhood. Infectious disease in the South, as well as repeated childbearing that continued well into a woman’s forties also increased mortality rates for women and infants.7 Despite her young age, Molly is aware of these realities and surmises that her aunt’s death is related to her advanced maternal age: “Uncle Junius is old, and Fannie is old, too, she did not have any business with any more babys, Old Bess said. Babys are always dangerous but it is even more dangerous when you are old” (9).

Molly’s mother Alice also experiences serious maternal loss with the death of an infant daughter, who remains unnamed. Details of the baby’s birth and death are not disclosed but Molly counts her as one of Agate Hill’s many ghosts. In an evocative diary entry, Molly writes: “My baby sister never named so I know for sure she has not gone to Heaven if there is such a place, this breaks my heart. I see her sometimes in the high dim air up near the ceiling in the parlor before we light the lamps, and once I saw her fly through the trees in the woods among the rising fireflies, just at dusk. B. and d. summer 1866, Agate Hill, North Carolina” (15). The lost sister appears near the beginning of Molly’s long list of dead relatives, just after Willie and Alice, indicating the baby’s significance despite her brief and nameless existence. Molly writes her into being and connects her to place, further imbuing Agate Hill with memory and loss.

In addition to these familial losses, Molly becomes aware of other violence related to war and the racist ideology and practices that helped instigate it. When she and friend Mary White escape domestic chores to go in search of animal bones, they make a more gruesome discovery instead; they find the hand of “a poor brave dead soldier” protruding from the ground (52). The girls make a game of finding the rest of the soldier’s skeleton, singing children’s songs and hymns as they continue their digging. It is a scene that blends childhood play and innocence with the depravity of war. Later, when Uncle Junius tells Molly about a skirmish between the home guard and Sherman’s “bummers” that left three men dead, the skeletal hand becomes invested with history and meaning. A violent symbol of the past, “YANKEE BONES,” as Molly describes the hand, serve as “the jewel of our phenomena collection” (53). In a more disturbing scene, she and Mary White become child witnesses to the brutality of racism. Writing in her diary, Molly offers compelling testimony about the South’s violent history and its objectification

7

CHERRY grew up in Fayetteville, NC. She received degrees in Psychology from Wake Technical Community College and in Studio Art from Meredith College. Her art is exhibited regularly in such venues as the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, NC, where she was honored in 2023 with the Joyce Wilkins Award by the Raleigh Fine Art Society. In 2023, the NC Museum of Art featured a virtual demonstration live from her studio in Artspace in Raleigh, NC. Currently, she works with the nonprofit Bullets and Bandaids, a veteran-led organization that gives veterans a voice through art. Cherry’s mission is to speak out on avoided topics like mental health disorders. She hopes to evoke empathy and raise awareness of the commonality of those suffering from similar conditions, including her own, as a catalyst toward healing.

and dehumanization of Black bodies. After the girls come across the mutilated body of a Black man in the woods, Molly concludes that it is the work of “the KuKlux” (80). Later they are instructed to keep quiet about what they have seen, with Aunt Cecilia telling them, “This is none of our business. Just forget it. We have enough trouble here, there is no sense borrowing more. Now do you understand?” Following Aunt Cecilia’s admonishment, Molly secretly pledges not to stay silent and tells herself: “I am going to tell Uncle Junius anyway, and I am going to tell Doctor Lambeth when he gets here” (81). Molly’s role of wounded storyteller takes on more personal significance through her sexual encounters with Nicky Eck, “a smooth-talking smooth-haired traveling man” (115) who comes to visit Selena, Junius’s second wife, after Junius’s passing. Without her uncle’s protection, Molly is left vulnerable to Eck’s predatory actions. The way Molly describes his assault suggests that his abuse of her happens on multiple occasions. The experience results in dissociation for Molly, which she writes in her diary that he “did the things he does to me but do not worry Dear Diary for I was not really there anyway I was up in the hayloft looking down thinking Why look at that!” (121). Dissociation can be a protective response following sexual or other trauma. According to Jennifer M. Gómez, in the case of familial sexual abuse or “high betrayal sexual trauma,” dissociation provides “a way for victimized persons to be separated from the abuse they are experiencing while maintaining the relationship with the abuser(s).”8 Although

BARB

dePerson 4 (oil on canvas, 20x30) by Barb Cherry

THE

SCHOOL HISTORIC SITE

Eck is not a family member, his visits to Selena and the plantation make him a familiar presence. His repeated, unwanted attentions presumably culminate in Molly’s rape, which leads to a fractured sense of self on her part. She struggles to tell about the sexual violation she has experienced and expresses shame while writing in her diary. The manner in which she writes, which includes long spaces and a lack of punctuation, convey her woundedness: “I do not care that the fairy ring is gone from the woods now I do not care that I am leaving my ghosts I am such a bad girl I do not care about anything” (122). Although Eck is caught in the act and struck with a pitchfork by Spencer, who rescues Molly, there is no real aid for her. During the time period of Smith’s novel, there was little if any social or scientific legitimacy given to child sexual abuse. The first paper “directly related to the abuse of children” did not appear until 1860 when French forensic physician Ambroise Tardieu published “Étude médico-légale sur les sévices et mauvais traitements exercés sur des enfants” (translated as “Medicolegal studies on cruelty and ill treatment upon infants”). Tardieu’s article, which appeared in Annales d’hygiene publique et de medecine legale, offered the first definitive description of child abuse and covered almost all forms of child maltreatment.9 It would be many more years before legal reforms and appropriate treatment would be available for abused children. In Molly’s case, the solution is to whisk her away Agate Hill to Gatewood Academy, a boarding school for girls. Here she is regarded as an outsider and “sexual poison.” Headmistress Mariah Snow fears her compromised state will corrupt the other girls, who taunt Molly for being a “[b]ad girl” and an orphan (160). Molly eventually makes friends and excels at her studies. Her verve and confidence return, and she finds a sense of community at the school.

After graduation, Molly finds freedom and adventure when she moves to the mountains of North Carolina. Here, she teaches school children with her former teacher, Agnes Rutherford. Molly embraces the wildness of the mountains and working with her young pupils. She chooses independence over marriage, dismissing even wealthy suitors who can offer her a comfortable life. Molly establishes connections with the people and the culture of the mountains,

ABOVE The Burwell School, upon which Gatewood Academy was based

8 Jennifer M. Gómez, “It Hurts When You’re Close: High Betrayal Sexual Trauma, Dissociation, and Suicidal Ideation in Young Adults,” Violence and Victims 35.5 (2000): 713.

9 Martin J. Dorahy, Omno van der Hart, and Warwick Middleton, “The History of Early Life Trauma and Abuse from the 1850s to the Current Time: How the Past Influences the Present,” The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease, eds. Ruth A. Lanius, Eric Vermetten, and Clare Pain, 3-12 (Cambridge UP, 2010) 3. See also Albert John Roche, Gilles Fortin, Jean Labbé, Jocelyn Brown, and David Chadwick, “The Work of Ambroise Tardieu: The First Definitive Description of Child Abuse,” Child Abuse and Neglect 29 (2005): 325–34.

particularly the music and storytelling that pervade almost every aspect of life there.

The feelings of accomplishment and independence that Molly achieves at Gatewood Academy and then in the mountain community are relatively short-lived, however. After she meets Jacky Jarvis, her life trajectory changes yet again. Marriage and motherhood propel her into new experiences of the body and loss. While life in the mountains offers Molly a place to reinvent herself, and a place to experience both freedom and community, inevitably, marriage to Jacky brings heartache and tragedy. His philandering and the continued loss of infants, one after another, prove to be more than Molly can bear. For the most part, she suffers privately, her grief resulting in a great wound and prolonged despair. As is often the case in narratives involving the body and human suffering, Molly’s maternal story is told by someone else in this section of the book. Jacky’s cousin, BJ Jarvis, recounts the bloody birth of Molly’s first child, Christabel, on the floor of the family’s general store where she works. The infant lives for two years before succumbing to diphtheria, which claims the lives of other children in the mountain community. According to BJ, “It was a sad, sad time” (295). He also describes Molly’s anguish following the death of her second infant, Spencer, who dies at birth, and her consuming grief as more of her children die early: “She did not know what she was doing then or for days to come. Every time she’d lose a baby, seemed like it took her longer to come out of it” (297). BJ’s account fills in Molly’s interrupted narrative, as her terrible maternal losses serve to silence her.

In a sense, Molly’s maternal losses constitute a “chaos narrative,” which Frank says is difficult to tell without leaving a “hole in the narrative that cannot be filled in, or to use Lacan’s metaphor, cannot be sutured.” According to Frank, “The story traces the edges of a wound that can only be told around. Words suggest its rawness, but that wound is so much of the body, its insults, agonies, and losses, that words necessarily fail” (98). People undergoing trauma or serious illness often need distance in order to talk about their experiences accurately, which time and healing may allow. In the meantime, their stories of crises and chaos must be related by others – friends, family members, or medical personnel. In Molly’s case, BJ serves this purpose. He seems to understand that Molly’s maternal narrative is beyond her capability, which reflects Frank’s point that chaos stories of illness are “always beyond speech.” Frank elaborates, stating “Ultimately, chaos is told in the silences that speech cannot penetrate or illuminate” (101). By employing other narratives such as BJ’s, Smith provides the means for Molly’s story to be told and heard by others.

dePerson 11 (oil on canvas, 36x48) by Barb Cherry

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

In depicting Molly’s female experiences of sexuality and motherhood, and by including other narrators who tell Molly’s story in times of particular trauma for her, Smith calls to mind key questions about “[o]ther-relatedness” posed by Frank in The Wounded Storyteller. These questions include: “What is my relationship, as a body, to other persons who are also bodies? How does our shared corporeality affect who we are, not only to each other, but more specifically for each other?” (35). Indeed, Smith seems to ask these questions over and over with each new character, each new body, that Molly encounters. War, injury, racism, illness, and maternity all involve bodily experiences that give rise to the questions posed in The Wounded Storyteller. Molly herself enters a dyadic relationship with other maternal figures who experience loss in Smith’s novel. She is deeply connected to her mother Alice and her aunt Fannie, as well other women in the mountain community who lose children to diphtheria during the same outbreak that claims Christabel.

Molly names each of her lost children, however brief its life. Her first born, who lives the longest – two years – is named “after a poem” (294), presumably Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s long narrative poem “Christabel.” The names she selects for the doomed children who follow Christabel honor and memorialize loved ones from the past, a not uncommon tradition in Southern families. The naming links Molly to her children and to her own childhood scarred by war and familial loss. Her sons are given names of important male figures at Agate Hill – Spencer, Junius, and Washington, while daughters Eliza and Mary Agnes bear the names of friends from Molly’s life. Her last baby, Fannie, is named for her beloved aunt. To mark each child’s life, Molly places carved stones on their graves, creating “a row of rock babies up on the mountain like a little stone wall” (299). Her maternal losses link her with female generations of her own family who lose children at birth or early in life. Indeed, her lost children are like the “ghost children” at Agate Hill whose promise and potential will never be realized (176).

Molly experiences “other-relatedness” with the death of her husband Jacky. When he dies following a gunshot wound and fire at the family’s general store, Molly is questioned by authorities but is soon exonerated, thanks to testimony from BJ. Years later, after returning to Agate Hill, Molly reveals the harrowing details of Jacky’s death in her diary, explaining that she finds Jacky mortally wounded on the store’s floor – “gutshot, his stomach open” – with BJ’s gun nearby (358). Jacky refuses to reveal who shot him, which raises the possibility that BJ is responsible. One can speculate that Jacky’s unfaithfulness to Molly, for whom BJ cares deeply, has ruined the close relationship between the cousins. With his blood pooling around his body, Jacky directs Molly to get the gun and implores, “Please, honey” (358). Molly shoots him.

Jacky’s violent death links him with other men in the novel who suffer the trauma of war, lynching, and outright meanness at the hands of others. Molly’s reflecting upon his death addresses the questions posed in The Wounded Storyteller: “How does our shared

corporeality affect who we are, not only to each other, but more specifically for each other?” (35). Her words indicate the oneness she and Jacky once shared, as well as her ability to move past despair to contemplate the possibility that death does not mean the end of love (Frank 39). In elegiac language, Molly observes that “love lives not in places nor even in bodies but in the spaces between them, the long and lovely sweep of air and sky, and in the living heart and memory until that is gone too, and we are all of us wanderers, as we have always been, upon the earth” (328). This realization speaks to and assuages the losses Molly has experienced. The knowledge that love is not bound by time, place, or the physical body proves sustaining to Molly. Writing in her diary, she confirms the sense of love and duty that compels her to kill her husband: “I would have done anything for my Jacky” (358). In remembering and mourning Jacky, she expresses no regrets: “I am glad I gave all my heart I would do it again” (359).

Molly’s account of Jacky’s death and their connectedness is a complex story, one that is not easy to tell or to hear. It aligns with important illness stories that, according to Frank, serve as an “act of witness that says, implicitly or explicitly, ‘I will tell you not what you want to hear but what I know to be true because I have lived it. This truth will trouble you, but in the end, you cannot be free without it, because you know it already; your body knows it already’” (63). These words could easily be Molly’s, or author Lee Smith’s, acknowledging the difficulty of speaking the body’s truth and the importance of doing so. Telling about Jacky’s death, painful as it is, allows Molly to reclaim her narrative identity and find healing.

In the novel’s final pages, Molly’s return to her childhood home brings her life full circle. She is able to restore the lost parts of herself and come to terms with Jacky’s death. Molly engages in other healing acts at Agate Hill. She cares for the ruined plantation and the last of its descendants, the blind dwarf Juney, whose special gifts offer comfort to Molly and others who seek him out. With Juney’s help, she transforms fallow land into a garden that produces a bounteous yield of “potatoes and cabbage and onions and beets, big old pie plants and shiny elegant eggplant, hill after riotous hill of squash” and other vegetables (351). The garden symbolizes the renewal of body and self, a restoration to health through work, healthy food, and a connection to people and place. Molly and Juney

ABOVE Stagville Plantation, the model for Agate Hill in the novel, circa 1920s

draw large crowds at the Saturday market, where they sell their produce and nourish others through songs, stories, and Juney’s healing talents. In return, they receive such offerings as “a cake or a pie or a loaf of bread or a pretty rock or a feather or a hundred dollars or a bottle of bourbon” (353), but most importantly they find community and belonging.

The importance of Juney’s character is reflected in the joy and purpose he brings to Molly’s life. His physical disabilities are not disabling; rather, his special gifts of sight, music, and healing, along with his skill at growing an abundance of vegetables, are life-affirming. At the novel’s conclusion, Molly’s last thoughts are about him and their next trip to the market. Writing in her diary – presumably just before her death – Molly explains that she, Juney, and their helper Henry all work together to sustain their life at Agate Hill. She speaks of Juney with love and longing that could well be about Smith’s connection to her late son Josh, with whom she shared a special bond and whose life and death factored into the writing of On Agate Hill. Molly’s evocative words suggest the flow of time and memory in grieving great loss while also embracing life, even until the end. As Molly’s final words in the novel, they also stress the importance of narrative, place, and community: “It is time. I am the one who tells the stories, Henry is the one who drives the car, and Juney is the one who holds the basket of eggs still warm on his lap while the land flows past on each side, tree and rock and fence and flower, all the hours, all the days, Juney is waving at everybody. Oh I could not do without my little man” (359).

The relationship between Smith and her characters in On Agate Hill seems particularly intense, more dyadic in nature as she pens each one’s bodily experience of trauma, death, or maternal loss. Like Molly, Smith is a wounded storyteller; her connections with lost characters in the novel appear to be forged from her own maternal loss. Just as she was beginning work on the novel, Smith lost her son Josh, age thirty-three. His unexpected death from acute cardiomyopathy in 2003 devastated her. She had already watched Josh endure years of “doing daily historic battle with the brain disorder” eventually diagnosed as schizophrenia.10 Antipsychotic medication stabilized him but also caused weight gain that may have enlarged and weakened his heart. According to Smith, her son’s death resulted in “grief – and rage – [that] were indescribable: ‘oceanic,’ to use one doctor’s terminology.” Her bodily reaction to losing Josh was profound: “I felt like I was standing with my finger stuck into an electrical outlet, all the time. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t read, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t remember anything” (Dimestore 178).

KAREN BALTIMORE designed this essay and the poetry in this issue. She has been designing for NCLR since 2013, when she was studying graphic design with NCLR’s Art Director at Meredith College.

10 Lee Smith, Dimestore: A Writer’s Life (Algonquin, 2016) 124; subsequently cited parenthetically.

dePerson 6 (oil on canvas, 40”x50” by Barb Cherry

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

After months of struggle, Smith returned to writing and to On Agate Hill on her doctor’s orders, actually a prescription he wrote out for her. The prescription read: “Write fiction every day.” Her psychiatrist then told her: “I have been listening to you for some time . . . and it has occurred to me that you are an extremely lucky person, since you are a writer, because it is possible for you to enter into a narrative not your own, for extended periods of time. To live in someone else’s story, as it were. I want you to do this every day for two hours. I believe that it will be good for you” (Dimestore 179). Smith returned to writing this novel and as Molly’s character took form, so did a dyadic relationship with the character that proved healing for Smith: “Molly’s spitfire grit strengthened me as she proceeded to ‘give all her heart,’ no matter what, during a passionate life journey that included love, betrayal, motherhood, and grief (of course, grief)” (Dimestore 180).

In writing On Agate Hill, Smith admits that she “had lost all control by the final section, much of which was not only a surprise but a revelation.” She recalls being “simply amazed when Juney entered the picture . . . though I recognized him, of course, as a sort of variation of my beloved son Josh. . . . I was so happy to have him here.”11 Smith describes his unexpected appearance in the novel: “through the mysterious alchemy of fiction, my sweet Josh had managed to find his way into the final pages of the novel after all, as a mystical bluesman and healer living wild and free at last in the deep piney woods he used to play in as a child” (Dimestore 180).

For Smith and her fictional surrogate Molly, writing aids in survival and healing. As wounded storytellers, they find solace and self through writing. According to Smith, writing is “a source of nourishment and strength. . . . [It] cannot bring our loved ones back, but it can sometimes fix them in our fleeting memories as they were in life, and it can always help us make it through the night” (Dimestore 180-181). As someone who has experienced perhaps the worst kind of loss, the loss of a child, Smith knows this truth profoundly. She also understands the healing gift that writing offers: “Whether we are writing fiction or nonfiction, journaling or writing for publication, writing itself is an inherently therapeutic activity. Simply to line up words one after another upon a page is to create some order where it did not exist, to give a recognizable shape to the chaos of our lives” (Dimestore 180–81). Throughout On Agate Hill, Molly seems to intuit the significance of writing and telling one’s story. Whether she is writing about war, childhood trauma, or maternal loss, Molly’s narrative acts give her agency and help create order from the unimaginable. Writing gives her the ability to “transform fate into experience” (Frank xi) and offers a positive response to the suffering and loss she has endured. n

11 Lee Smith, “Answers from Agate Hill,” email to the author, 19 Mar. 2015.

“HOW ELSE NOT BE LOST”

a review by Robert M. West

James Seay. Come! Come! Where? Where?. University of North Carolina Press, 2024.

ROBERT M. WEST is the editor of both volumes of The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons (W.W. Norton, 2017; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019 ) and co-editor of Robert Morgan: Essays on the Life and Work (McFarland & Company, 2022; reviewed in NCLR Online Spring 2024). West serves as the head of the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures at Mississippi State University where he is also Associate Editor of Mississippi Quarterly.

JAMES SEAY , a native of Mississippi, is Professor Emeritus of English at UNC Chapel Hill. He has published several collections of poetry, and he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1988.

With twenty-seven years having passed since the publication of James Seay’s marvelous last book, Open Field, Understory: New and Selected Poems (1997), and with the author now well into his eighties, one could be forgiven for assuming that that book would stand not just as his last-as-in-latest but as his last-as-in-final. Yet Seay has continued to write and to publish work in magazines and journals, including poems – see, for example, “Now We Eat the Dark Vein,” which in 2017 appeared in The New Yorker – and especially essays, which have appeared in Harper’s, Blackbird, Oxford American, and other estimable venues. Come! Come! Where? Where? – his first book of prose –combines his recent nonfiction with his earlier forays in the genre, giving us a volume authored over a span of at least half a century. Given the long time over which the essays were written, the consistency of the author’s voice is noteworthy: the narrator of “Damn You, Love,” which first appeared in 1976 in Esquire (as “The Wicked Witch of North Carolina”), is the same worldly, recondite, psychologically insightful persona as that in “The Chandeliers,” which Oxford American brought out in 2021. As varied as these essays are – and they’re quite wide-ranging in their subject matter – they achieve an admirable unity in large part due to that consistency of voice.

Unlike many poets’ essay collections, this is a book of personal essays, not exercises in literary criticism, and so its cohesiveness also has much to do with the running backdrop of the author’s life history. One

could almost approach it as a highly episodic, highly selective, out-of-sequence autobiography: we read a good deal about Seay’s parents and grandparents, about his childhood, and about his decidedly nonacademic work experiences as a young man. We learn about his son Josh, who died of illness in his early thirties. We read about some of his travel across the US and abroad. He introduces us to his present home and tells of both harmony and conflict with his neighbors – of the bird variety as well as the human. We hear virtually nothing about other subjects one would expect from a memoir per se; for instance, his past marriages are only glancingly acknowledged, there’s nothing about his long career as an English professor, and while there’s plenty of reference to his life as a reader, there’s precious little mention of his life as a poet. While such absences are interesting – I think of Marianne Moore’s remark prefacing her incomplete Complete Poems: “Omissions are not accidents” –they certainly don’t weaken the book, which just as it is offers a compelling, multifaceted portrait of the author and a great deal of pleasure and wisdom. (Of course, territory not covered here could appear in a sequel. After all, the poet Donald Hall recently produced not one but two fine books of personal essays in his own midto-late eighties.)

The title Come! Come! Where? Where? comes from an Audubon Society description of sparrow song: “come-comewhere-where-all-togetherdown-the-hill.” The insistent

invitation (“Come!”) leads to the anticipated response (“Where?”) –and indeed these essays take us to many remarkable places: to Seay’s home today, to the eerily lighted bedroom where he slept as a child at his grandparents’ house, to Manhattan (including stops at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Twin Towers), to the cemetery where Josh rests, to Moscow (incuding the cemetery where Chekhov is buried), to the Aialik Glacier in Alaska, to the Everglades, to the barrier islands off the Mississippi Gulf Coast, to a tugboat on the Mississippi River, to the Canyon de Chelly in Arizona, and to the Mississippi Delta wilderness Faulkner’s readers know as the Big Bottom. The volume’s title also hints at the surprising direction some of the essays take: Seay himself seems a bit bemused by the fact that a meditation on eating and drinking, “Our Hands in the History of It,” concludes by evoking his childhood interest in pocketknives.

Now and then Seay can draw in a reader and keep them spellbound but also uncertain for some time where exactly it is they’re going. Consider the introduction to “The Weight of a Feather,” the third essay of the book’s twenty:

Laura, who comes every other week to clean my house, seems not to engage with the little narratives I leave for her. On my refrigerator, for instance, I have three fish magnets that I arrange in a simple linear narrative, no Last Year at Marienbad or Memento stuff. At the top of the story is a fish I got in Barbados. It is a barracuda-looking fish. But if it is in fact a barracuda, it is one goofylooking barracuda. It’s just swimming along with no thought for the morrow—or, for that matter, for the

moment. Below it is a shark that I have set in a vicious downward angle in pursuit of what looks like a snapper, but it’s not a red snapper, more blue and green. Probably a spangled emperor snapper, though the emperor when frightened will change its color, so who knows. The snapper is swimming desperately upward in the direction of the nitwit barracuda, but its attempt to escape is clearly doomed. The shark is hungry, relentless. Laura rearranges the fish in peaceful and parallel paths across what I intended as an ocean of pain and truth. I don’t think she has a Disney World narrative in mind, but that’s the story I see. (11–12)

In some ways that opening makes a good snapshot of the book’s style: the delivery is crisp and entertaining, with invocations of both high and popular culture, international travel, and the author’s knowledge of matters far beyond the ivory tower. Here as elsewhere we also find deftly deployed verbal effects associated with poetry: for example, there’s a remarkable amount of alliteration throughout, beginning with the very first sentence (Laura/ little/leave, who/house, comes/ clean, not/narratives). It’s a captivating paragraph.

One probably wouldn’t guess, though, that an essay that starts in such (mostly) lighthearted fashion and then proceeds to humorously describe other aspects of the author’s home décor – charmingly detouring through memories associated with those items – would eventually reach a deeply poignant reflection on Seay’s relationship with his father, followed by an equally poignant account of the elder Seay’s experience of a life-altering work injury. One wouldn’t guess that trajectory,

but that’s the one we’re led to take, through a series of moves as thoroughly graceful as they are surprising. Having conducted us to this destination, Seay closes with a meditation on narrative:

It is commonplace to note that some of the stories we attempt to tell elude or otherwise fail in their mission. Likewise stories that we are told. We can’t follow the narrative line; it escapes us utterly or we lose it somewhere along the way. Or the import of the story eludes us. As for the stories we tell, those that involve a sense of play are particularly prone to misinterpretation. They have the wrong traction, the wrong tonal register, the wrong timing. They can embarrass us or leave us unsatisfied with our attempt. On Wikipedia they would be in need of disambiguation. But we continue to offer those stories for play in the world. (21)

We need to tell and hear such narratives, he goes on to say, to cope with life’s overabundance of pain and loss. To quote the rhetorical question with which he closes the essay, “How else not be lost in weeping for the hurt and the too-soon gone?” (21).

Indeed, several of the other essays (such as “Wheat Field with Crows,” “Snugfit Eyepatch: The Monocular Proof,” and “You Dumb Bell”) do revolve around loss, but they do so with an inspiring kind of philosophical good humor. And others (such as “Avian Voices: Trying Not to Kill a Mockingbird,” “Big Boss Man,” and “The Single-Wide Wars”) stay mostly clear of the elegiac. Come! Come! Where? Where? isn’t a sad book, even when it does deal with sadness; it’s genuinely as life-affirming as the sparrow song translated by its title. n

BY PRISCILLA MELCHIOR

Elegy for a Friend

Marty Sliverthorne, 1957-2019

You heard her sigh, saw the sad shake of her head, that a look of pity you know so well after all these years; you must’ve heard her whisper, sweet faux discretion and concern, There but for the grace of God,

but you sat mute, knowing, a big man buckled and strapped to a wheelchair, useless limbs tied in the quadriplegic pose, head back that you might survey the world — grimace or grin, no one sure. Ah, but for the grace of God:

you, a brawny country boy on drink and drugs flung from his motorcycle at 19, left in a bloody knot on the road to nowhere; shattered, and yet, you owned it. You couldn’t get up, but you did go on, even these decades

beyond: poet, counselor, father, friend. And so I understood that day when the drunken lout spotted you, shook his head and sneered. I understood, as you watched him lurch past, why you muttered There but for the grace of God, and meant it.

PRISCILLA MELCHIOR is originally from Wilson, NC. She is a four-time finalist for the James Applewhite Poetry Prize, and her poems have previously appeared in NCLR 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2022. Throughout her career, she worked at various newspapers in eastern North Carolina, including The Daily Reflector. Retired since 2011, she lives in Highland County, VA.

BILL GRIFFIN is a naturalist, poet, and retired family doctor who lives in rural North Carolina. He features Southern poets, nature photography, and microessays at his blog. In particular, find his blog posts on the poet Marty Silverthorne, who inspired this poem: “Stories We Tell” and “The Leaving, The Abiding.” These blog entries include poetry by the poet, who was paralyzed from a motorcycle accident in 1976.

Purple Dwarf Iris by Bill Griffin

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Echoes of Past Issues FLASHBACKS:

‘Tis the Season

by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor

Election season is a good time to share the “A Modern Poem” (1777) with an introduction by E. Thomson Shields, Jr. We believe you’ll agree with him that “[t]he Censor’s satire of Revolutionary War-era politics hits home in the political climate of the twenty-firstcentury United States.” Note how the poem’s original editor says he had not planned to publish it but, worried about the complacency of the electorate, changed his mind. And so this piece hearkens back to our “in the news” theme of 2018, as does the next piece in this section: an essay in which a journalist ponders his relationship with his career choice.

Read another short story by Ronald Jackson, this one David Joy’s selection for second place in the 2023 Doris Betts Fiction Prize contest. This is Ron’s second NCLR story, and it also calls to mind our 2014 issue featuring War in North Carolina Literature – as well as anticipates our 2026 call for submissions for a special feature section on writing by veterans, active military, and their families.

Next you will find two reviews of Young Adult novels (in 2006, we featured children’s and YA writers), then two reviews and a poem adding to the Appalachian literature we featured in 2010. In addition to her Appalachia-inspired poem, we have a second poem by Maria Rouphail to add to our literature and the other arts theme (2017), as it was inspired by a work of art by the poet’s son.

Finally, Robert G. Anthony reports on the 75th gathering of the North Carolina Writers Conference, held in Black Mountain. Such gatherings of writers were often covered in the early issues of NCLR

If the feature topics echoed in all of this writing appeal to you, remember that all of these back issues – indeed, all of our back issues – are available for purchase. We have a full storage closet that will need to hold next year’s issues when they come in and a revenue advance we must meet with sales to access our full spending budget. So please, peruse our virtual bookstore here, credit card in hand. We have something for everyone, so how about starting your holiday shopping early? n

38 A Modern Poem by the Mecklenburg Censor introduction by E. Thomson Shields, Jr.

52 Highway 17 (failing at local journalism) Rose Post Prize essay by Nikolai Mather

60 The Way Home a short story by Ronald Jackson art by Chris Liberti

72 Growing Gracefully a review by Amber Knox n Karen Jones, The Summer of Grace

74 Emergency Salad Dressing a review by Wendy Tilley n Ena Jones, Six Feet Below Zero

76 Timely Portrayals of a Place a review by Elaine Thomas n David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew n C.L. Willis, Hillbilly Odyssey photography by James O. Reynolds

80 Space and Time in the Appalachians a review by John Charles Ryan n Loss Pequeño Glazier, Transparent Mountain

83 Appalachian Morning and Things that lift my heart and make it glad two poems by Maria Rouphail photography by James O. Reynolds and art by Paul Rouphail

86 North Carolina Writers Conference Celebrates 75 Years by Robert G. Anthony, Jr.

6 n North Carolina Disability Literature essays, a poem, and a book review

89 n North Carolina Miscellany poetry, fiction, and an essay

A “ ” (1777)

Modern by the Mecklenburg Censor POEM

introduced by E. Thomson Shields, Jr.

E.THOMSON SHIELDS is Associate Professor Emeritus at ECU. His research has focused on early American and frontier literature, including that related to North Carolina. Most recently, he co-authored with Charles R. Ewen

Becoming the Lost Colony: The History, Lore and Popular Culture of the Roanoke Mystery (McFarland, 2024). He and Ewen also co-edited Searching for the Roanoke Colonies: An Interdisciplinary Collection (North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 2003).

Through brags and threats , Subtle and Sulky tell voters to elect them and they will connive to get Mecklenburg County more than its share from the new government.

THEIR REAL AIM IS TO BECOME AS RICH AND POWERFUL AS POSSIBLE BY LEADING SULKY AND THE GENERAL POPULACE BY THE NOSE. THE CENSOR CONCLUDES BY WARNING THE ELECTORATE THAT IN THIS NEW DEMOCRACY, IF THEY ARE NOT CAREFUL, THEY WILL FIND THEMSELVES WITH “MORE EXQUISITE PAINS, / THAN TYRANT GEORGE’S GALLING CHAINS.”

The Censor’s satire of Revolutionary War–era politics hits home in the political climate of the twenty-first century United States.

After the Declaration of Independence was ratified in July 1776, the Province of North Carolina began transitioning to become the State of North Carolina. That fall, representatives to the Fifth, and final, North Carolina Provincial Congress were elected, an assembly that would draw up the new Constitution of North Carolina. And in the spring of 1777, North Carolinians elected representatives to the newly created North Carolina Assembly. Modern myth imagines a world of Patriots unified for American Independence, ready to defend their newly created democracy against the British monarchy. However, as the people of Mecklenburg County prepared to vote for representatives to the new state assembly, the Censor circulated his cutting portrait of the November 1776 election.

The Censor tells how one candidate, called Squire Subtle, convinces another, Sulky, to run for the Provincial Congress. In his speech to the assembled voters, Subtle describes himself as godlike – protecting the rights of the little people and, with Sulky, being responsible for the success of the local school. In his own speech, Sulky tells how his great plan for a giant pan to produce sea salt failed only because the Provincial Congress failed to recognize its greatness; how in victorious battle against the Cherokees he captured a huge pile of potatoes; and finally how as a lawyer he can manipulate laws in their favor. Through brags and threats, Subtle and Sulky tell voters to elect them and they will connive to get Mecklenburg County more than its share from the new government. And if they don’t elect them, their lives will be hell. Surprisingly – or maybe not – the bombastic haranguing speeches work. Both men are elected. The scene then shifts to Subtle talking with his brother, Quirk. The two discuss how their real aim is to become as rich and powerful as possible by leading Sulky and the general populace by the nose. The Censor concludes by warning the electorate that in this new democracy, if they are not careful, they will find themselves with “more exquisite pains, / Than tyrant George’s galling chains.”

As politics dominate current news cycles and our lives, it is worth reading “A Modern Poem” in the same light as the anonymous Editor. did Having hand-copied the Mecklenburg Censor’s poem and added his own introduction, the Editor says he had the poem in hand for a while with no plans to share it because he thought the Censor’s satire was too harsh. That was “until [he] saw . . . the same spirit of insipid indifference” to the corruption in the people they had elected. The Editor, like the Censor, is worried they would elect the same again. Just as the Editor and the Mecklenburg Censor did in 1777, we have to ask what democracy is, what it could be, and what it should be.

Some Notes on the Text and Context

While considering how the Mecklenburg Censor’s view of politics in 1777 backcountry North Carolina compares to the present day, it’s also worth drawing pictures of the origin of “A Modern Poem.” One such picture is of the poem’s setting. In 1777, Mecklenburg County was North Carolina’s western frontier. The county courthouse, where the speeches would most likely have been given and the election held, was at the intersection of Trade and Tryon Streets in the small town of Charlotte – the town only having been incorporated in 1768. The courthouse itself was reportedly a wooden structure raised on brick pillars with outside steps leading up to the courtroom and the space underneath used to hold markets. The steps would have served as the stage for the election speeches with the voters standing below, many probably having come from one of the nearby taverns.1

PHOTOGRAPH BY S.H. KRESS; COURTESY OF HE ROBINSONSPANGLER CAROLINA ROOM, CHARLOTTE MECKLENBURG LIBRARY

And those taverns may have played a part in how “A Modern Poem” was “published.” In the late 1770s, there were six taverns within two blocks of the courthouse.2 Taverns were not only a place to get libations before, after, maybe even during

of

1 This description of the first Mecklenburg County courthouse appears in several nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources. See, for example, Daniel Augustus Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg County and the City of Charlotte, from 1740 to 1903, Vol. 1 (Higginson, 1903). Several replicas of the courthouse have been built over the years, mostly in conjunction with commemorations of historic events, such as the 1976 Bicentennial.

2 Kate Hillary Moore, “Strange Business for a Lady: Single Women’s Work in Mecklenburg County, NC, 1774–1860” (UNC Charlotte, 2016, MA thesis) 23; subsequently cited parenthetically.

ABOVE Replica

the first Mecklenburg County courthouse built for the 1976 Bicentennial

Taverns were also one of the hubs of manuscript culture – that is, where people shared, including reading aloud, what wasn’t available in print but had been written down.

an election; they were also social centers. In Charlotte’s taverns, as elsewhere throughout British America, “male community members met to discuss politics, business, and local gossip while women often tended to the customers” (Moore 24). Taverns were also one of the hubs of manuscript culture – that is, where people shared, including reading aloud, what wasn’t available in print but had been written down.3 There is no specific evidence that “A Modern Poem” was shared in one or more of Charlotte’s taverns, but it is easy to imagine it was. For one reason, while extant records show such activity in urban taverns and coffee houses, the structure of “A Modern Poem” lends itself to such a performance, even in a noisy frontier tavern. Except for the introductory and concluding stanzas, the satire is presented through dialogue and speeches, that is, through the spoken word. And the lines are eight-syllable rhyming couplets, called Hudibrastic verse, a sing-song form that comes off as humorous and that is easy to follow.

Another reason to think that “A Modern Poem” was written to share out loud in a public space, like a tavern, is that the poem exists only as manuscript, in two manuscript copies. One copy is in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the other is owned by the Charleston Library Society in Charleston, South Carolina.4 The Southern Historical

ABOVE Tap Room in the Halifax Historic District, Halifax County, NC, perhaps like the tavern in which the Censor read his poem

READ

ALOUD, THE EMPHASIS

WOULD HAVE BEEN ON THE GENERAL

SATIRE

OF

POLITICS AT THE TIME OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, INCLUDING QUESTIONS ABOUT HOW REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY WOULD HAVE TO DEAL WITH A HUMAN TENDENCY TOWARD SELFISHNESS.

Collection manuscript is an 1850s copy of an earlier manuscript dated March 18, 1777. The Charleston Library Society manuscript is an original from the eighteenth century, dated March 30, 1777. The two versions of the poem itself are generally the same, but there are significant differences. The Southern Historical Collection manuscript (titled “The Mecklenburg Censor” rather than being by The Mecklenburg Censor) includes several lines not in the Charleston Library Society version. At the same time, the Charleston Library Society edition includes two major additions not found in the Southern Historical Collection version.

One is the Editor’s introduction, mentioned above. The other, not included here, is an appendix titled “Characters and Notes of Information” identifying the various characters in the poem as specific people in Mecklenburg County. The “Characters and Notes of Information” have been left off here to give a better sense of how the poem might have been first experienced when read aloud in one of Charlotte’s taverns. Read aloud, the emphasis would have been on the general satire of politics at the time of the American Revolution, including questions about how representative democracy would have to deal with a human tendency toward selfishness. The “Characters and Notes of Information” are a second, highly local layer of satire. To follow this second layer of satire requires looking at the notes, then connecting them back to specific lines in the poem, an activity that would require an individual or a small group of people focused on the manuscript rather than on the poem alone. In fact, the Charleston Library Society manuscript is set up like a political pamphlet; it can even be speculated it ended up in Charleston with the hope that it might be published. But at its heart, “A Modern Poem” is a satirical poem ripe for oral performance.

That is why this edition is presented as it is, different from any of the few previous editions. The poem has been published only three times before – by Alexander Samuel Salley in in one of his regular historical columns in the Sunday edition of the Charleston News and Courier, by James H. Moore as an appendix to a book on the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, and by me as a fully academically annotated and explicated edition in Early American Literature 5 The two early twentieth-century editions focus on the

5 A.S. Salley, Jr., “People of Charlotte to Celebrate a Myth,” Sunday News [Charleston, SC] 22 Apr. 1906: 20; James H. Moore, Defence of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence: An Exhaustive Review of and Answer to All Attacks on the Declaration (Edwards & Broughton, 1908); E. Thomson Shields, Jr., “‘A Modern Poem,’ by the Mecklenburg Censor: Politics and Satire in Revolutionary North Carolina,” Early American Literature 29.3 (1994): 205–32.

And the first step, now as then, is not to put people in power who “Let public good to private yield,” but to elect those who “Make private ends to public yield.”

historical context of the poem, and references to the poem from the nineteenth-century until as recently as 2014 discuss it as a historical source, not as literary work.6 My own 1994 edition does discuss the literary and rhetorical aspects of “A Modern Poem,” but is presented with as much historical and textual annotation as I could find at the time. A cleaner edition to focus on the satire is called for. This edition, then, is based on the Charleston Library Society manuscript. In addition to the poem, the Editor’s opening letter addressed “To the Electors of Mecklenburg” is included because it, like the poem, satirizes the voters of 1777 Mecklenburg County, but through general questions about what it means to be part of a representative democracy. And the letter could have been read aloud in a Charlotte tavern as easily as the poem. The “Characters and Notes of Information” have been omitted to emphasize the poem and its satire, as noted above. All the twists and turns of the poem’s fuller historical and textual context can be found in my 1994 edition, but I would urge almost anyone to read “A Modern Poem” – even read it aloud –as given here first.

In that way, we can better consider how we might today avoid what could “cause you more exquisite pains, / Than tyrant George’s galling chains,” as the Censor cautioned his 1777 audience to do. And the first step, now as then, is not to put people in power who “Let public good to private yield,” but to elect those who “Make private ends to public yield.” n n n

Modern Poem A by

The Mecklenburg Censor

To the Electors of Mecklenburg ~

Gentlemen,

The following poem came sometime ago by accident into my hands, in which I find some things that will probably offend many of my good friends in this County. Yet I am of opinion that it contains many useful hints which ought not to be concealed from the public at this critical conjuncture. I have therefore thought it my duty, as an impartial but sincere friend to the inhabitants of the county, to give you an opportunity of perusing it.

The Censor ridicules the confused and unthinking conduct of the freemen of Mecklenburg, at the election held

last November, with a severity that I thought unjustifiable, until I saw that the same spirit of insipid indifference prevailed at our last election, held the 10 th day of March. He also disapproves of the men you have chosen; and indeed I have great reason to believe from your conduct and public sentiment that you yourselves disapprove of your choice. For what other reason has induced you to hold elections for field-officers of the Militia and Justices of the peace – a power by our Congress very judiciously vested in the General Assembly? And why the very particular instructions you have given your Representatives? If you

were convinced that you had chosen honest men, you would surely trust something to their management. But instead of this you are so dubious of their integrity that you do every thing your selves, and send them only as messengers to inform the assembly what your will & pleasure is. Strictly by your orders our Representatives must abide or do nothing. Quere [Query] would not those instructions in writing, signed by a number of leading men in the county, and sent to the Assembly by a trusty negroe, answer the same end? If you expected that your Representatives were to answer any purpose, would you choose one of that class of men which you always suspected of corrupting your laws and constitution, a Lawyer ? And one too whose interest (if he has any) lies in another county; at any rate is not a freeholder in this; and never thinks proper to reside in it but when a Court is held, at which he may scrape up a few pence, or when he would wheedle you to elect him representative, an honour which the people where his interest lies are not foolish enough to confer on him?

I sincerely wish that all party feuds were extinguished in this county, as I verily believe that most of the people at present study more to mortify an opposite party, than to promote the general wellfare.

March 30th, 1777~

Your sincere friend

The Editor

THE MECKLENBURG CENSOR

A Modern Poem

When Mecklenburg’s fantastic rabble, Renown’d to censure, scold and squabble, At Charlotte met in giddy council

To lay the constitution’s ground-sill, By choosing men most learn’d and wise, Who clearly could with half shut eyes See mill stones through, or spy a plot, Whether existed such or not; Who alway could at noon define Whether the sun or moon did shine; And by philosophy knew whether It was clear or rainy weather; And sometimes, when their wits were nice, Could well distinguish men from mice: Squire Subtle then to Sulky came, Sulky a lawyer mean in fame.

“Sulky,” he said, “my friend pray hear, “I’ve things important for your ear.

“D’ye mark yon silly rabble rout?

“Who talk they know not what about:

“Who by the nose like colts are led:

“Quere, isn’t this our time to speed?

“You know, my friend, the vulgar views,

“I guide to ill just as I choose,

“By hypocritic cant and prayer, “To what I say I make them swear.

“Lend me your hand, as sure as fate

“I’ll make you rich, I’ll make you great, “And to the Congress strait I’ll send you,

“And every help I there will lend you.

“But what I tell you still obey, “Lie, perjure, every trust betray;

“Let public good to private yield, “Until our empty bags are fill’d; “Pay equal tax to brother Quirk “He’ll do your business in a jerk.” Grim Sulky gave th’applauding grin, And yields assent with all his chin.

“To you and Quirk my soul I’ll sell, “To serve you till ‘tis sent to hell.”

He every wrinkle then expands, And gives him thanks with lifted hands. Into the assembly now they rush’d, With glowing hopes sublimely flush’d, Where Subtle thus harangues the croud,

With gesture strong and accent loud: “My countrymen, poor senseless throng, “O’er whom I’ve watch’d with care so long, “Although I move in higher spheres, “Nor feel your little hopes and fears, “My godlike mind can deign to bend, “And sometimes to your needs attend. “I oft to heaven your case prefer; “(And I have mighty interest there.)

“By me it is the hosts on high “Regard you with a pitying eye; “By me it is each civil right “Is not obliterated quite; “My wisdom’s power at council board “Redeem’d you from a home-bred lord, “Who else e’er this had stripp’d your skin, “As bare as good friend Sulky’s chin.

“By me it is that learning lives, “By Sulky and by me it thrives, “Who on it have employ’d our stores “Of coppers, even many scores.

“At least one score by it I’ve lost; “If I said two I should not boast.

“Since such my merit I demand “You choose me member out of hand: “Else hence my aid I’ll all withdraw “Nor mind you more than empty straw.” He said. Then long-chin’d Sulky rose, First wip’d his mouth, then blow’d his nose, And yawning wide he thus began; “Remember friends I am the man, “Who in provincial council sat, “Debating much on schemes of state, “And great emolument had brought, “By stress of lungs and stress of thought; “Had not my compeers, empty sots, “Despised all my earthen pots, “You had not eat your victuals fresh, “But fitly season’d all your flesh, “Your beef, your mutton, pork and pullet, “Th’ adored idols of my gullet.

“A plan I fram’d by which the ocean “(Conform’d exactly to my notion)

“Had yielded all her copious stores, “And pour’d her salt upon our shores.

“A Crock of wond’rous shape and size, “Such ne’er was seen by human eyes, “Had o’er the beech [beach] its basis spread, “Forming a deep capacious bed, “Wherein the briny wave inurn’d, “Should by the sun to salt be turn’d. “But jibing fools my crock withstood, “And sneer’d it to its native mud;

“While you my friends the boon lament, “The boon my project might have lent. –

“Now listen, Gentles, if you please, “How I bemaul’d the Cherokees, “When arm’d all o’er in dread array, “To Indiantown I bent my way; “Resistless through the village broke, “And much potatoes captive took.

“To this the troops can witness bear, “Who of the captives had a share. –

“But more than this have not I been “A patron to the college scheme?

“Did not I here a school erect, “And with my influence it protect?

“In chimney corner I begot it, “And from my fruitful body brought it: “Its father, mother, midwife I, “‘Tis surely then my projeny. – (All laugh)~

“Restrain my friends this noisy mirth, “Squire Subtle saw the wond’rous birth; “And old reports the fact will prove, “For Pallas sprung from head of Jove. “My learning too you know is great, “In all the tricks and wiles of state; “Able I am from any block, “To hew a police or a crock, “And any law can quickly make, “To hang a man or whip a snake, “To fix your right in land or pin, “Or castigate you when you sin.

“Since such my learning and great merit, “To any lawyer I’ll refer it,

“If I have not the justest claim, “To all the honours you can name: “Your votes you can not fail to give, “If you have any sense alive;

“And if you don’t by G – I swear, “You’re fools too great for earth to bear, “And Subtle shall with book and bell, “Soon pray you headlong all to hell.”

The Sheriff now with awful voice, Had signifi’d the people’s choice.

Old Subtle heard himself proclaim’d, And Sulky too with Sharp Shears nam’d. His furious joy in rapture breaks, And Sulky’s chin in concert shakes. He draws his brother Quirk aside, And thus he pours th’ exulting tide.

“How happy now our scheme’s on foot, “We could not wish a tittle to’t, “Sharp Shears and Sulky well I know, “As I direct will say or do.

“I’ll make them lie, and cringe, and swear, “And of the profits give you share.

“But this observe, when I’m displac’d, “(For so I must be, and disgrac’d,)

“When e’er some medling soul shall rise, “To ope the blinded vulgar’s eyes, “Unfold the selfish schemes I’ve built, “And trace my secret paths of guilt, “Then take my place, my steps pursue, “And plot for me, I plot for you, “Sharp Shears and Sulky will agree, [“]To tool for you as well as me, “The Charlotte trimmer too I ween, “At home will throw his interest in. “Come let us then to greatness soar, “The glittering prospect lies before; “We’ll gain it soon, pursue, pursue, “The happy goal is full in view.[“] Quirk thought it best to check his pride, And thus the cautious knave repli’d.

“Take care, my brother, how you steer, “Your sanguine rashness much I fear, “Sharp Shears and Sulky both may aid,

“If in the dark they’re wisely led.

“But never let the blockheads know

“Expressly what you mean to do; “For if your secret they possess, “They’ll spoil it by their emptiness, “Make such a bustle, such a rout, “The veriest fool may find it out.

“Sharp Shears, fat head, can never span “The intricate intrigues we plan, “Nor guide with such a steady grace, “As long can cheat the populace;

“The shallow current soon will shew “The filthy trash that lies below.

“Sulky, you know, how false his boasts

“Of feats perform’d on Indian coasts, “Of Indian towns to pieces shaken, “And huge potatoes captive taken,

“You know his scheme of marsh-mud kettle, “Made like himself of feeble mettle,

“And twenty things that prove the fool “Is only fit to serve as tool.

“By acting thus secure and sly,

“We’ll never at their mercy lie;

“They can’t in weakness or in pet “Expose us to the public hate, “If they should fail we’ll others get,

“Will serve our purposes as fit.

“If any should reflect upon us,

“We’ll stop their mouths with empty honours;

“The lucrative engrossing gold, “Our children and ourselves will hold.

“And if at length we be detected,

“When we’ve a mass of wealth collected,

“We’ll try corruptions potent force, “To keep us steady in our course, “And drive the rabble into measures, “By distribution of their treasures.”

“Quere,” cries Subtle in a transport, “If you are not the very man for’t: “Most wisely you the plot have laid, “And I will act just as you’ve said.

“Oh how my soul with rapture swells, “When on the pleasing thought it dwells “Of holding rank ‘bove vulgar fate, “And supping mush and milk in state,

“Of giving to the rabble law;

“While low they cringe with humble awe;

“Seeing my grounds by negroes till’d, “And all my chests with dollars fill’d,

“A blaze of glory round my head,

“My house a little palace made;

“My fair-hair’d son no more you’ll see, “Affrighted climb a hickory tree,

“But arm’d with power and mighty sway “Compel the county to obey.

“Adieu dear Quirk, I must be gone “Still bear in mind what we’ve begun.”

My countrymen, I pray you think, You’re tottering now on ruin’s brink.

Oh think e’er long ‘twill be too late, I tremble for the birth of fate.

E’er long you’ll find the Squire and Quirk, More absolute than Moor or Turk, And cause you more exquisite pains, Than tyrant George’s galling chains.

Be wise my friends and choose such men As will your freedom still maintain, Make private ends to public yield, Contend and never quit the field, Until your rights they all secure, By laws and ordinances pure.

Mark this, nor need advice again Sirs, Sim’lar to the Mecklenburg Censor’s~

17 HIGHWAY AT (FAILING LOCAL JOURNALISM)

by Nikolai Mather

with photography by the author

NIKOLAI MATHER is a Report for America core member from Pittsboro, NC. He covers rural communities in Pender County, Brunswick County, and Columbus County. He graduated from UNC Charlotte with degrees in genocide studies and political science. Prior to his work with WHQR, he covered religion in Athens, GA, and local politics in Charlotte, NC.

On November 1, 2023, I was about an hour from the newsroom, driving down US-17, practicing a speech. US-17 is a highway running through Wilmington, North Carolina, up along the coastal edge of Pender County. My speech was about black mold. It wasn’t even really a speech; it was a series of thoughts I had cobbled together in an attempt to convince a couple of landlords (whom I’d meet in a few minutes) to talk to the media (i.e., me). They didn’t want to talk because they were being sued for – allegedly –covering up a black mold infestation in their Section Eight apartments for half a decade. Deep in thought, I was driving down 17 when I totaled my car. In a half-second: my airbags inflated, knocking me back against my seat and spraining my ribcage. My knees hit the slant below my steering column, and they sprouted deep, dark purple bruises. My lip busted. My windshield shattered. The entire front half of my car crumpled on

Dimly, I reached for my phone. Miss Dawn, a resident who kept sprouting mysterious gastrointestinal bleeds, had texted me: “When will you be here?” I readied my fingers to text, “Might be a bit late,” and then, hearing the yells outside, it occurred to me to first check if I, too, was bleeding, or if I maybe had killed someone.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment journalism started ruining my life. Was it back when I freelanced? All those blithe invoices I sent, the ones publications never replied to? Was it the first time an editor made me late on rent? Or the twenty-

Maybe it goes back to my years as a student reporter at UNC Charlotte. Was it the day I had to cover my own school’s shooting? The snipers on the roofs, the screaming pockets of evacuating

students, the New York Times stringers badgering my friends for information until they cried. The bloody photos and traumatic interviews I pored over, trying to make sense of senseless violence. Was it then?

It could have been when I was working at that paper in Georgia. Those were some truly despondent news cycles: the collapse of Roe v. Wade, the crystallization of the South’s legislative transphobia, the birth of Cop City. Actually, there was a whole season where my coworkers and I investigated sludge: a mysterious, often hazardous, and totally unregulated substance used for farm ing. Companies grind up unwanted unknowns sometimes chicken uteruses, sometimes indus trial washdown, sometimes an as-yet-unheard-of toxin that’ll give our grandchildren cancer. They label it “soil amendment” and pay farmers ducats to spray truckloads of the stuff on their land. The rain washes it into streams, over budding produce, onto cow pastures. In the summertime, plagues of flies descend upon the boiling fields. The stench of rotting flesh carries for miles. Real end times shit. We spent months toiling away at this big story package, and when it finally did publish, one of our boss’s bosses admon ished us for not getting enough clicks. I guess our readers had other things to worry about that year.

All I know is that by the time I crashed my car, I had spent five years absorbing these blows. Vet eran journalists will laugh at that number. But it’s astounding to look back on this short time and see all the things I put myself through in the name of local news. The layoffs. The source who groped me. The transphobic hate mail following me from job to job. As I’ve grown, I’ve contorted myself around these things, sidestepping the barbs when I can, embracing their stings when I must. Their presence in my life is so complete that I hardly notice them anymore.

For weeks, I had been making the hour-long trek from downtown Wilmington up to the small town of Holly Ridge. For a while, it was daily – sometimes twice a day depending on the deadlines. I had been covering what had metastasized into a public health crisis at an apartment complex owned by the town of Holly Ridge.

Hurricane Florence passed through here in 2019. It blew the roofs off the buildings, soaked the ground, dropped several feet of stormwater overhead, made a lake out of the potholed neighborhood. Miss Dawn’s cabinets still had a floodline from that storm. Her apartment also had black mold.

Miss Dawn had major respiratory issues. She cleaned her house like a maniac to no avail. Miss Dawn told me that she requested somebody do something about the mold way back in 2019. She said they kicked her and her son out for a few weeks, removed her warped cabinets, and set them in the North Carolina heat and humidity to “cure.” Then, she said, they popped them back in place.

“Watch this,” she told me a few days before my crash. She placed her hand on the wall, drew it away. It left a slight imprint. And then she waved

On Halloween weekend, the town of Holly Ridge ordered all residents to move to a hotel twenty miles north while they tested their apartments for mold. On Thanksgiving weekend, they condemned them, giving residents until December 31 to move out of the hotels. Their Christmas was a hurried, transient affair in the hotel conference room.

Finally, the town council gave them a twoweek extension, telling residents it was the last straw. By then, the town had spent two million dollars on emergency lodging and other expenses – a quarter of last year’s budget. They said the residents needed to take responsibility for themselves. This is in Onslow County, where social services is overrun with veterans and where, as one nonprofit director put it, homeless shelters have been more or less at capacity since 2021. The residents started trading TikToks on how to safely sleep in cars. The town cut the hotel funding on January 15, the day I was to turn in this essay.

Before I was a reporter, I harbored different delusions: specifically, delusions of one day becoming an activist. When I was seventeen, I organized an anti-Trump protest with my friends. During the march, a reporter approached me, said he was from the Daily Tar Heel, wanted to ask a few questions. We spoke briefly, then he disappeared into the crowd.

That night, my comments appeared on Breitbart. Turns out the guy was actually working for a right-wing blog called Campus Reform. It

college students would attend protests, publish hurried write-ups about them, and then watch their work get chewed up and spit out in the form of an angry blog from Breitbart’s evening editor. Whichever poor soul got name-checked in it would spend the next week deleting angry DMs from their readers.

I never saw the Campus Reform guy again. But years later, I had a chance encounter with that editor. After several years with Breitbart, he said, he had a change of heart. He went back to law school and became an attorney. He ended up writing an essay about the experience, which I dug up online. He is not quite as remorseful as he should be, but certainly embarrassed enough to apologize to me over the phone.

ants could get out from those awful apartments. If anything, she helped me: took me out to lunch, walked me through the history of Holly Ridge, gave her opinion on the apartment buildings (she was also a general contractor).

“This town is too small to handle a public housing authority,” she told me. “I don’t know what they were thinking, taking this on.”

“It was that or working for the local paper,” he explained. “And who wants to do that?”

Who, indeed?

Holly Ridge has one newspaper: the Topsail Times, run by the gun shop slash axe throwing venue slash arcade owner Dorothy

She was right. Holly Ridge had 4,100 residents. Before the mold crisis hit, the town council agendas revolved around parade planning, zoning for new luxury housing developments, the new town seal.

During this year’s candidate forum, which Royal moderated, one of the town council members beseeched the crowd to slow down on US-17. It runs right through Holly Ridge.

“And my mama, who’s eighty-five years old, still crosses it every day to check her mail,” she said to applause.

I was sitting with a group of residents, who, arms busy with babies and taking notes, didn’t really clap. That council member would go on to pose a different request to the tenants during a

“If you can’t live in these apartments,” she said, “why don’t y’all just move somewhere else?”

One of them stood up, declaring that she was on disability, that she lived on less than one-thousand dollars a month.

“Where can I go with that?” she said, voice trembling. “I’ll move there today!”

These tenants take care of each other. One of them watches everybody’s kids while a couple of them go off to pack. One of them picks up boxes from the Dollar General while the others grab some tape. They share food, they share appliances, they cry and laugh and bash the people who let it all get this bad, and they do it all together.

I scribbled that note down at my desk during another long day. My editor, who fought a bunch of Public Informatio Officers (PIOs) over one of my stories last week, stood to leave. My assistant editor, who stayed late to edit one of my pitches last night, did too.

in Jackson ville and her job being in Hamp stead, and obviously she’s got to worry about where she’s gonna be living in a few weeks, and how she’s gonna pay for it, because she was only paying about threehundred dollars a month before, and what she’d even be sleeping on, because she sure can’t take her mattress, but as we share a pack of Newports in the town hall parking lot, she asks after my family.

I started dating a writer for a local television station about a month before all the Holly Ridge ladies were supposed to leave the hotel. “Content producer” was her official title.

“Okay, okay, I will,” I say. But it’s an-

Miss Kelly’s got to worry about her own nieces and nephews, who live next door to her in the complex and keep getting random bloody noses, and she’s got to worry about her job, which she now has to drive an extra thirty minutes to on account of the hotel being

The night we met, she explained her job to me: clock in first thing, absorb PR agency emails, release as news items, thirty-minute unpaid lunch break, more pressrelease quick-turns, leave at six p.m.

By this time, I’d been pampered with two years of fellowship funding and flexible work schedules. Gannett was bad, but this? Seemed unfathomable. And I told her so. I asked her why she stayed with them.

“Because I get paid to write,” she said.

On the worst nights – during the most monotonous meetings, the most frustrating PIO calls – I have to remind myself that same thing, that I am getting paid to write. Because even the best journalists know they can’t do it forever. All the essayists and bloggers I admired in high school have since left this industry. They work in corporate, or in retail, or they crowdfund for living expenses. Some of them got chased out by online harassment; others were melted away by the heat of more banal evils, like one corporation eating

COURTESY OF WHQR

another. It usually came down to money,

One day, when I burn myself out on news and have to work at the Autozone, I know I’ll look back on those commission meetings and

Holly Ridge owns the apartment complex. But HUD mandated that they had to hire a property management company to run it. For about four years, that was Pendergraph Management. That company stands accused of ignoring tenant complaints about mold, threatening to kick out tenants who complained about mold, withholding the tenants’ leases, hiding mold damage from HUD inspectors, lying about mold damage to town officials, et al.

I’ve called their office fifty-one times since this whole saga began. Fifty-one voicemails, and not so much as a text in return. The one time I’ve ever spoken to a Pendergraph employee was in late November. I walked into the dim office, and there was Miss Karen, the octogenarian property manager. We started chatting, and as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw what she was doing at her desk – sweeping piles of documents into a black garbage bag.

She caught me staring. “Oh, child, this is just for my burn pile,” she said.

“Oh,” I replied.

Eventually, I asked her if she’d like to comment on the ongoing mold issues.

She beamed. “Oh, no. You know that’d get me in trouble, darlin’. But I appreciate you asking.”

One of the many babies I got to hold during my time in Holly Ridge is named Timothy. He’s Miss Danielle’s chunk of a six-month-old, with big blue eyes and an easy smile. He reaches for me at a town meeting, and I pop his button nose. He grins, drools a little bit.

“Look,” Danielle says, switching him to her other hip. She strokes the back of his head. “Feel his glands. They’re swollen again.”

Timothy has had an ear infection in one ear or both pretty much since he got out of the

delivery room. He’s been put on all different types of antibiotics. For a long time, he also had a red rash on his little body – a rash, Danielle tells me, that started to subside once they moved out of her apartment and into the hotel.

“You know, we learned he’s allergic to penicillin,” she says. “So I’m waiting to see whether that mold’ll pop up on our building’s results.”

There is nothing more frustrating than trying to figure out what’s growing in your house. I spent hours talking to mold experts trying to figure this out. Your typical test amounts to taking samples of the air in a certain number of places in your house – let’s say all four corners of each room, each one for fifteen minutes. You’d still only collect the spores that floated into that area at that one point in time. That says nothing of the spores that kick up when you turn on the ceiling fan or shuffle over the carpet, the molds that bloom and die based on season or time or humidity.

Hell, let’s say you do conduct a thorough audit of every mold in your house. Which ones are dangerous? It’s impossible to say. As one biologist told me, you would have to take every spore and propagate it and then see whether it produced a mold that was toxic or allergenic or benign.

I even went to HUD, whose inspection guidelines on mold said something to the effect of, “if you see it, fix it.” I tried asking HUD which molds exactly were dangerous. Weeks of back-and-forth emails led to my money

COURTESY

quote: “HUD cannot comment on this matter at this time. Refer to HUD guidelines for more information.”

If this explanation seems crazy-headed to you, it might be because these revelations came to me on hour twenty of an all-nighter. I just wanted to have something to help the ladies make sense of their results. They just wanted to know what they could salvage. Their couches? Their late husbands’ clothing? Their babies’ birth certificates? It was the first time I didn’t have an answer for them. It wouldn’t be the last.

There’s a punching bag in my newsroom. I use it a lot more than I’m ready to admit.

Do I like my job?

Do I like bearing witness to bottomless sorrow? Do I like making recordings of single moms crying over losing all their possessions? Do garbage collectors like the stench? Do vets like euthanizing beloved family pets?

Not all of it is bad. And the bad that it is, God, it’s just nowhere near the bad that my sources deal with. I can run back to the office, bury myself in reorganizing files or scrolling through my phone. But they can’t run from their own lives.

The way I see it, this job is founded on proximity – on positioning yourself so close to the struggle that you have to remind yourself where it ends and you begin. If you can even find that line. It’s why I find it so deeply grating to hear journalists complain about the people they cover. When I joined this profession, I assumed most people

would understand the phenomena they wrote about, or at the very least what it was like to be on the other side of the mic. No. Turns out a notinconsequential number hardly even know what their sources are saying. “Can you sum that up for me?” a local reporter whispers behind me, following someone’s remarks at a conference. “I don’t speak Robeson County.”

Do I like my job? Someone’s got to do it. And Lord, let it be me. Not those TV reporters recklessly deadnaming murdered trans kids on the air; not the good old boys taking the sheriff’s reports as gospel. I’ll never understand my state, and I’ll never understand my people – my neighbors, my communities. But let it be me who shares their stories, and not someone who thinks they got them all figured out.

There is no tidy ending to Holly Ridge. I’m writing this with salvation in sight, but not quite here. The USDA announced last month that they will issue rent vouchers to everyone affected by the mold crisis. Through some bureaucratic magic, these vouchers will honor the original rent prices each resident had, but allow them to live at any apartment they can find in the area.

Most of the families have found a new place to stay. But there are still thirteen living at the hotel, waiting for the USDA to approve their new apartments. Most of them only need another week or two to get their housing sorted. It’s not like they have much to salvage from their old apartments. Besides, their new landlords won’t allow them to bring anything from the old place. It’s too much of a hazard.

The town council cut their funding today, but one of the local churches stepped up to fund one more night. Miss Dawn has created a groupchat of the remaining families. She named it “The Final Countdown.” She tells everyone to take a deep breath, to take care of each other, to trust they won’t be homeless by the weekend.

“JUST REMEMBER,” writes Miss Dawn, her text messages peppered with smiling faces and hearts, “JESUS WAS ONCE A REFUGEE TOO!”

I didn’t kill anyone. My only victim was an elderly woman’s Mercedes, which came to a near-stop in a fifty-five mile per hour zone.

I met her in the back of an ambulance. She was fine, just shaken. She vaguely patted me on the shoulder.

“Bless your heart,” she said. “You really took a hit there, honey.”

The cops came and ticketed me for rearending her. The medics asked me if I wanted a ride to the hospital; I said no. The towing company came and hitched up what was left of my Honda Civic. The driver offered me a cigarette, which I accepted.

I spent ten minutes waiting outside the salvage yard, texting Miss Dawn and the rest of them, the evening sunlight waning. Then a battered black sedan pulled up. My editor-in-chief got out.

“I guess I’ll extend your deadline. Just this once,” he said.

And then he took me back down 17, back to the newsroom. n

“I’m drawn to stories about essential jobs that are hard to keep doing – a situation reflected in the title. . . . But this essay –nuanced, gripping, and honest – is as far from a failure as it gets. I hope to read more from this writer.”

—Belle Boggs, final judge

SARAH ELKS , who designed this layout, the NC Writers Conference and Tomlinson essays, and the article about the Green Performance Poetry contest, is a graduate of Meredith College and has been working with NCLR since 2022. She is a graphic designer based

2ND PLACE, 2023 DORIS BETTS FICTION

PRIZE

THE WAY HOME BY RONALD JACKSON

RONALD JACKSON writes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. His work has appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, NCLR, Tar River Poetry, and other journals and anthologies. Recognitions include finalist, short list, honorable mention, or runner-up for the Lascaux Prize in Poetry, American Short Fiction ’ s Halifax Ranch Prize, the Doris Betts Fiction Prize, the Thomas Wolfe prize in short fiction, the Lascaux Prize in Flash Fiction, the Lamar York Prize in Nonfiction, and the Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Award. Jackson holds an MFA in Writing (fiction track) from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

That’s the thing with some lifers. Pulling out of Dodge gets in their blood.

Charlotte-based artist CHRIS LIBERTI was born in Buffalo, NY, and raised on the East Coast. His early interest in illustration led to study in graphic design before he transferred to Buffalo State College, where he earned a BS in Fine Arts/Painting and Urban Design. While working as a telecommunication design engineer, he continued to exhibit his art in New York, Virginia, and California. He and his family lived in Charlotte, NC, for a time, where he maintained a studio. He exhibits extensively throughout North Carolina, as well as nationally. He is represented by Blue Spiral 1 Gallery in Asheville, Thomas Deans Fine Art Gallery in Atlanta, Meibohm Fine Arts in East Aurora, NY, and Tregony Contemporary gallery in Cornwall, UK.

My first week in bluegrass country, a fellow airman and his wife had me upstairs for pork schnitzel and red cabbage. The ceilings were sloped up there. You walked in the middle and stooped toward the furniture at the sides. Sergeant Pell was heavy and stood well over my six feet, and I couldn’t figure how he got on in that place. Halfway through my tour there, he dumped his German bride and their baby daughter to go live with a fleshier woman. That’s the thing with some lifers. Pulling out of Dodge gets in their blood.

Little Liesl – that’s what people called her – was a pixie. Delicate frame, pretty nose, and short, sandy-blond hair. She had an impish smile, but after Pell bugged out, she was always rubbing lotion on her hands and losing her train of thought. She had baby Rosalie and a yappy Chihuahua, Gretel, as companions. The neighbors across the road, Blanche and Shug, stopped by when they heard. A newlywed couple lived across the entry from me, and the bride went up to keep her company.

I took her into Berea when Pell couldn’t make it, which was often. At the drugstore, she carried Rosalie on her waist in a cozy pouch. The baby made goo-goo eyes at strangers while Liesl shopped for meds, powders, lotions, and anything made in Germany. The first few times, I passed the time chatting with Naomi, the checkout girl I liked. Something different about her stirred

me up, but I never figured out what it was. Then she disappeared, and I kicked myself for not asking her out. I took to browsing toothpaste, razor blades, and snacks while Liesl shopped.

I slept with Liesl the one time, a couple months after Pell left. We were unloading the car, she put on some water for tea, and it went from one kind of thank you to another.

WITH ART BY CHRIS LIBERTI

OF

I SLEPT WITH LIESL THE ONE TIME, A COUPLE MONTHS AFTER PELL LEFT. WE WERE UNLOADING THE CAR, SHE PUT ON SOME WATER FOR TEA , AND IT WENT FROM ONE KIND OF THANK YOU TO ANOTHER

Kitchen Counter (oil on wood, 16x20) by Chris Liberti

AFTER

FOUR

YEARS SALUTING AND

YES-SIRRING, I WALKED TOWARD MY FREEDOM RIDE, BIG DUFFEL OVER ONE SHOULDER AND A SMALLER ONE IN THE OTHER HAND.

It had its gloomy moments, with all the crying and talk, but she was a fireball during – I could’ve shown you the bites and scratches. And despite her miseries, she could crack a joke when we got twisted like pretzels or something missed its mark. The next day, she looked at me like we had a thing going. I told her I liked her a lot, but I worked with Pell every day and it would be a while till her divorce. I didn’t want to be her Johnny on the spot. She didn’t like it, but I kept helping her out and she went along with it.

The newlyweds entertained us. I heard the bride talking about her married life and Liesl shouting, “You naughty little bugger!” One afternoon, before Mr. Newlywed got home, the girl hurried down the steps.

“He’s going down on me tonight!” she called out. “I have to take a bath.”

The husband was a soldier at the big Army depot up toward Richmond, which is where they’d plunked our little Air Force station. My last afternoon there, they gave me a farewell party. They served cake and Asti Spumante, and our commander, Major Shaw, gave a toast that had everyone rehashing how clueless I was when I first got there. I’d come a long way since then and appreciated the laughter and pats on the back. The morning after, I stepped out to a steady breeze and took a farewell stroll around the farm that

surrounded the cottage. Mr. Blankemeyer was shooing the mules out.

“Hup, hup, hup!”

I waved, and he waved back as he rapped at their haunches with a leafy branch. The mules brayed formally and twitched their ears and tails but didn’t really mind. I went back and said goodbye to Gretel at the bottom step. She’d scampered down barking when I opened the door. Liesl waved from the top, her bathrobe half open and a towel wrapped around her head. She looked seriously good, and I had to remember the plan: catch the one o’clock bus home to Philly.

“Thanks for the deal on the car,” she said. “And the rides.”

Her voice got shaky, and she held onto the banister.

“And the lessons. I’ll practice on back roads. Promise!”

I waved up like I’d be coming home in the evening. She had a forced smile on her face, and if I went up, I’d never get out.

I had a couple hours to make the bus. After four years saluting and yes sirring, I walked toward my freedom ride, big duffel over one shoulder and a smaller one in the other hand. It was usually a fortyminute hike into town, but over an hour with the bags, and I was fighting the wind. I wanted a slow, ground-level look at my world for what seemed a lifetime, mostly farms that sold off strips of land along the road for cottages and ranch homes. I waved at people mowing their grass, hanging up clothes, or out with their kids. Most of them waved back, and I got nostalgic.

All in all, I’d had an okay enlistment. They taught me electronics, and I kept radio links running in the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. I didn’t have it as bad as guys entering a village in Nam, wondering if the Viet Cong had got there first. I got to see faraway places and learn that people were crazy different and pretty much the same everywhere. At the ass end of my time there, I had no clue what Uncle Sam was up to, just that people were dying, I was part of it, and get me out of there. After forever, they plucked me from Southeast Asia and stuck me in the Bluegrass. At the station, they trained me on radar, and I tracked and scored bombers on practice runs. I was still part of it.

In town, I popped in the drugstore and bought a pack of Chiclets, a Pepsi, and a Zagnut bar from the new girl. She had snowflake tattoos falling down her cheek and talked like a Canadian. At the depot, my mind turned to Philly. I was making it home after a long time away, and I didn’t feel like the same person who’d left four years earlier. One guy from the neighborhood got drafted and sent over as a helicopter gunner and didn’t make it home alive.

I was excited more than I’d anticipated, anxious to see Aunt Nanny, my mother’s sister, and her husband, Felix. Nanny cooked all day for us and had a stream of homemade catchphrases ready for anything. When someone raised her hackles, it was, “And they shot a man like Lincoln!” When a woman got mistreated, she’d say, “No prick’s worth it.” When a teenager went on forever about how grown up he was, she’d shock us with, “He ain’t through shittin’ green yet.” This from a

Catholic lady who went to mass every Sunday, was friendly with everyone, and wouldn’t hurt a fly.

My uncle and I spent summer evenings on our front porch on Brown Street. We were separated from the sidewalk by a little garden he kept flowered and trimmed and a wrought iron fence with points shaped like the ace of spades. We sat on cushy, springy chairs, feet up on the porch rail, and listened to the Phillies on his transistor. We waved hello to passing neighbors, and they asked the score. Carpenter bees burrowed in the wall behind us, and he spoke to them in Polish like they were old friends.

I waited on a bench that wobbled when I moved, nibbling my Zagnut and sipping on the Pepsi. The Philly bus pulled in – it said NEW YORK on the front – and two hippies got off wearing the widest bellbottoms I’d ever seen. The driver said my duffels were too big for the overheads, so I shoved them in the baggage compartment underneath. When he nodded, I took a last breath of Kentucky air, helped up an old man with a cane, and got on.

I went to the back and sat in the next to last row. A lady had draped a purple velvet coat over herself and stretched out asleep on the back seats, which went all the way across like a bench. She’d have to get up when seats got scarce, but I figured she knew that and was having her moment. I’d just settled in when Naomi, the girl I liked from the

CARPENTER BEES BURROWED IN THE WALL BEHIND US, AND HE SPOKE TO THEM

IN POLISH LIKE THEY WERE OLD FRIENDS.

505 Window, 2022 (oil on wood, 15x15) by Chris Liberti

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

drugstore, got on and came to the back with her head down. She sat across from me in the aisle seat, and I could see she’d been crying. She sat stiff, like she was afraid a bomb might go off. The bus pulled out, and Naomi started crying again, the kind of sobs you hear with your eyes.

We rolled through Bluegrass country and were nearing the Ohio River. It was a rerun of my trip north two days before. Wright-Paterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, was the closest place to get my walking papers. I’d driven up in my Nova, past the same white-fenced pastures, all perfectly groomed like the thoroughbreds standing in them. Near Lexington, I’d cracked the window to let the early spring cool in, something you can’t do on a bus without someone complaining. Every so often, a hard wind bucked the car. I opened the window all the way, let the air rush in, and stuck my arm out like it was summer.

Naomi had the scrubbed look of a farm girl. Pink cheeks and thick, tawny-blond hair that fell in waves to just below her neck. When we’d chatted at the register, I glanced at it whenever she turned her head, thinking how I’d like to run my fingers through it, bury my face in it, and smell it. Now she

stared straight ahead, like she knew she stuck out, and closed her eyes as we crossed over the Ohio. When she opened them, she looked out her window, then over at me. I gave her a soft smile. She gave me a little wave from her lap. She moved to the window seat, and I thought she had enough of me or anybody. But she patted the aisle seat, and I went over.

“I remember you,” she said.

At Cincinnati, a slew of people got on, and the lady in the purple coat sat up blinking. When we pulled out and left the city behind, I told Naomi I remembered her too. She commented on the cows, which looked like props to her. When the scenery started looking all the same, she let out a long breath. She told me she’d wondered whether I’d ask her out after the many times I came in front of her at the register.

“You can tell when guys want to, but they’re afraid of getting shot down.”

“Would you have said yes?”

“You didn’t ask, so I can’t say.”

Fair enough. We sat in silence past Dayton and Columbus. At Zanesville, she leaned into me, and her voice lowered to a whisper.

“I have to tell somebody, and you’re it.”

She put a grim look on her face and talked like she was in the confessional. She’d found out she was pregnant shortly after I’d last seen her. When the baby came, she gave it up for adoption.

“I was working late with my boss. He was doing books, and I was stocking shelves. He trusted me more than the other girls and gave me extra hours. He had barbecue sandwiches and Dr Peppers delivered and pulled a bottle of rum from a desk drawer.”

“We deserve it,” he’d said as he poured some in.

They gossiped about work for a while until he began with, “I appreciate you, you stand out,” and it went on from there.

“As guys go, he wasn’t all that bad,” she said. “Things escalated and I let it happen.”

Naomi pursed her lips, ready to say more, but stopped.

“That’s enough. You get the picture.”

She looked lost, like maybe she’d made a mistake telling me or had no idea how to follow up.

“Let’s swap life stories,” I said.

She let out another long breath and told me about the Amish, that she was headed back to Lancaster County to live with her family, and that she needed to be with her mother. She’d come out to live among the English for a while, one of the girls who wanted more than bonnets, farm life, and no music.

“I used to work in Philly, the Amish food stall at Reading Market,” she said, in the way you stare into another time and remember it fresh. “I loved it. The music from the speakers made me happy. When I turned sixteen, I went Rumspringa – the running around wild in the world. You’re allowed to do it. I found a roommate in Philly, but I didn’t like big city life, so I followed a girlfriend to Berea. When the baby came, the father and I talked a lot. He said I wasn’t ready. It scared me.”

She started to struggle again, so I told her what I might have said if we’d gone out on a date. About the Blankemeyer farm. About the newlyweds, which she laughed at. About Little Liesl upstairs and her baby, but I stopped myself.

“No,” she said, “I want to hear it.”

I told her about Pell leaving and about Rosalie and Gretel. I told her about my childhood, how it sucked a lot but had its moments. How our home

I TOLD HER ABOUT MY CHILDHOOD, HOW IT SUCKED A LOT BUT HAD ITS MOMENTS.

HOW OUR HOME WAS MISERY

CENTRAL, HOW

I WENT TO LIVE WITH MY AUNT, AND HOW I PLAYED A LOT OF BASKETBALL AT REC CENTERS AND ON THE STREETS, WITH PLYWOOD BACKBOARDS ON TELLY POLES.

was misery central, how I went to live with my aunt, and how I played a lot of basketball at rec centers and on the streets, with plywood backboards on telly poles. How I was thinking of going to college on the G.I. Bill, maybe major in Journalism. Naomi listened, then shook her head like something didn’t make sense.

“How does Liesl make it? She can’t be getting enough from Pell.”

Liesl worked as an admin in the US government office in town that tried to help poor people and small businesses get on their feet. There were many of those in Appalachia, and growing up poor in blue-collar Philly, I admired what she did. I told Naomi all that, and as the conversation went on, her comments took on more life. She asked who took care of Rosalie when Liesl was at work,

and I told her about Blanche across the road, how kind she was, and her husband Shug giving Liesl rides to work. I asked about her baby, and she said the papers were signed.

“He’s going to a couple that wants a child bad – that’s all they could say. I have a week to change my mind. I couldn’t bear staying in Berea, knowing he might be having his bottle or sleeping in a house near me.”

She did the little head wiggle you do when you’re trying to forget something and reached into a canvas bag at her feet. She read from her journal, a story she made up that took place in Lancaster County. An Amish wheelwright fell in love with a woman from Trinidad who was doing a PhD in American Studies at a Philly college. It came from someone she’d met.

“Back when I worked at the market, a Trinidad woman bought Amish barbecue from me, and we had a conversation, mostly me asking questions. She was a student, dark and beautiful, and her talk had a melody. I never forgot her.”

In the story, they made a love nest from an old wagon frame, hay, and quilts. They met terrible opposition from the community. The ending was sad, and I drifted into a kind of awe. I dreamed of writing stories, and she was doing it.

We were getting close to Wheeling. I got deeper into Liesl’s baby and how Pell had left her mostly alone. How Liesl spent time with Rosalie and Gretel in the patch of yard between the house and the road. How I kept an eye on them through the window and they did all right. I stopped when

IN THE STORY, THEY MADE A

NEST FROM AN OLD WAGON FRAME, HAY, AND QUILTS.

I realized I was going on about babies and mothers. We slowed down, and when we pulled into the terminal I said, “Sorry.”

“You did right!” she said and shooed me into the aisle.

She walked out, whispering, “I have to get off,” and I sat there stunned.

I popped out of the little bubble we’d been in. When I glanced back to see who was around, the lady in the purple coat had an accusing look on her face, like she’d been listening in. Her big face and broad shoulders surprised me, and I held her gaze a second trying to figure her out. She spoke deliberately to me in a thick voice and a Cajun accent I thought you only found in movies.

“Me? I’m not lettin’ dat fille get away.”

Then she raised an eyebrow at me, like what’s it gonna be, buster?

I caught up with Naomi in the ticket area. She was shocked I got off, but grateful. I checked in at the counter and presented both tickets. They said

Doors, 2021 (oil on wood, 18x22) by Chris Liberti

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

we could resume our trip to Philly the next day, with no extra charge. I got our bags from the bus and the lady at the window directed us to a motel down the main street.

She’d gone into radio silence, and I let her alone on the walk over. After we settled in the room, she stretched out on the bed and let me massage her feet and back. We napped, and she nestled into me and moved a little, adjusting herself. It aroused me, and she stopped cold and moved away. We tossed and turned in the night and woke up dopey in the morning.

In the motel’s breakfast room, Naomi kept her eyes on her boiled egg. I waited until I couldn’t.

“What’s going on?”

She looked up with clear eyes.

“I’m going back for my baby, hell or high water.”

I listened and nodded but didn’t mean it.

At the depot, she sat down and stared into space, like she was imagining it all happening. I sat thinking myself into a stupor about leaving Naomi behind. Then about being with Naomi and her baby, what kind of life that might be – changing diapers, dodging pee fountains, and singing

IT WAS A PACKED FIRST WEEK. SHE APPLIED TO GET HER SON BACK AND BEGAN EVALUATION AND COUNSELING. IF SHE

lullabies. I asked for her ticket and got up. The lady at the window said she could issue a new one for the difference and a change fee. I drummed on the counter with three fingers until the lady said, “Sir?” I slid both tickets over. The woman slid two new ones back at me with a blank expression, like she’d seen the episode and knew the ending. Naomi’s eyes got big when she saw both tickets with BEREA, KY printed in bold. All she could say was, “Thank you,” in a whisper, and look at me like she was trying to see into my brain.

From the Berea bus terminal, it was a short ride up to my place. I had a good time showing Naomi around. Our little cottage faced the road, right where you turn into the Blankemeyer farm. I checked in with our landlord and landlady, and my place wasn’t taken. You entered the apartment from a low cement-floor porch that had a rustymetal glider sofa next to the door. Naomi sat down and made a squeaky sound with her mouth when it creaked, which was a good start, and I smiled when she wasn’t looking. In the closet-sized entry, when you shut the door behind, you had four doors to pick from: Liesl’s going up, the newlyweds on the right, my place on the left, and the door you came in on if you wanted to turn and leave. I’d done that more than a few times when I needed to be around people not wearing a uniform. I’d drive into town for supper, or walk around Berea College, or stop in a bookstore, and remember what it was like. This time I picked the left door and showed Naomi around my place.

It was a packed first week. She applied to get her son back and began evaluation and counseling. If she could steel herself on the bus, even for a few hours, she had the stuff to get through the sessions. Liesl let me use the car in exchange for more lessons and chauffeuring. When I told her I was taking Naomi out shopping, her voice stiffened.

“Bring it right back. I might need it.”

Naomi needed to be busy all the time, so I showed her around the farm in the afternoons when she was done counseling. I assured Mr. Blankemeyer’s wife Florence that it was not a shack-up, that she needed a place until she sorted things out. She called her “child” and told us we could stay and not to worry, that it’d all be taken care of when I got work.

WE SLEPT LIKE BEARS. THE NEXT NIGHT, IT WAS CLEAR WE WOULD NOT BE DOING THAT AGAIN SOON.

I was hoping Liesl would invite us up and they’d get along. The third day back, Liesl came out to the front yard with Rosalie and Gretel, and Naomi went out to meet her. I left them alone, but I could see through the window that they weren’t saying more than a few words at a time. When Naomi came in, I asked how it went, and she didn’t say much.

“She’s thinking of going back to Germany.”

Naomi was so caught up in getting her child back, that comforting her – back rubs and light snuggling – seemed the right thing. She said stuff that sounded like she might see us together at some point, but it was up in the air. At the end of the first week home, we were in bed and wound up spooning, which is a slippery slope. I got hard and she got squirmy. After a bit, she turned around and looked into me like she was trying to figure me out. Good luck with that. We slipped our legs between each other’s and started back and forth, like in high school. I’d forgotten how much wild abandon that could be.

“Just this,” she said, as things got hotter. We slept like bears. The next night, it was clear we would not be doing that again soon.

A few days later, Naomi went out to the yard again to visit Liesl and her crew. I watched as

Naomi spoke for a good while. Things seemed to relax and Liesl turned her head toward her a few times. They laughed at something, and I was happy to see them getting along. I asked what they talked about this time.

“She’s afraid if she goes back, she’ll hear Itold-you-so from everyone.”

It was my first job hunt, and it wasn’t easy. Up at Wright-Patterson, I’d gotten an exit interview from a nice man, Master Sergeant Toon, who had short, wispy hair that fell forward like Mr. Blankemeyer’s barley when it first comes up. He’d asked what I was good at.

I had to think.

“Writing,” I said. “The nuns drilled grammar in our heads. People come to me for help.”

“Tech writing!” he almost shouted.

I hadn’t thought of it.

“You got good tech training, pretty much a two-year degree. Cash it in. Companies need people who can explain things without the mumbo jumbo.”

I found out in the first week back that there wasn’t a ton of industry in the Bluegrass, the kind that needs tech writers. In the second week, I got hired at Kmart. They made me department manager in charge of radios, TVs, hi-fis, and other electronics. The manager said I could help write up the weekly fliers. I started right away, and he left me on my own. I waited on customers, read pamphlets when no one was around, explained things in a shaky way, and made my apologies. It was a big thing off my list, and I went home happy.

Naomi had been getting rides home from her counselor, and I expected her to be there, but it stayed quiet when I came in and shouted out about the job. She’d mentioned that the evaluation was winding down, so I figured there was some kind of final review, maybe a decision and celebration. I grabbed a Yoo-hoo from the fridge and went to the front room, where a folded note lay on the coffee table. She did have other business, but not the kind I was thinking. She wrote that her chances were better to get her child if she went back with the father. The day before, they’d had a heart-to-

heart, and he agreed it would make things better for them and the baby. He couldn’t see himself living in Berea with any peace of mind while Naomi and his son lived nearby. I gave him that point. I couldn’t stand to read the rest of the letter, the part meant to let me down easy. Boom. Thud. Kaput.

I got out my bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold tequila. I had no limes but found an orange that had seen better days. I sprinkled salt on the good parts and got to pouring shots. It was me, myself, and Jose. I’d thought a good thing had been happening between Naomi and me, that it might develop into something, and that she only needed time. The messing around? That was her showing appreciation. A one-shot deal. The seventh Jose gave me my plan. I’d get up, walk to Trailways again, and ride the bus all the way to Philly. There I’d know the score. I set the alarm for nine and went to bed. I slept through till eleven. The bus left at one, and for a couple minutes, I moved like the plan was on. But my head felt like someone planted an anvil in it. The more I realized that my speed was set to slo-mo and I had to pack and make calls, the more I realized I’d never make it. What’s one more day, anyway? I put on some water and scraped out a spoonful from a jar of instant. There was a half-sleeve of Ritz in the cupboard and Muenster cheese slices in the fridge. I set up in the front room, staring out the window as cars rolled by now and then, like they had important reasons for doing what they did. Where were they going? Did they know? Or was it bees in a hive? Spurred on by everyone doing the same and no one knew how to stop or that it needed stopping. The queen was fat, so it felt like a purpose. I sat that way a long time, then nodded off like an old drone.

I woke to clattering coming down the stairs. It was Liesl lugging the

THE QUEEN WAS FAT, SO IT FELT LIKE A PURPOSE. I SAT THAT WAY A LONG TIME, THEN NODDED OFF LIKE AN OLD DRONE.

playpen to the yard. Then another trip down with a lawn chair, which she set up next to it. I watched her corral her little pooch in the pen. Finally, she came down the steps with a jumbo baby bag hanging from her shoulder and singing sweet nothings to her girl.

“Kleiner engel – kleiner maus –kleiner schnucki.”

Then, “My baby bunny – my sweet little sparrow – my pretty red fox.”

I liked that she was serenading her baby in both languages and saying things I’d never heard. Through the front window, I watched them settle under the big elm. Liesl laid a blanket out and rested Rosalie on her back. She tucked a little pillow on each side, set her up with a bottle, and opened a book. The whole thing looked nice. I walked to the vestibule and stopped, thinking do I want to do this? I went out and sat in the glider.

“Guten morgen,” I said. It came from the German lesson Liesl gave me when I’d been up for dinner with her and Pell.

“Come join us,” she said.

The glider squeaked when I moved, and I squeaked back at it and went over. Liesl pulled up another beach chair, the kind with short legs.

“Just in case,” she said, and gave me a nervous smile.

I opened it and lowered myself in. I stretched my legs out, bent my neck back, and slid my butt forward. Liesl nodded like it was fine and natural.

“It’s not best for a big guy, but it keeps the heinie off the ground.”

The baby went into her milk bliss, then stopped on a dime and looked into the tree. Branches swayed gently, and new leaves rustled in a soft breeze. A robin flew into a bird’s nest tucked into the fork of a limb,. Rosalie started in on her bottle again, and things stayed quiet until Liesl spoke.

“A man came for the girl. Want to hear about it?”

“Sure,” I said, but I didn’t.

I kept my eyes on the nest and Liesl’s words got distant. A squirrel scurried up the trunk with what looked like a blackberry in its mouth and disappeared on the other side. After a bit, she cut the story short and gave me a lesson.

“The girl squirrels do all the work. They have the babies, find the food, and feed the kids.”

The girl squirrel scooted down the trunk. How many trips did she make in a day? After a boy got around to his job, how many little furballs might wait in her cozy den for a wild berry or a chunk of produce from Mr. Blankemeyer’s fields? Here came the robin again and Rosalie giggled. The bird had a clump of brush in its beak.

“The robins team up,” Liesl said. “He finds mud and twigs and fluffy stuff, and she makes the nest how she likes. They both find food and feed the babies.”

The bird and squirrel stayed active, and Rosalie followed them around, singing her own sweet nothings. The tree persons understood her better than us ground persons, I was sure. I started in with the Philly bus, the coming back, my new job, and the note. It was Liesl’s turn to go silent, and I stopped talking. There was quiet in the air, one of those still-

THE BABY WENT INTO HER MILK BLISS, THEN STOPPED ON A DIME AND LOOKED INTO THE TREE.

BRANCHES

SWAYED

GENTLY, AND NEW LEAVES

RUSTLED IN A SOFT BREEZE.

nesses that lingers long enough to feel it, as if the Earth paused to rest and collect its thoughts. After several minutes of us breathing quiet, a bumblebee came looping by, looking for clover or early flowers. We watched as it floated around in its pattern until it came near Rosalie. I leaned forward to shoo it away, but Liesl laid her hand on my elbow and held me back.

“He’d never sting her,” she said. “It’s good luck.”

Gretel raised hell barking when the bee dipped into the playpen. Rosalie chirped when the furry little thing flew over. The squirrel screeched at us, and the bird flew down and spooked it. We kept our eyes on them to see who got the best of their shenanigans, and when the bird made a really nasty

pass, the squirrel turned from head stretched out and screaming to head up and hightailing it back to safety. We all laughed like hyenas, one of those long, long laughing fits where you try to stop, but you can’t. n

THERE WAS QUIET IN THE AIR, ONE OF THOSE STILLNESSES THAT LINGERS LONG ENOUGH TO FEEL IT, AS IF THE EARTH PAUSED TO REST AND COLLECT ITS THOUGHTS.

Tree, 2019 (oil on mylar, 17x14) by Chris Liberti

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

GROWING GRACEFULLY

a review by Amber Knox

Karen Jones. The Summer of Grace. Brother Mockingbird, 2022.

AMBER KNOX is a graduate student at East Carolina University, where she works as an NCLR Editorial Assistant. She has an Associate in Arts degree from Pitt Community College as well as a BA in English from ECU.

KAREN JONES ’s books include Death for Beginners (Quill Driver Books, 2010). She is a retired broadcast journalist who also spent ten years as a public school educator and has taught writing workshops and seminars at Louisiana State University, Austin Peay University, and Old Dominion University as well as writing courses at the University of Richmond and Christopher Newport University.

In her new novel, The Summer of Grace, Karen Jones takes her readers back to 1950s America to explore the complex relationships within a Southern family and the challenges, both internal and external, that they face together. This Young Adult, coming-of-age novel follows ten-year-old Gracie over the course of a summer spent on her great-grandmother’s farm in North Carolina. Gracie’s visit is fraught with familial and social tensions as she and her cousin attempt to overcome the histories that haunt them and uncover the mysteries surrounding their family. In The Summer of Grace, Jones crafts a heartbreaking and heartwarming story about the traumas of the past and the strength of family.

Jones makes it clear from the beginning of the novel that Gracie does not have a close relationship with her parents. She spends most of her time trying to avoid catching her high-strung mother’s attention. And while her father seems to be concerned about his wife’s mental state, his daughter’s needs do not receive the same care. Gracie is very aware that “There was enough trouble around here without me having a problem too. Momma’s spells took up most of the air” (6). Unable to rely on either of

her parents, Gracie mostly keeps to herself, confiding only in her faithful dog Brown Hound.

When Sissy’s condition seems to worsen, Gracie and Brown Hound are sent away to stay with her father’s relatives for the summer. While her grandmother, Miss Emily, and greatgrandmother, Granny Jane, are practically strangers to Gracie when she arrives, she soon finds a new home with them and her cousin Jane. The two girls spend their days exploring the North Carolina countryside, swimming in the nearby river, and scaring each other with tales of the conjure woman and the local ghost. The relationships Gracie develops in North Carolina are vastly different from what she has come to expect at home. Miss Emily and Granny Jane often show concern not only for the girls’ safety but also for their happiness. Aunt Martha and Uncle Ben enjoy spending time with them and regularly invite Gracie and Jane to their house in Kingston for the weekend. Brown Hound is no longer Gracie’s only confidant as Jane becomes a constant presence at her side. Perhaps most impactful for Gracie is the realization that she now has people in her life who are willing to stand up for her: “Daddy always gave up.

ABOVE Queen Street looking North, Kinston, NC, circa 1953

But Uncle Ben didn’t give up. He just kept at it until he won. He’d said that it was important to me, and he made Aunt Martha see that” (113). Under this care and attention Gracie “blossomed like a flower in the sun” (265). She quickly comes to love her extended family, and, as the summer passes, her fear of her parents sending her away becomes fear of being taken back.

Gracie is not the only character dealing with complicated feelings about her family. Her cousin Jane lives on the farm with Miss Emily and Granny Jane and seems to be happy and thriving. However, not everyone in the family is content with Jane’s upbringing. Gracie and Jane’s aunt Viola makes her disapproval very clear throughout the course of the novel. This family conflict quickly spills out into the community, getting Aunt Viola’s friends and the local preacher involved and placing Jane and Gracie in a precarious position.

The girls also find themselves entangled in the complex social tensions surrounding the family’s African American housekeeper, Marcell. Marcell has had a long and troubled history that some

members of Gracie’s family and most of their community would rather not acknowledge. She also has an intense dislike of dogs that quickly puts her in conflict with Gracie and Brown Hound. But Gracie and Jane’s relationship with Marcell evolves over the course of the novel. During an unauthorized visit to Marcell’s house, Gracie and Jane are startled to discover “Marcell ate food, mended holes in her clothes, and read books. Marcell suddenly became a person” (71). Gracie and Jane also begin to uncover hints about Marcell’s past and the mystery that still haunts her and their family. Over time, the girls see Marcell as less of an adversary and more of a companion and ally against the influences of the outside world. Like them, Marcell suffered tragic and lifealtering events in her childhood and much of her life has been directed by forces beyond her control. As Granny Jane says, “Marcell’s got too many ghosts in her head. She was just a child when it happened. And she saw it. And she still has scars” (62). Convinced that solving the mystery of Marcell’s past will resolve their family’s issues and finally bring Marcell peace from the “ghosts

in her head” (62), the two girls dig into the complex history of their community and their family, determined to uncover the truth before the summer ends.

In The Summer of Grace, Karen Jones addresses issues of family, race, and community through the eyes of two young girls just learning about the world outside of the familiar boundaries of their childhood existence. The history and relationships that have led to the small, makeshift family that populates Granny Jane’s farm are at times heartbreaking, but in each other these characters manage to find comfort and a chance to heal. Despite the societal and familial expectations that try to dictate their lives, Gracie and Jane are given the freedom and support to grow into themselves through their relationships with others. Karen Jones gives her readers the same opportunity through introducing these complex issues in a heartwarming story about family. Gracie and Jane’s childhood adventures and the relationships they form with the adults in this novel offer a comforting and nostalgic storyline to offset the trauma and injustice of Marcell’s story without distracting from its importance. n

EMERGENCY SALAD DRESSING

a review by Wendy

Tilley

Ena Jones. Six Feet Below Zero. Holiday House Press, 2021.

Since the passing of both their parents in a car accident three years earlier, the Spreen siblings – twelve-year-old Marigold “Rosie” Spreen and her brother Baker Spreen, her junior by a year – have been living in the house of their Great Grammy “in suburban Maryland, on ten acres of land just 9.3 miles from the White House” (6). And while the “past-its-peak house” isn’t what Rosie wants (she envies the McMansions which surround it), Great Grammy does her best to instill in her and her brother a love for the old family home and warn them against their grandmother, Gram “Grim” Hesper, a money-hungry, mendacious lawyer who would “sell King Construction the whole kit and caboodle if she ever had the chance” (7).

chapters in the books are styled as degrees), the novel only grows more complicated as it progresses. On top of the dead great-grandmother, the evil grandmother, and the absent aunt, there is a mysterious grave on the property, a nosy, but friendly, neighbor Rosie’s age who keeps showing up at all the wrong times, a sick puppy, falling trees, lots of homework, lots of food, and a constant barrage of phone calls, emails, and knocks at the door. And it all serves the book well. Deftly handled by author Ena Jones, the plot ramps up the tension in short, page-turning chapters that move with the frantic energy and speed of Grim Hesper’s red sports car.

WENDY TILLEY is a student in the English MA program at East Carolina University where she has served as an editorial assistant for NCLR

A member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators since 2004, and the author of the YA novels Clayton Stone, At Your Service (Holiday House, 2015) and Clayton Stone, Facing Off (Holiday House, 2016), ENA JONES grew up on the outskirts of Washington, DC, and currently lives in North Carolina.

Rosie and Baker come home from school one day to find Great Grammy dead in her favorite chair with an open notebook in her lap. The notebook, fortunately or unfortunately, happens to be open to the page detailing what the kids should do in case she dies: put her corpse in the new deep freezer she bought and installed in the basement (hence the book’s title), keep Grim Hesper in the dark as long as possible to prevent the selling of the house, find Great Grammy’s will (which she has misplaced), and reach out to Aunt Tilly (daughter of Grim Hesper) to come home, take care of them, and help them avoid losing their family home. And that is just where Six Feet Below Zero starts.

So if that sounds like a complicated plot to set up in the first chapter (chapter “Zero°,” as the

On a stylistic level, there is novel and surprising figurative language throughout. While recollecting about summer yardwork, Rose opines that “Bright green was my favorite time of year” (25). And there are apposite similes such as “We didn’t discuss Grim Hesper’s message, so at breakfast on Friday the kitchen phone was still flashing, like a lighthouse warning us away from a dangerous shoreline” (72). This level of technical competence in crafting a fast-moving, entertaining plot decked with figurative language that reinforces that plot (is enough to ensure readers of any age that turning over a few hours of their life to Six Feet Below Zero was a good choice to make.

Though Grim Hesper is the evil grandmother from so many fairy tales, the novel’s cast is very much composed of human, rounded characters. Like Lewis

Carroll’s Alice, Rosie Spreen is a kid – thorns and all – with her own set of strengths and weaknesses, one of those weaknesses being her quick temper, as when, early on, she remarks, “I didn’t mean to shout. I’d been working very hard at not shouting, or calling names, or being difficult” (2). This gets to the heart of one of the themes of the novel: learning to identify and deal with tough emotions. Near the beginning of the novel, the emotions she feels are described in a visceral way, such as “My heart dropped and a rotten kind of ugliness spread from my stomach to my shoulders” (33). Rosie is aware that she is feeling something; she just doesn’t have the emotional vocabulary to define it.

The book lists its intended audience to be eight to twelve years old, which seems right. Not only does the book have a fast-moving, young personfocused plot; there are real stakes – a dead great-grandmother, an endangered family home, a sick puppy – and it is firmly planted in the present day, cell phones and all. Beyond this, Rosie is very relatable to people of any age. She recalls, for example, that when her great-grandmother bought her a much-desired smartphone, “Less than forty-eight hours later, I was sneaking looks at my new phone every chance I got, same as everyone else at school” (22). As much as it was desired, the cellphone also signals Rosie’s move into the adult world, and

the dangers and responsibilities of that world, again showing the care Jones has taken to tie all aspects of the plot to her themes. And in spite of the dead great-grandmother hidden in a deep freezer and grandkids lying to avoid the discovery of her death, the tone is comic enough to undercut what could be a very macabre plot. The novel is ultimately an imminently entertaining, can’t-put-it-down experience – a good reason to read a book at any age. Will Grim Hesper succeed in taking the house? Will Rosie learn to understand and deal with her emotions? What about that grave on the property? And the sick puppy? Well, you will have to pick up a copy of Six Feet Below to find out. n

TIMELY PORTRAYALS OF A PLACE

a review by Elaine Thomas

David Joy. Those We Thought We Knew. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2023.

C.L. Willis. Hillbilly Odyssey: Resilience in a Small Mountain Mill Town. Redhawk Publications, 2024.

ELAINE THOMAS lives in Wilmington , NC. She’s been a college communications director, journalist, and hospital chaplain. Her short stories, essays, and book reviews have appeared in numerous publications.

DAVID JOY lives in Jackson County, NC. Those We Thought We Knew won the 2023 Willie Morris Award and Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. He is the author of four previous novels published by Putnam’s: When These Mountains Burn (2020; reviewed in NCLR Online 2021), which won the 2020 Dashiell Hammett Award; The Line That Held Us (2018; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019), which won the Southern Book Prize; The Weight of This World (2017), and Where All Light Tends to Go (2015; reviewed in NCLR Online 2016 ). Read Leah Hampton’s interview with Joy in NCLR 2024

C.L. WILLIS, a native of Canton, NC, moved back to the mountains after retirement. He is Professor Emeritus of sociology and criminology at UNC Wilmington. Hillbilly Odyssey is his first book.

North Carolina is blessed with many fine Appalachian writers. These writers share a regional culture, but their individual experiences and truths vary, as do their literary styles and approaches. For those of us who don’t hail from the western part of the state, their range of stories and insights bring us as close to understanding the complexities of the region as we may be likely to come.

Two recent books give us particularly timely examinations not only of a specific Appalachian area, but also of broader American divisions and tensions.

David Joy’s novel Those We Thought We Knew and C.L. Willis’s memoir Hillbilly Odyssey are set in rural communities located only a half hour or so apart.

Joy’s story may be fictional, but both authors draw on lived experience within their communities. The settings are real and the descriptions precise, so that, as with all strong writing, the particular sheds light on the universal. Both demonstrate awareness of the greater human condition in all its complexities, good and bad. Both examine the damage done when people view themselves as set apart from, and somehow more deserving than, others.

In the heat of election season, let’s be absolutely clear: neither of these books address party politics. But they do raise timely questions that illuminate underlying differences in how individuals understand power and community. Those questions are useful for reflection as each of us seeks to understand our country’s current bitter divisions.

C.L. Willis, as the title Hillbilly Odyssey suggests, confronts the portrayal of Appalachia and its people in J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Like Vance, Willis builds a memoir from anecdotal childhood reminiscences, followed by his unfolding educational and career success. Both happen to call their grandmothers Mamaw. There, any similarity ends. In fact, Willis’s first chapter is titled, “What Vance Got Wrong.”

Worth noting: the publication date of Hillbilly Odyssey was six months before Vance unexpectedly became the Republican Party’s 2024 vice-presidential nominee. Also notable: although Vance’s book propelled him into national prominence, Hillbilly Elegy was published way back in 2016, at a time when Barack Obama was still President. Willis wasn’t writing against a political candidate but against the negative stereotypes of Appalachia perpetuated by Vance in his book.

Willis points out that Vance is hardly alone in drawing negative stereotypes of the region. Pop culture has long done so (think Beverly Hillbillies, Snuffy Smith, and Deliverance). Willis writes, “Appalachia is often viewed as a unique world which is separate and different from larger society. It is seen as a mix of ancient mountains, unique culture, and eccentric residents. . . . Appalachia is characterized as being plagued by violence, substance abuse, and poverty” (19). Willis concedes that Vance might have a compelling personal narrative, but states, “Vance’s memoir is a celebration of self, not a portrayal of place” (11). In telling

his own personal story, Willis frames it analytically within a much larger, more complicated cultural context. He does give us “a portrayal of a place.”

An elegy is a lament for that which has been lost. Vance might have been lamenting, but Willis is not. He wrote an odyssey, a tale of journey and adventure, of leaving home, making it in the outside world, and returning to the place where one began and truly belongs. He also allows for progression within the community itself. In another chapter, “The Times They Are A-Changing,” he describes the many cultural changes he witnessed during his youth.

Willis grew up on a farm just outside of the small town of Canton. He went on to earn a doctorate in sociology and become a professor. In telling his story, he uses the mind and eye of the trained sociologist to look back at the family and community of his childhood. He writes about those early years with genuine warmth, even

when the experiences might have involved hardships. Willis argues that what Vance “got wrong” is blaming the victims: “By focusing on his own dysfunctional family and early life experiences, [Vance] concludes that the Appalachian culture and the lack of human agency of its people are the causes of the crisis of poverty, substance abuse, and despair” (16). Without denying the challenges that have occurred in the region, Willis honors the traditions and influence of his community, and of its institutions such as schools, churches, and organized sports. Willis focuses on the strength and character that can be found within Appalachian individuals and communities, whereas Vance “blamed the Appalachians and their culture for their problems while ignoring the larger social context they were facing” (17). Yes, limited opportunities and structural barriers exist and engender poverty. But as the subtitle Willis chose for Hillbilly

Odyssey indicates, the trait he notices most in the proud, hardworking people he lives among is resilience. In particular, Willis examines the central role the paper mill in Canton has played as provider of families’ financial stability and progress, as a source of social connection and identity, and as an economic engine for the town. At one point in Canton’s history, faced with a buyout of the mill, the workers banded together and located an investment firm that would share ownership with them:

This episode involving the purchase of the paper mill by its employees shows the resilience and industriousness of the people in the region. When faced with a challenge that threatened the economic stability of their town, they responded with intelligence, planning, organization, and determination to save the plant. It flies in the face of the tired old stereotypes perpetuated by Vance and others of mountain folk as lazy and unsophisticated. (53–54)

Just as Willis finished writing Hillbilly Odyssey in 2023, the town’s people again found themselves facing difficult news. Current owners announced plans to close the paper mill. In response, local leaders and business owners were proactively planning ways to respond to the crisis. A job fair had been set up, and the local community college had begun training classes to help ex-mill workers prepare for other careers. “The future for the town and its people is uncertain,” Willis writes. “But what is certain is their resilience

COURTESY OF C.L. WILLIS

ABOVE C.L. Willis (boy in overalls) and family at their Crossroad Hill home in the North Carolina mountains, circa 1952

and determination. . . . Through perseverance and grit, they will survive. Much of the town may change, but its values remain” (180).

Hillbilly Odyssey includes a valuable bibliography for those of us who might wish to learn more about Appalachian lives and voices, particularly in western North Carolina. Among writers on the list, and cited several times within Willis’s book, is David Joy. One area Willis identifies as needing more exploration involves the commonalities of stereotyping of white Appalachians and African Americans. He describes growing up during segregation: “The racial world was separate, and it was not equal” (63). He notes the continued effects and tensions from that unfairness, and it is just that topic that Joy brings to life in Those We Thought We Knew

David Joy draws on his intimate understanding of a place and its people to examine what’s frequently been called America’s original sin, our troubled history with race and white supremacy. He set Those We Thought We Knew amidst protests against the prominent display of Confederate monuments. A community is forced to look at wounds that linger, to wrestle with difficult realities the people prefer to pretend have long been resolved.

The novel, Joy’s fifth, is a true page-turner. It is a mystery, the plot built around crimes that grow from and reflect community divisions. It contains many layers, primary among them a

condemnation of racism and white supremacy. This layer includes the obvious need for those of us who are white to listen, to learn, and to be honest with ourselves about that history. Among other interesting themes are belonging versus being an outsider, the interdependence of life within a rural community, and the power of art as an instrument of social activism.

Those We Thought We Knew is a character-driven story. It may be a cliché to say location functions like a character, but in this case it’s also definitely true. From a “mixed brood of laying hens” (21), to “paintbrush clouds streaked a purple and orange sky” (33), to a Carolina wren that “flittered onto the porch and hopped along the weathered planks” (71), to the outer edges of a garden lined with river rock “carried stone by stone from the stream decades before” (385), you know you’re in the hands of a writer who knows this place in detail and who loves its natural world.

As the story opens, a stranger, Willie Dean Cawthorn, shows up in town and gets arrested for public drunkenness and vagrancy. He turns out to be a Klansman from out of state, carrying a notebook with a list of local names, some of them prominent individuals.

Another visitor to town is Toya Gardner, a young African American artist from Atlanta. In a sense an outsider, Toya also has deep generational ties to this mountain community. She is staying with her grandmother,

Vess Jones (who she just happens to call Maw Maw). Toya’s late grandfather, Lon, lingers prominently in her and Vess’s memories. When Toya visited her grandparents in summers as a child, Lon “always tried to put the land in her because he was scared to death the city would wash the mountains clean out of her blood.” Toya’s mother, Dayna, a lawyer in Atlanta, “had run off and left at eighteen, shedding the mountains she was from like a set of outgrown clothes” (32).

Toya’s staying with her grandmother while completing a graduate thesis. She works in an art studio at the local university. Her thesis project explores family genealogy and what it means to come from a place. As part of this, Toya is casting a set of molds of family faces, capturing similarities in expressions of emotions through the generations. Her work, her devotion to it, and the change it brings both to her and to others contribute to the growing awareness of tensions beneath the community’s surface. At one point Toya thinks, “The impact that work makes on the world, that’s more important than the work itself” (53). For Toya, art is “an instrument of social change” (54).

In that spirit, she creates two other pieces of art. One involves digging graves at the original location of an AME Zion church and cemetery, which had been moved to make way for other construction. From that relocation, “the pain had been passed down from one generation to the next, and

that’s what so many people could never understand unless it was their history, unless this was their story. For certain groups in America, trauma was a sort of inheritance” (6).

The other action involves pouring red paint over the hands of a Confederate statue: “The idea and image were simple, but what she feared might get lost was that it wasn’t just the blood on the hands of the Confederacy, nor the blood of bondage that had drawn out for nearly 250 years before the Confederacy even existed. It was the legacy, the open wound that continued to bleed 145 years after the fact” (69). A large percentage of the residents of the town and surrounding area get drawn into the conflict when protests and counterprotests break out around the monument. Two brutal crimes occur in the aftermath.

Sheriff John Coggins knows Toya’s family well. He and her grandfather Lon fished and hunted together. Now on the cusp of retirement, Coggins had “never been a man to take a day off and had worn a standard patrol uniform same as the deputies his entire time in office so as not to appear different from the men and women who worked for him” (17). Those who work for him include Deputy Ernie Allison and Deputy Leah Green, who also play key roles in the novel. Joy has many gifts as a novelist, among them strong interiority, an ability to balance multiple points of view, and vivid descriptive power.

He deploys them in service of big, big questions. Those We Thought We Knew is a traditional mystery in form, and like any good mystery the questions it asks are going to stay with you. An astute reader might figure out who committed the crimes before the reveal. Or not. But even if that happens, it in no way diminishes this story’s wallop. What matters here is not as much who-done-it as why it was done.

In searching for a comparable writer of dark mysteries whose gifts bring a specific place to life on the page, the name that sprang to my mind may be surprising: Boston writer Dennis Lehane might seem an unlikely comparison (New England rather than the South, urban not rural), but his specificity of setting and characters similarly captures and conveys the frailty and endurance of being human. Like Joy, he also tackles questions surrounding America’s history of racial injustice.

In examining the portrayals of Appalachian communities by Joy and Willis, the word community covers a lot of territory. It implies a shared place but also people who share common concerns, at times in fellowship, at times in conflict.

In Hillbilly Odyssey Willis writes, “[A]s Wolfe suggests, you may not go home again and expect it to be the same as when you left it. But it is still home. . . . The values you grew up with remain. The work ethic perseveres in the face of adversity. Folks still help their neighbors and take care of their family, and church bells still ring. Yes, home has changed, but it is still home” (181).

Those We Thought We Knew conveys darkness and the deep pain of characters. Yet, in Joy’s beautifully written final section, Vess meditates on the faithfulness of her connection to home: “The woman will never leave this place. She cannot leave this mountain” (384). n

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES REYNOLDS

SPACE AND TIME IN THE APPALACHIANS

a review by John Charles Ryan

Loss Pequeño Glazier. Transparent Mountain: Ecopoetry from the Great Smokies. Night Horn Books, 2022.

JOHN CHARLES RYAN is a writer of poetry and nonfiction. His publications include the poetry collection Seeing Trees: A Poetic Arboretum (Pinyon Publishing, 2020) with Glen Phillips, and co-editing the anthology The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence (Synergetic Press, 2021). In 2023, his botanical poems were included in the exhibition The Power of Plants at Being Art Museum in Shanghai, China. He is Adjunct Associate Professor at Southern Cross University in Australia.

LOSS PEQUEÑO GLAZIER is Professor Emeritus of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo, NY, and director at the Electronic Poetry Center. His work focuses on meetings between language and technology. His books include Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries (University of Alabama Press, 2002), Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm (Salt, 2003), and Luna Lunera: Poems al-Andalus (Night Horn Books, 2020) . He has authored digital works released by Electronic Poetry Center, including White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares (1999), Io Sono at Swoons (2002), and Territorio Libre (2003), as well as poems, essays, films, and projects for dance, music, installation, and performance. He now works and writes in the mountains of North Carolina. Read a poem by him in NCLR Online Winter 2024 and, forthcoming in 2025, his Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize Honorable Mention essay.

Loss Pequeño Glazier’s latest poetry collection, Transparent Mountain, traces the exuberance of nature as the poetobserver becomes an embodied participant in the vibrant Earth-community of the Great Smoky Mountains. The book’s rich linguistic terrains bring the region’s distinctive biota to life with more-than-human consciousness, intention, and communication. Deeply bioregional in outlook, Glazier’s writing attends perceptively to the animals, plants, fungi, rocks, water, and weather of the Smokies, foregrounding historical and contemporary nature-culture intersections in the mountainous Southeastern United States. Anchored in the ecological materiality of the Smokies yet cognizant of global environmental currents, Transparent Mountain remains faithful to the transcendent possibilities of encountering morethan-human life with an ethos of sympathetic-mindedness. As Glazier writes in “Knob,” “We are all a single intertwined thought.”

Fleeing environmental upheaval during the Last Glacial Period roughly twenty thousand years ago, animals and plants found refuge in the Smokies, resulting in the prominent biodiversity still extant. Transparent Mountain reminds us that the area in focus is a refugium, a place harboring populations of formerly widespread species. Of its dense forested land, one-quarter is mature and undisturbed, constituting the largest old-growth forests east

of the Mississippi River. Despite its predominantly arboreal character, the region features grassy and heath balds, mountain summits and crests cloaked in native grasses and shrubs, and hazy blue fog from volatile organic compounds, especially during the summer. Southern Appalachia as “place” is the biological, ecological, and geological grounding of Transparent Mountain. In the tradition of Robinson Jeffers and other place-immersed writer-ecologists, the bioregion delineates the parameters of the poet’s lexical explorations. Glazier’s collection comprises nine elemental sections: Knob, River, Light, Rock, Island, Cove, Ocean, Ridge, and Stars. Throughout the work, intertextual allusions disclose a vast poetic intellectual pedigree, from eighth-century Chinese poet Li Bai and thirteenthcentury Japanese Buddhist priest and poet Eihei Dōgen to William Wordsworth, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Nan Shepherd, and other alpine writers. The collection tracks balletically between lineated and prose poetry. A distinguishing element of the work is its organic mise-en-page, generating a textual ecology optically evoking the ancient species and deep-time habitats of the Smokies. Consider, for instance, how the use of spatial caesura intergrades with the actual speciation unfolding within and around the fissures of Appalachian geological forms in the poem “Rock”:

The slopes are a living gallery where paintings continuously change hues from luminous lysergic Stonewall Jackson indigenous azalea to lucid perch flesh.

André Michaux frolics among seeds and flowery Appalachian alpine leaf. Michaux’s sumac, Rhus michauxii a rare species of flowering plant, a cashew.

Caesuric pause punctuates the nearly impenetrable forest cover, enabling solar energy to nourish the undergrowth. For highly shade-intolerant Michaux’s sumac (Rhus michauxii), these breaking points in the text are especially poignant. Endemic to the Southeast, the species is imperiled by habitat degradation, fire suppression, and limited genetic variability. Inhabiting granite soils in wooded areas, Michaux’s sumac requires gaps – caesura – in the overstory in order to harvest sunlight and to photosynthesize. The oscillation between ecological diction and organic mise-en-page encourages polyscalar engagement with the text evocative of immersive interaction with a habitat – from the proximal reading of diminutive flora (seeds, flowers, leaves) to the distal observation of geological phenomena (slopes, cliffs, prospects). In Transparent Mountain, textual gradients and fissures generate corporeal response in readers, giving real-time insight into the poet’s negotiations of space and time in the Appalachians.

Threading through the collection’s nine movements is the transparent mountain. This koan-like figure signifies the harmonization of contradictory forces in the dialectical tradition of Daoism – fullness within emptiness, multiplicity within singularity, corporeality within immateriality, the noumenal within the phenomenal, all interweaving within the delimitations of the bioregion. The intellectual essence of the transparent mountain is the interdependent nature of existence in which the binaristic categories of everyday thought dissolve, as occurs in “Ridge”: “Soundless echoes sing of transparent mountain.” Meditative absorption in the cordillera engenders intermountain consciousness, . . . Accordingly, breath is visible here. Leaves effervesce goldenrod, orange jewelweed flower, sorrel, butterfly-weed, Lobelia cardinalis, that turns forests translucent. That is why you

transporting the reader across time and space to the globe’s other sacred peaks, both tangible, like Tiantai Mountain, and cosmological, like Mount Meru. As the poet discovers in “Knob,” “That transparent emptiness is solid. It is ‘not-thought’, breath-space, mind itself.” The entwining of ecology, poetry and breath mediates the enigmatic absent-presence of transparent mountain:

see through ridges. They are transparent mountains, living epidermis. As if your skin were a pane through which organs visibly hum and whir inside you. Delicate

precision of internal processes, interdependent, in inner awe. The solitary “I” is now displaced. Thus: I think, therefore I “is” multiple.

ABOVE Loss Pequeño Glazier (left) with Brent Martin at the book’s release celebration held at the Cowee School Arts & Heritage Center in Franklin, NC, 2 Sept. 2022

PHOTOGRAPH

With ecopoetic elan, these lines of “Knob” call attention to the symbiotic pulse of breath between poet and botanical kin. Goldenrod, jewelweed, sorrel, and butterfly weed are the metabolic inspirators of place. In a rhapsodic Whitmanesque celebration of interrelationality – lines spreading freely like mycelium across white space – the inner body (singular) becomes outer bodies (plural), the “I ‘is’ multiple”; as later declaimed in “Stars,” “Thus, the transparent mountain: the multiple made visible.”

A compelling feature of Transparent Mountain is its movement through heterogeneous timescapes and temporal scales. Emerging between two and three hundred million years ago, the Appalachians rank as one of the world’s oldest ranges. The bioregion’s deep temporality registers on a visceral basis in “low inhalations lasting 10,000 years each.” Granitic forms archive events transpiring over millions of years, confounding a comparatively limited view of time based on centuries or millennia: “The material archive of what passed here, / not books, not microfilm, not data storage / but the geological register – slabs of rock –.” The textual engendering of deep time pivots on the mythologized figure of the Niobraran Sea, an immense inland water body bifurcating the North American continent into two landmasses, Laramidia to the west and Appalachia to the east. Between the Late Cretaceous (100 Mya) and the Paleocene (66 Mya), the primordial sea connected the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. In Transparent Mountain, the Niobraran is an elusive presence – a palpable absence – driving the poetry’s temporal orientation, as described in “Ocean”: “No longer a // thalassic body, the ocean has now turned transparent, its ghost-dreamy surface / turned to air.” From this contemplation of deep time afforded by the sea, the poetry turns to embrace the immanence of the present, vivified by bioluminescent fungi and the photosynthetic denizens of the Smokies.

However, this ancient provenance of the Smokies – in large part giving rise to its biodiversity

– contrasts sharply to recent human impacts at local, regional, and global scales. In the new materialist sense of transcorporeality theorized by Stacy Alaimo,* human and more-than-human bodies mutually express the consequences of ecological contamination, as referenced in “River”: “Our own bodies bear scars of violence to the planet, tumor-fish awash in debris, particulates, / waste, toxins. Wildfires, floods, cyclones, UV carcinomas.” In the Appalachians, a particularly pernicious environmental scarring results from mountaintop removal, surface coal mining at the crest or summit of a mountain. Short-term economic imperatives defile the deep-temporal order, as shown in “Light”: “But we, blasting crowns off billion-yearold-peaks, turn native ecotones to coal- / fired capital.” As the collection progresses, the critique of environmental degradation intensifies, exposing the colonial underpinnings of ecological and cultural disequilibrium. More precisely, fear of native forests, or arborphobia, is one factor among many underlying the despoliation of sacred mountainscapes, as in “Island”:

Colonists feared trees. For them, forests harbored perils, hindered roadways. Forests were the haunt of “savages.”

They clear-cut the woods, depleted the soil, in Faith such bounty was theirs for pillaging. They felled the twelve-story, 14-foot diameter American Chestnut, Cherokee “Grandfather of the Forest.”

In this highly nuanced, temporally-plural way, the collection balances the material concerns of the conservationist and the emancipatory spirit of the “ecoflâneur,” Glazier’s term (following Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin) for one who wanders the woods, an acute observer of arboreal life.

Traversing timescapes, rooted in ecology, and illuminating the complexities of place, Loss Pequeño Glazier’s Transparent Mountain contributes uniquely to the North American ecopoetic tradition. As he writes in “Stars,” “Here, you enter the heart-spirit landscape.” n

* Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (U of Minnesota P, 2016) 111–42.

2024 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE SEMIFINALIST

BY MARIA ROUPHAIL

Appalachian Morning

Six o’clock.

Not yet warm enough for thermals to lift red-shouldered hawks and golden eagles into their high-altitude gyres.

But the sky is flowering into dawn, and the sun’s fingers flash pink and gold.

Coasting along the side of a mountain, I come to a shallow curve and a wide gravel shoulder at the edge of a sheer drop to a valley floor. Semis and SUVs thrum and whine past me.

I steer into the quiet and stop. It’s just me now, and the sun bellying up to the horizon, sliding its long legs over the sill of the world, splaying its feet on the cool carpet of aquamarine air, spreading its toes among the houses and trees.

Streetlights of the little towns blink out,  one by one.

JAMES O. REYNOLDS is a self-taught professional photographer who lives near Asheville, NC, with his family. His Blue Ridge Mountains photographs are “not . . . for work [but] for fun” – and the enjoyment of his many social media followers. See Asheville Pictures on Facebook and @ashevillepictures on Instagram, and @AshevillePictur1 on X. Find more of his work with the review of David Joy’s novel in this issue.

Sunrise Over the Blue Ridge (photography, 4x6) by James O. Reynolds

2024 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE SEMIFINALIST

BY MARIA ROUPHAIL

Things that lift my heart and make it glad

(zuihitsu with reference to a painting by Paul Rouphail and after a line by Ted Kooser)

midmorning tea, mango-ginger, in the white stoneware mug

a black gooseneck kettle on the boil the thin upright plume of steam

a painting of the steaming kettle – oil on linen the plume’s sharp bend as though from a strong breeze

a cherry tree in full bloom in front of my son and daughter-in-law’s row house

their row house, its pale coral-colored brickwork and forest green trim

the blooming crown of the cherry tree seen through the tall double windows on the second floor

MARIA ROUPHAIL is Senior Lecturer Emerita of NC State University, where she taught courses in World Literature and served as an academic adviser to the English major. She is Poetry Editor of Main Street Rag. Her third poetry collection, All the Way to China (Finishing Line Press, 2022), was a finalist in both the University of Wisconsin Brittingham Poetry and the Blue Light Press competitions. In 2022, North Carolina Poet Laureate Emeritus Joseph Bathanti awarded Rouphail First Place in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Poet Laureate competition. In 2023, she was awarded in both the Randall Jarrell and Prime Magazine contests. This small house, this big sky, Rouphail’s fourth poetry collection, is forthcoming from Redhawk Publications in 2025. A six-time Pushcart nominee, she lives in Raleigh.

the light blue throw rug jade vase cerise flowers

amber the color of butterscotch on a leather cord my daughter-in-law wears around her neck playing on a laptop, Sibelius’ fifth symphony how it breaks into flight in the third movement

moss velvet verdigris

down the block, two hawks wheeling over a weathered church steeple in the slant light of late afternoon

a long walk through an old city

the sun waiting at the end of a street.

Locations of recent group exhibitions include Paris, Stockholm, New York, and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. Reviews of his work have appeared in print and online, including Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Artspace, New American Paintings, and Imagine Architecture (Gestalten Press). His work is

PAUL ROUPHAIL was born in Chicago, IL. He lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. He earned his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Recent solo exhibits include A Nearer Sun in Jack Barrett, NY (2022); Another Night, Smart Objects in Los Angeles (2022); and The Passenger at Sterns Gallery in Brussels (2021).

represented by Jack Barrett Gallery, NY, and Sterns Gallery in Brussels and Paris.

Kettle, 2022 (oil on linen, 46x44) by Paul Rouphail

COURTESY

NORTH CAROLINA WRITERS CONFERENCE CELEBRATES 75 YEARS

By Robert Anthony, Jr.

Like the Springtime migration of cliff swallows from South America to Southern California, the North Carolina Writers Conference (NCWC) is an eagerly anticipated annual happening. No enduring song – think When the Swallows Return to Capistrano –has yet been written to celebrate it. But, given the talents of the writers who in some years open the Conference with a Friday night musical performance and the occasional spontaneous gather-round-thepiano-and-belt-it-out-as-best you-can singalongs enjoyed by participants and auditors alike, there’s hope that someone will soon join lyrics and score to commemorate this long-running highpoint in the Tar Heel literary year.

The NCWC blossomed from a small gathering of writers in Manteo in 1950, invited by celebrated author Inglis Fletcher of Chowan County and UNC Press Editor Lambert Davis of Chapel Hill to attend Paul Green’s outdoor drama, The Lost Colony, as a group. Their presence would demonstrate the support of the Tar Heel writing community for Green and help publicize his play. They had such a good time that they decided to meet again, the following year, but this time in Cherokee, in far western North Carolina. Thus began the tradition of the NCWC meeting at various locations around the state. In the seventy-four years since that first meeting, NCWC members have met in thirty-four Tar Heel communities and special resorts. The 2024 meeting was the first in Black Mountain.

The story of the first five decades of the NCWC is told in Fifty Splendid Summers: A Short History of the North Carolina Writers Conference, 1950–1999. The programs, plus broadsides by honored writers, in the

years since are archived by several Tar Heel libraries, including the North Carolina Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

This year NCWC members gathered in Black Mountain on July 19–20 to celebrate both the teaching and practice of the literary arts in North Carolina and also the accomplishments of current day writers. One hundred and twelve NCWC members and special guests registered for the meeting. The setting for most events was the Monte Vista, a small boutique hotel listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Award-winning playwright June Guralnick of Apex chaired and organized the 2024 Conference, assisted by Vice Chair Michael K. Brantley, author of four nonfiction books and Professor of English at Barton College in Wilson, and Secretary Jacinta V. White of Winston-Salem, author of two poetry collections and founder of The Word Project and Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing.

The Conference opened Friday evening with a special session at the Black Mountain Center for the Arts, “Evangelized by Black Mountain College,” with Joseph Bathanti, former North Carolina Poet Laureate and the author of more than twenty books, reading from a memoir in which he relates some of the history of the famed experimental college and how he came to learn of and explore its continuing influence on the study and teaching of the creative arts. A showing of the award-winning documentary film Fully Awake: Black Mountain College by Asheville natives and filmmakers Cathryn Davis Zommer and Neeley House followed.

ABOVE Members and guests in attendance at the 75th North Carolina Writers Conference at the Monte Vista, Black Mountain, NC, 20 July 2024

Saturday morning, Guralnick first welcomed the Conference attendees, then delighted them with the announcement of a special Proclamation by the Governor of the State of North Carolina recognizing and honoring the Conference on its seventy-fifthyear milestone. Past chairs joined her in reading the proclamation to the assemblage. Vice chair Brantley then read the names of NCWC members who had died in the previous years – Mae Woods Bell, Fred Chappell, Ann Deagon, Peter Makuck, Bruce Piephoff, Mary Carlton Snotherly, and Mark SmithSoto. They were remembered with admiration and appreciation.

The day’s theme was “Stories Save Us,” with a focus on examining ground-breaking North Carolina cultural program during the past seventy-five years. For the first panel, Dr. Bruce Kelly of Asheville, Assistant Chief of Primary Care at the Charles George Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center prior to his retirement, moderated a discussion with

Vietnam War military veterans David Robinson and Robert E. West and Midge Lorenc, widow of a veteran. The panelists recounted their participation in “Brothers Like These,” a creative writing program for area veterans of the Vietnam War with PTSD and struggling with the emotional and psychological impact of their wartime experiences. Dr. Kelly co-established and co-coordinated the program with Joseph Bathanti. The panelists described the weekly sessions and the writing they shared with each other as spiritually liberating, empowering, and life-changing. Four other participants in “Brothers Like These,” special guests of the Conference, applauded from the audience.

Guralnick then led a session on the North Carolina Visiting Artist Program. A partnership between the North Carolina Arts Council and the North Carolina Community College System established in 1971, the program supported more than three hundred artists in community colleges across the state during its twenty-four years of operation.

The day’s theme was “Stories Save Us,” with a focus on examining groundbreaking North Carolina cultural program during the past seventy-five years. Whereas, members of the Conference have been recognized as some of the state’s and nation’s leading writers, bringing distinction to North Carolina

Panelists Norma Bradley, Steven Lloyd, and Benjamin Porter recounted their experiences as visiting artists introducing and expanding the understanding and appreciation of the arts and guiding thousands of North Carolinians in developing their creative skills.

During the luncheon, special tribute was paid to the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective (CAAWC). Teresa Church, a longtime member of the CAAWC, talked about its importance in her growth as a writer. She then introduced award-winning poet and CAAWC founder Lenard Moore, who discussed his inspiration and goals in establishing the CAAWC and listed the impressive accomplishments of individual members.

The afternoon session focused on the legacy of Black Mountain College. Alex Albright of Fountain, a former NCWC chair, moderated the discussion. Mary Emma Harris, author of The Arts at Black Mountain College (MIT Press, 1987), detailed her work as Chair and Director of the Black Mountain College Project through which she conducted almost four hundred interviews with students, faculty, and staff at the college. The interviews and related files are archived in the Special Collections Research Center at Belk Library at Appalachian State University. Alice Sebrell

followed with a discussion of her work as program director at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and then Heather South shared her experiences as lead archivist at the Western Regional Archives of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, which has custody of many of the official records of the college.

The celebratory highlight of the weekend was the Saturday evening banquet honoring Joseph Bathanti. Almost one hundred friends and admirers of this beloved poet, teacher, and community activist cheered and applauded as Dannye Romine Powell, David Potorti, Georgann Eubanks, Sandra Ballard, and Tom Cervone told stories of their personal friendship with the honoree, how he supported and encouraged them and others in their work, and why he is recognized as one of the Tar Heel State’s most generous and effective practitioners and promoters of the literary arts.

At the conclusion of the banquet, the 2024 NCWC adjourned, its members pleased with another successful gathering of so many talented writers, already anticipating next summer’s conference. That is when the members will once again celebrate writing and the literary arts in the Tar Heel State. n

ABOVE LEFT Lenard D. Moore with his wife, Lynne, and

ABOVE RIGHT Joseph Bathanti, 2024 North Carolina Writers Conference honoree, in Black Mountain, NC, 20 July 2024

PHOTOGRAPH

ROBERT G. ANTHONY, JR., a past chair of the North Carolina Writers Conference, worked in the North Carolina Collection at UNC Chapel Hill for almost forty years bef3ore retiring. Read more about him on the occasion of his receiving the 2021 Christopher Crittenden Award for the advancement of North Carolina history. He has also received the Order of the Long Leaf Pine from Governor Roy Cooper.

Miscellany NORTH CAROLINA

A Very Good Year for Writing

by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor

Our writing contests sure are thriving. You’ll read here three stories from the 2023 Doris Betts Fiction Prize contest, including Kaylie Saidin’s story, selected for third place by final judge David Joy. All three of the authors are new to our pages. Submissions to the Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize contest tripled from last year’s premiere. And for that I give credit to Digital Editor Devra Thomas, whose regular social media postings have also increased our sales and subscription numbers. Which means we also thank the North Carolina Arts Council. Our grant from them helps to fund Devra’s position, as well as the increased graphic design cost of having so much fantastic material in these pages. I realized that this fall issue was already over-full in the middle of the summer (our goal is a hundred pages for each online issue)! Keep that material coming, writers. We also publish here Tommy Tomlinson’s keynote address at the North Carolina Writers’ Network Fall 2023 conference, with thanks to him for allowing us to publish his wisdom about revising (and re-visioning) and other writing advice. Tommy also reminds us that not many people get rich on writing, but at NCLR, we are committed to paying our writers something, so we thank our collaborators, the North Carolina Writers’ Network and North Carolina Poetry Society, for example, who provided the funds to pay the honorees in this section. n

90 Words Take the Stage: Submissions Triple for the Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize

Tondu: The Tragicomedy of the Black Boy

Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize poem by Edward Mabrey

Foundations by Jess Kennedy

Hey, America by Marcial “CL Tha Artist” Harper

Just Like Black by Brenda Bailey

My mother was a tree by Regina YC Garcia

Marvelous Marble Jesus by Alessandra Nysether-Santos

92 Re-vision by Tommy Tomlinson

96 The Other Donners a short story by Kaylie Saidin art by Sherry O’Neill

106 All Things Work Together for Good a short story by Jeremy Griffin art by Jimmy Fountain

116 Where I’m Supposed to Be a short story by Gabi Stephens photography by Michael Galinsky

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

6 n North Carolina Disability Literature essays, a poem, and a book review

37 n Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues poetry, fiction, essays, book reviews, and literary news

WORDS TAKE THE STAGE: SUBMISSIONS TRIPLE FOR THE JAKI SHELTON GREEN PERFORMANCE POETRY PRIZE

In April, the North Carolina Literary Review held the second annual Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry competition in partnership with the North Carolina Poetry Society. Created in 2022, the contest aims to support the community of poets in North Carolina who regularly participate in spoken word, performance, praise, and slam poetry. Video submissions for this year’s contest tripled from last year’s inaugural run of the competition. Find in this story links to the winning performance and to others selected by the final judge for honors.

The 2024 contest judge was Dasan Ahanu, the 2023 Piedmont Laureate for poetry. Ahanu is a visiting lecturer at UNC Chapel Hill and an alumnus of Harvard University’s Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellowship. A respected recording artist, he has collaborated with many jazz, soul, and hip-hop artists in North Carolina. He has performed nationwide and been active in the poetry slam community, participating in regional and national competitions as a founding member and coach of the Bull City Slam Team, and he has released several recordings of his work.

For the 2024 Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize, Ahanu chose Ed Mabrey’s “Tondu: The Tragicomedy of the Black Boy,” saying, “This poem is so nuanced and layered. It is educational and full of beautifully intentional craft. The extended meta-

phor and the meaning it carries is powerful. The performance of it is a seasoned performer at work. A commitment to embody the poem, not just deliver it.” Seasoned indeed, Mabrey has four World Championships, seven Regional Championships, and over five hundred other wins to his name. An NAACP Image Award Nominee, Mabrey has been on TV One, as well as ABC, FOX, HBO, CNN, Crackle, CBS, and NBC, and he has performed at over four hundred colleges.

For second place, Ahanu selected Jess Kennedy’s “Foundations,” praising the poem’s “great use of narrative”: You could see the story and feel the impact. The vulnerability in the poem grabs you. The pacing and tone work perfectly with the topic. It is a well written and delivered piece.”

ABOVE North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green introducing the performances at the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Fall Meeting at the North Carolina Arboretum in Asheville, , NC, 14 Sept. 2024

ED MABREY lived for over a decade in North Carolina, during which time he participated in countless open mics and poetry slams and taught workshops throughout the state. A Cave Canem fellow, Watering Hole graduate fellow, and Scioto Retreat Cohort, Mabrey is a Pushcart nominee and was commissioned to craft a speech encompassing the Freedom Award recipients for 2017 to 2021 on behalf of the National Civil Rights Museum. Mabrey is a choreopoet, screenwriter, and actor. Most recently, he is a 2023–2024 Grammy Voting Member and member of Phi Theta Kappa.

ABOVE TOP Ed Mabrey performing “Tondu: The Tragicomedy of the Black Boy” for submission to NCLR

ABOVE BOTTOM Jess Kennedy performing “Foundations” for submission to NCLR

JESS KENNEDY, now a resident of Washington, NC, is an Ohio native. She was introduced to slam poetry in high school where she competed in her school district’s annual poetry slam, and she has pursued it ever since, including attending Ravensun’s Wellspring of Imagination youth writing retreat in 2018.

PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL GRIFFIN

Ahanu’s third-place pick is “Hey, America” by Marcial “CL Tha Artist” Harper. “The approach to this poem is what makes it stand out,” according to Ahanu, who describes the poem as “part epistle and part dramatic monologue, an intersection of literary and performance forms. The structure and concept allow for harsh and necessary truths to be spoken.”

Ahanu also chose three poems for Honorable Mention: Brenda Bailey’s “Just Like Black,” Regina YC Garcia’s “My mother was a tree,” and Alessandra Nysether-Santos’s “Marvelous Marble Jesus.”

Congratulations to all of the poets. Enjoy their performances (and last year’s honorees) on the NCLR YouTube channel.

The North Carolina Poetry Society gives honoraria to each of the poets selected for these honors, and they were invited to perform at the Society’s fall meeting in Asheville, NC. If you are a spoken word poet, we hope to watch your video in 2025. Submissions for the third annual Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize competition will be open throughout April. n

HARPER performs under the name “CL Tha Artist” at various events across the Southeastern US and Virgin Islands. A current resident of Clayton, NC, he is a poet, rapper, health coach, and business consultant.

REGINA YC GARCIA is a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill and ECU and an English Professor and the Global Programs Coordinator at Pitt Community College in Greenville, NC. She is a DAR American Heritage Poetry Award winner, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a finalist for the Charlotte Lit/South Award, and a two-time James Applewhite semifinalist. Look for her finalist Applewhite Prize poem in one of the 2025 issues. Her poems have been collected in The Firetalker’s Daughter (Finishing Line Press, 2023) and published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies.

BRENDA BAILEY , artistically known as Loc’d, is an educator and performance artist. A resident of Clayton, NC, she has performed in various local theatrical productions, appeared in award-winning short films, competed in poetry slams, hosted poetry events, headlined with bands, and recorded critically acclaimed music.

ALESSANDRA NYSETHER-SANTOS is a Brazilian American writer and educator who now lives in Florida after eight years in North Carolina. In addition to their Applewhite finalist poem published in NCLR Online Fall 2023, their work can be found in Sad Girl Review, SOUP CAN Magazine, the lickety~split, among others.

ABOVE LEFT Brenda Bailey performing “Just Like Black” and RIGHT Regina YC Garcia performing “My mother was a tree” at the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Fall Meeting at the North Carolina Arboretum in Asheville, NC, 14 Sept. 2024

ABOVE TOP Marcial “CL Tha Artist” Harper performing “Hey, America” for submission to NCLR

ABOVE BOTTOM Alessandra Nysether-Santos performing “Marvelous Marble Jesus” for submission to NCLR

MARCIAL

COURTESY OF ALESSANDRA NYSETHER-SANTOS

PHOTOGRAPHS BY BILL GRIFFIN

COURTESY OF MARCIAL HARPER

RE- VISION

By Tommy Tomlinson

Keynote Address for the North Carolina Writers’ Network’s 2023 Fall Conference

It’s a Friday night in a city of two million people. Some folks are still getting dressed for their night out. The clubs will soon be hopping; there’s gonna be booze and romance and illegal substances and all sorts of other fun things. And we are here in a hotel ballroom to talk about writing. We know how to live the life, don’t we?

And yet somehow there’s nowhere else I’d rather be. I’m working on this book Dogland, about the Westminster Dog Show, but beyond that, it’s

about the relationship between people and dogs, which goes back as far as thirty thousand years. There’s no other creature on earth that humans connect with the way we do with dogs, and I try to look at what both sides get out of that deal. So I turned in the first draft of my manuscript last week, and I’ve just started revising. Revising, in many ways, is the fun part of writing for me. I read a profile once of a guy named John Swartzwelder, who wrote many of the greatest episodes of The Simpsons. He had a writing method I wholeheartedly endorse. Here’s how he describes it: “I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue. Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip

PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFF

CRAVOTTA

TOMMY TOMLINSON was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary for his column in the The Charlotte Observer He has also published work in ESPN Magazine, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and Garden and Guns. He is the author of two books, both published by Simon & Schuster, The Elephant in the Room (2019) and Dogland (2024). This essay is adapted from his keynote Speech he gave at the North Carolina 2024 Writers’ Network’s Fall Conference.

of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it.”1

There’s a lot of truth there. Those of you who know Anne Lamott’s book Bird By Bird, and her concept of a “shitty first draft,” will be familiar with that crappy little elf. But I do also think there’s something deeper going on when we revise. And that’s what I want to talk about tonight.

My jumping-off place for this conversation is a quote from the brilliant short story writer George Saunders. He has an excellent Substack on writing called Story Club, and a few weeks ago, talking about revising, he said this: “We are revising in order to come out of the valley called How Most of Us Think, at First, and move toward that peak up there called What I and Only I Can Do.”2

That’s a pretty inspirational verse for me – so much so that I printed it out and put it on my desk where I can see it every day. But I think what hit even harder for me was the simple act of turning revising from a verb to a noun. Revision. I turn sixty years old next year, and I’ve been writing for a paycheck since I was twenty. I have done countless revisions to everything from seventyword newspaper briefs to seventy-thousand-word books. But in all that time I never thought much about the word itself. It’s blindingly obvious once you really look at it. Revision is re-vision. It’s a new way of seeing. Or maybe to put it a little more precisely, it’s choosing to see in a new way.

And I think re-vision is not just something we have to apply to whatever piece we’re working on, but it’s something we also have to apply to our whole approach to writing, and maybe our approach to life as well.

Most of us who write start out as copycats. We write stories like the stories we love, whether they’re Marvel comics or Judy Blume novels or anything in between. When I was sixteen, about to go on a long bus ride, I picked up a book of short stories by a writer I’d never heard of before, a guy from Maine named Stephen King. Two

things happened after reading those stories. The first one was that I was afraid to get off the bus. The second one was that I spent the next couple of years trying to write stories that would scare the hell out of other people the way those stories scared the hell out of me. I was no good at it for many reasons, but mainly because I could not go all the way like Stephen King does. In his novel Pet Sematary, the protagonist’s two-year-old son wanders out onto the road in front of their house and gets run over by a speeding tanker truck. It’s an incredibly traumatic scene. Then he writes a scene showing that it never really happened, it was just a bad dream, and everything was fine. And then he writes another scene showing that the happy ending was the actual dream, and that yes, that little boy did get run over and killed. Stephen King can be one ruthless bastard. I was not willing or able to be that bastard. So for the first time of many, I had to revision myself as a writer. I had to reconfigure what I wanted to do and how to get there.

1 Quoted from Mike Sacks, “John Swartzwelder, Sage of The Simpsons,” New Yorker 2 May 2021: web.

2 George Saunders, “Report from the Retreat,” Story Club with George Saunders (Substack 2 Jul 2023): web; subsequent quotations from this essay.

This has happened throughout my writing life. I set out to be a newspaper reporter. Then, after a while, I re-visioned and wanted to try being a columnist. Then I re-visioned myself as somebody who would try to write for magazines. Then I re-visioned as someone who hoped to do a podcast, and then to write a book or two.

Revision is re-vision. It’s a new way of seeing. Or maybe to put it a little more precisely, it’s choosing to see in a new way.

This kind of thing is rarely a linear progression. Sometimes you might be doing two or three things at once. Sometimes you might be doing none of them because the rest of your life gets in the way. There’s a constant need to re-vision your creative work, to get as close as possible to the path you want to take.

When we’re in the muck of it, we often go back to our old copycat ways. It’s easy to fall back on old habits when you’re tired. I could go back through my old newspaper columns and see when I was worn out or having a bad day, because they’d be cheap imitations of Leonard Pitts or Lewis Grizzard or whoever I needed to make the deadline. Also, when you’ve got a lot of words under your belt, you start copycatting yourself – trotting out your favorite writing tricks to prop up ideas that might not be as solid. It’s like lending your brand name to a knockoff version of your own product.

of what you and only you can do – as a writer, and as a human being – the better chance you have of being successful at both.

This is where we get into murky areas like confidence and courage. The wrong kind of confidence can trick you. Years ago, a newspaper invited me to be their visiting writing coach for a week. Part of my job was reading clips from some of their writers and giving them suggestions on how to get better. Almost everybody there was eager for feedback. But there was one guy –when we sat down, I started out by asking him what he thought he needed to do to improve. He said, “To be honest, I can’t really think of anything.” I just smiled and said, “Well, I have a couple of ideas.”

If you read the origin stories of successful writers, they tend to fall into one of two categories. One, a writer fails over and over until he or she finds her true voice; or two, a writer finds his or her true voice and gets rejected over and over until somebody believes.

I also realized along the way that maybe I had the wrong goal in mind. I always thought about it as figuring out the next thing I wanted to do. What George Saunders is getting at is something deeper – figuring out who you want to be. He frames it in a doing mode, but listen to the words: “move toward that peak up there called What I and Only I Can Do.” That’s not a category of words. It’s a category of self.

And here’s my inspirational verse for the night: I believe that the closer you get to that peak

So you will meet people with irrational confidence now and then. But by and large the problem is the opposite – we don’t trust our own ideas, we don’t believe other people will care, we don’t think our own voice is strong enough to carry the tune we want to play. Here’s the truth: Your true voice is the only one that will play that tune.

If you read the origin stories of successful writers, they tend to fall into one of two categories: one, a writer fails over and over until he or she finds her true voice; or two, a writer finds his or her true voice and gets rejected over and over until somebody believes. The reason Stephen King has sold hundreds of millions of books is because nobody else sounds like him. The reason we’re

No matter what subject you’re writing about, the voice of the story is part of your legacy. So it damn sure ought to sound like you.

You probably know the quote often attributed to Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. It is the only thing that ever has.” Never doubt that a writer’s true voice will succeed. It’s the only thing that ever has.

This is where I have to stop and say that your writer’s voice will probably never make you a millionaire. In fact, it might never make you a nickel. There’s a reason you don’t see pictures of writers running around in their yachts. A scant few authors – the one percent of the one percent – make a mint. A fair number of others – and I am lucky enough to count myself in that number – make enough to pay the bills. Many, many writers make little or nothing from their work. But that work still has tremendous value – if you work to get to that place of what you and only you can do. Even if no one ever sees it, that work is important if it gets you closer to your authentic self.

I’ve been doing revisions long enough that I have a few tools I always fall back on. But it hasn’t been until lately that I realized those tools are good for more than just writing. Here are three things I always think about when I’m trying to reach that peak of the best I can do.

One, it’s all about the verbs. I know writers who do a search for the letters ly so they can get rid of as many adverbs as possible and replace them with strong and precise verbs. A good story, like a good life, is less about talk and more about action. And it doesn’t matter so much how you do something as the fact that you’re doing something.

Don’t worry so much about the modifiers. Focus on the actions.

Two, make sure every scene has a point. One of my writing gurus, the late Jay Lovinger at ESPN, taught me that every scene in a story should do two things: advance the plot in some way and tell you something new about one of the characters. A scene that does neither one of those things isn’t useful to the reader. When I was in high school, we read a bunch of so-called classics, books like Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native, which started with a long description of the heath in the countryside where a couple of the characters would eventually run into each other. It was six pages long but felt like 106, because there was no real point. Don’t write long descriptions of the countryside unless you have a real good reason. And don’t live a pointless life. Make sure that you’re advancing the plot of your life a little at a time, and that you learn a little more about yourself with every step along the way.

My third and final tip is always be thinking about the ending. Sometimes it’s helpful to basically write a story backwards: do the ending first, then figure out all the steps that naturally lead to that place. But even if you don’t have the literal ending figured out, always be thinking about the subtext of the story, the larger lesson you want readers to come away with. Aim for that spot. Stories don’t always have happy endings, but I think you do want your story to end with a satisfying ending, with the main character having changed in some way since the beginning, and having learned something important along the way.

When I think about the ending when applying this to life, I’m not thinking about death. This is not about figuring out how and when you want to cross through the curtain. It’s about your life being a lesson in some way about how to live, a lesson you learned and then can impart to others by, among other things, telling stories in your authentic voice. That’s the reason it’s so important to reach for that peak of what you and only you can do. Because no matter what subject you’re writing about, the voice of the story is part of your legacy. So it damn sure ought to sound like you. n

3RD PLACE, 2023 DORIS BETTS FICTION PRIZE

THE OTHER DONNERS

by Kaylie Saidin

THE DONNERS WERE FAMILY FRIENDS, WHICH IS PERHAPS THE STRANGEST KIND OF FRIENDSHIP TO HAVE: YOU ARE BOUND TO ONE ANOTHER LONG BEFORE YOUR BIRTH, AND YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO BE FRIENDS AS YOU SWIRL IN CLOSE PROXIMITY FOR ALL OF ADOLESCENCE.

KAYLIE SAIDIN graduated in 2022 with an MFA from UNC Wilmington, where she served as Fiction Co-editor of Ecotone. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, Prairie Schooner, New Orleans Review, Los Angeles Review, Nashville Review, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. A native Floridian, SHERRY O’NEILL retired to Charlotte, NC. She has been painting and making art since the age of nine. She holds a BA from Barry University in Miami Shores, FL, and was on the faculty of the prestigious Cornell Museum of Art School in Delray Beach, FL, for twelve years. She has traveled extensively in the US and abroad teaching workshops on painting and collage. Her artwork can be found in collections worldwide and can be seen at Art Source Fine Art in Raleigh, NC, and at Ann Lea Fine Art in Cashiers, NC.

WITH ART BY SHERRY O’NEILL

THREE DAYS INTO HOUSESITTING FOR

the Donners, I ran into their daughter, Andrea. She was sitting in a torn-up purple folding chair just thirty feet from the smoothed dirt of a hiking trail, one of the many semi-maintained paths that wound in the open space preserve outside the property. When she saw me, she cocked her head to the side, as if confused. Her face was caked in dirt, her eyes rimmed red. Her smile was yellowed and chipped, but it was the same smile I remembered: prominent gums, square teeth that held evidence of braces, the slight upward turn of the left side that indicated she was playing a joke on you.

This all was very strange, and not because Andrea and I had not seen each other for twelve years, nor because the last time we’d seen each other was in the summer after high school, when we had a fight that culminated with her smashing an heirloom Victorian era glass mixing bowl onto the concrete slab of their pool deck. Those things

I DIDN’T DARE MOVE. I FELT MY HEART BEATING IN THE TIPS OF MY EARS AND THE SOLES OF MY FEET. I FELT LIKE I WAS IN A DREAM . . .

made me uneasy, of course, but they were not the reason my brain felt like someone had put it in a food processor. What was strange was that Andrea was missing, presumed dead, and she had been for three years, ever since she’d allegedly gone hiking one day in this very canyon and never returned.

“Andrea?” I heard my voice disappear into the wind as soon as it emerged.

She closed her eyes, and for a moment, I thought that she was sleeping. I didn’t dare move. I felt my heart beating in the tips of my ears and the soles of my feet. I felt like I was in a dream: if I looked away, she’d vanish, and if I turned to run, I would only be able to move slowly and arduously, as though caught in gelatinous fog.

Finally, she opened her eyes. The same blue. She was beautiful, once.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said. Then, she laughed. “I’ve been waiting to use that line on someone.”

Heartbeat (mixed media on canvas, 60x48) by Sherry O’Neill

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

IT WAS A CLAY POT OF A HOUSE; THE WHOLE DYNAMIC SEEMED LIABLE TO BURST AS SOON AS IT WAS PLACED INTO HEAT.

The Donners were family friends, which is perhaps the strangest kind of friendship to have: you are bound to one another long before your birth, and you have no choice but to be friends as you swirl in close proximity for all of adolescence. Tim Donner had gone to college with my father; they were brothers in an elite and mysterious secret society that was the subject of internet conspiracy theories. Maggie Donner had an unshakable bond with my mother after they’d raised Andrea and me together almost as siblings (we were born within a week of each other, in mid-August). Maggie had also invested in my mother’s pottery studio and business, and as I grew older, I learned this funding was instrumental and probably the sole reason the studio existed at all.

Tim and Maggie were the sort of Californians who left the state only to receive their Ivy League education, then immediately returned. They were both from families who did things like donate libraries and ski in the Alps. Their lineage was respected, their ancestors having been in the northern part of the state for several generations, though they claimed to have no relation to the Donners who famously cannibalized one another in the Sierras. (“No, we’re the other Donners,” I heard Maggie say at many a dinner party.)

My parents, on the other hand, were both new money and new Californians. They’d grown up in middle class in the Midwest, which I imagined involved a lot of cornfields and emo music, even when they assured me that in their day, it was more about Bruce Springsteen. My father had made a great deal of money in financial tech, specifically online banking, and at some point during my grade school years, this money halved itself as a result of the dot-com crash. He found work again, and while

I was old enough to notice little differences in the quality of our vacation lodging or off-brand cereals, we always belonged to the upper class world of our woodland suburb.

Mostly, at that age, my focus was on Andrea’s life and how superior it seemed in comparison to mine. She was an only child and was allowed to do pretty much anything she wanted: the freezer was perpetually stocked with ice cream sandwiches, and she had no limitations on television time. Her house – the same one I was housesitting in now –was considerably larger than ours. It was a beautiful wood-paneled residence with vaulted, light-filled rooms, built into the hillside and surrounded by enormous oak trees.

The Donner house had a hidden loft that was accessible only through Andrea’s room. It was her hiding place. We filled it with toys and treasures and diaries. I coveted this loft, always desiring a hiding place of my own.

In our open-concept, A-frame house, all was laid bare. I was the middle child and subject to the tension between my mother’s strict anti-tech philosophies and my father’s tech money. My brothers were deeply affected by our parents in a way I couldn’t relate to: they constantly strove for their affection and validation and thus were often competing with one another or crestfallen when they sensed attention waning. It was a clay pot of a house; the whole dynamic seemed liable to burst as soon as it was placed into heat.

When, at the age of twenty-seven, I heard that Andrea had gone missing on a hiking trail, I flew home to my parents. It was the first time I was home with them without my brothers, and I felt enveloped and nurtured by the silence of the house, their quiet tenderness. I joined the futile

search party for a few hours. I baked a lasagna and brought it to the Donners, who looked by then like the couple in American Gothic: grim, steadfast, horrified. Really, what I desperately wanted was to go in the hidden loft – I had the odd feeling she’d be in there, hiding from the outside world and clinging to some secret only I could understand – but I did not ask.

“What are you – doing?” I asked Andrea. I wasn’t sure how to end the sentence: what was she doing here, in the modicum of wilderness surrounding her parents’ house? What was she doing, sitting in the tattered camping chair, so physically dirty I could barely recognize her? What was she doing alive?

“Just visiting my parents,” she said nonchalantly, as if this were any ordinary meeting between us.

“They’re in Italy for another week,” I said after a beat. “I’m house sitting for them.” My stomach churned once I said it. I felt I shouldn’t reveal too much information to her, that perhaps she was not to be trusted.

“I can see that.” She crossed her legs and rubbed her hands on her thighs, leaving marks of dry dirt. “I never understood the point. Of house sitting, I mean. They don’t even have dogs anymore. What do you do,? Just bring the newspaper in each day?”

“I skim the pool, too.”

She snorted. Darkish mucus dripped from her left nostril. She had always been one of those kids who was covered in snot, which no amount of Maggie Donner’s travel-sized tissue packs could fix. “The fucking pool.”

“Listen, Andrea,” I said. “I’m not sure what’s happening. What are you doing out here? Do your parents know you’re – okay?”

“Yeah, they know. I swing by here every few months.”

I sat down on the closest rock I could find, and the granite jutted into my buttocks. The world still seemed spinning, but the slight pain brought me out of my state. This was really happening, I thought. Andrea Donner was alive, sitting in the very woods she supposedly vanished from. She was not missing, and perhaps never was.

“I still don’t understand,” I said. “Everyone thinks you’re dead.”

“How convenient for everyone.” She laughed. I put my head in my hands and pulled at the roots of my hair. “But – we had a search party. I was there. We looked for you.”

The harsh lines in her face, the places she squinted into the sun, seemed to suddenly soften. “You were there?”

“Of course. I flew back here for it,” I said.

This was not the full truth, of course, but I didn’t want to reveal too much to her. She had, for all accounts and purposes, come back from the dead, and I didn’t want her to have any leverage over me, for there was already so much she knew and was withholding.

I had been living in Washington, DC those three years ago with my husband, Michael, where he worked for an affordable green housing developer. It was one week before Thanksgiving that he told me he thought he was polyamorous, and on Thanksgiving Day, his mistress – he refuted that word, said it was archaic, but I continued to wield it at him like a weapon – appeared at our apartment door with a dish of cranberry stuffing. She

IT WAS ONE WEEK BEFORE THANKSGIVING THAT HE TOLD ME HE THOUGHT HE WAS POLYAMOROUS, AND ON THANKSGIVING DAY, HIS MISTRESS – HE REFUTED THAT WORD, SAID IT WAS ARCHAIC, BUT I CONTINUED TO WIELD IT AT HIM LIKE A WEAPON – APPEARED AT OUR APARTMENT DOOR WITH A DISH OF CRANBERRY STUFFING.

was blonde (aren’t they always? my mother had quipped, leading me to wonder if my father had once an affair of his own), and she was petite, and when I asked who she was, a look of panicked confusion washed over her face.

The following Monday, I received the call that Andrea had gone missing. I took the opportunity to buy a seat on the next flight, ignoring Michael’s pleas that we try marriage counseling. On the plane, I chewed gum and read a magazine, two things I had rarely done before. I made an effort to keep my chin up, not metaphorically but literally. I read in the magazine that women with pointed chins, like mine, should always tilt their heads slightly upward to accentuate our regal features.

The search party went on for two days before a winter storm drenched the region in heavy rain. It was bad, we all murmured, for the search party, because now the trails were being washed out, and there would be no visible footprints, no scent for dogs to pick up on. But it was good, we all agreed,

for next years’ impending wildfire season. After those few days, I was already beginning to think of myself as a voice in this we

I texted Michael and told him we were through, that I was not coming back to DC, and he could sell or donate or burn everything I’d left behind. Then, partly on the advice of my family’s divorce lawyer and partly out of spite, I blocked his number. My parents loaned me enough money to rent an apartment in the area, and I soon got a remote job as a technical writer for a solar panel company. I took up running; I started regularly doing goat yoga on a nearby vineyard. I turned thirty a few weeks ago and celebrated at a craft brewery, where the dry sun beamed down on outdoor tables and made everything golden.

I was a lapsed Californian, born again. Perhaps I had Andrea to thank: after all, I would never have come home had she not vanished.

I WAS A LAPSED CALIFORNIAN, BORN AGAIN. PERHAPS I HAD ANDREA TO THANK: AFTER ALL, I WOULD NEVER HAVE COME HOME HAD SHE NOT VANISHED.

Stepping Inside Yourself (mixed media on canvas, 36x36) by Sherry O’Neill

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

“Can you start from the beginning?” I asked her.

“The beginning?” she scratched her greasy hair. “Like, how far back?”

“Start by explaining how it is that you went missing off a hiking trail, and you were never found. Now somehow, you’re here, and you’ve been seeing your parents.”

She closed her eyes, as if it was hard to concentrate. “I wasn’t hiking. My parents and I got into a fight, so I left.”

“You left?”

“Yeah.” She smiled crookedly. “You know I love a dramatic exit.”

It was true: her most famous had been at prom. She and I were the only sophomores invited that year, and when her date squeezed her ass over her dress, she threw a soda in his face on the dance floor and stormed out of the hotel. I followed her outside, feeling sorry for myself, and then angry. I knew that she wanted me to chase after her, to yell her name in the street, and I did. We’d been in that loop for more than a decade by then.

“Where did you go?” I asked her.

“I guess I did go into the woods at first,” she said. “But only to make my way down to Coyote Camp.”

Coyote Camp was the colloquial name for an enormous tent city located in the ravine of a local park. Nearly three hundred unhoused people lived there in makeshift dwellings. It was the source of heated debate on neighborhood forums, although most sentiments on either side were similar: they began with a cry of someone should do something! and then, when they decided what the something was, they said, well, not me, though. Every fall, the police attempted to clear everyone out before the rains came and flooded the area, and every spring, the tents reappeared, popping back up like fluorescent wildflowers. With the exception of when one of my mother’s more cynical friends brought it up, I did what everyone else did about Coyote Camp: pretend it didn’t exist.

“Is that where you live now?” I asked, fighting to keep my voice even.

She shrugged. “Sometimes.”

“What are you doing up here, then? Asking your parents for money?”

WITH THE EXCEPTION OF WHEN ONE OF MY MOTHER’S MORE CYNICAL FRIENDS BROUGHT IT UP, I DID WHAT EVERYONE ELSE DID ABOUT COYOTE CAMP: PRETEND IT DIDN’T EXIST.

I SAW IT CLEARLY, THEN, WHAT I’D KNOWN FOR YEARS BUT NEVER WANTED TO RECOGNIZE: ANDREA WAS PART OF A WORLD I DID NOT BELONG TO, A WORLD OF COUCH SURFING AND SLEEPING IN TENTS AND SCORING DRUGS AND TRAVELING TO OBSCURE ELECTRONIC MUSIC FESTIVALS.

“Oh, there she is,” she said. She reached into the backpack next to her – it looked military-issued, tan and industrial – and fished out a crushed packet of cigarettes. “There’s the snob I know.”

“I’m not a snob,” I said, feeling my face redden. She took out the cigarette, then began the process of digging into her pockets for a lighter. I had no idea when she’d started smoking. She seemed to be moving in slow motion, trapped in the physics of dreams the way I’d felt when I first saw her again. Her sleeve fell away from her body for a moment, revealing an arm covered in reddish spots that looked like flattened bug bites. She at last found the lighter – a clear thin one featuring a sticker of Bart Simpson – lit the cigarette, and inhaled deeply.

“How have you been in town this whole time?” I asked her. “I mean, how is it possible that no one has found you?”

“Easy. The people that want to find me find me, and the people that don’t don’t.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Okay. Like, for example, just last week, I saw Seth Eucker,” she said. “Downtown, as he was leaving some yuppie bar. He didn’t recognize me.”

Seth had been on the dance team with us throughout high school. It was hard to imagine he wouldn’t have recognized her face, but I pictured the scene and understood what she meant: in her flowing and baggy clothes, taut backpack, dirtstained bandana, she was nearly unrecognizable.

“But then there’s someone like Thalia Hart,” she continued. “I see her all the time.”

“Why?” Thalia was more of a name I recalled, someone who’d once been in a chemistry class with me, not a face.

“We run in the same circles.”

I saw it clearly, then, what I’d known for years but never wanted to recognize: Andrea was part of a world I did not belong to, a world of couch surfing and sleeping in tents and scoring drugs and traveling to obscure electronic music festivals. After our falling out in the summer after high school, we had drifted apart in our separate college lives. She’d taken medical leave for a semester, then subsequently dropped out and returned home. For several years she worked as a receptionist for a chiropractor’s office, and I saw her once or twice when I visited home and our families got together, though she made herself scarce whenever Michael was around.

“Andrea,” I said softly. “I’m worried about you. Let me get you help.”

“God, don’t do that. Don’t pity me. I’m doing fine.”

“Let me at least buy you something to eat,” I said. “Tell me what I can do.”

I watched a look come over her face that I could not easily identify. It seemed like a blend of hesitancy and humiliation and sadness. She looked old, so much older than thirty. I knew that she had chosen this life, because we had both once had lives that looked the same, but this did not make me feel less sorry for her. All this time she’d been here, all around me, invisible in plain sight.

“Can you let me in the house?” she asked. “A shower would be nice.”

When Andrea entered the Donner house I knew immediately I had made a mistake: she did not belong here. She ran upstairs with her shoes and enormous backpack still on, locking herself away in the bathroom attached to her childhood bedroom.

I followed her and sat down on the upholstered chest at the end of the bed, feeling my heart beat. I was no longer in control of the situation. There was no telling how Maggie and Tim would react when they’d learn I’d encountered Andrea. I considered not telling them, not telling anyone, but it seemed too insane. Someone believed to be missing had resurfaced. I thought of the hours the community had poured into searching the woods, the fathers of all our classmates tacking up the missing posters in stores downtown. They deserved an answer. If I held this secret in, it would be treasonous.

From behind the closed bathroom door I heard Andrea rummaging through her bag. I imagined finding her slumped over the toilet, shooting up heroin like I’d seen on TV. Then, the hiss of the shower faucets turned on. Within ten minutes, steam wafted from the crevice at the bottom of the door. The running water of the shower sounded like a river, like the black muddy water that flowed through the remnants of Coyote Camp each rainy season. Footage on television showed tents and shopping carts and stuffed animals washed away. An environmental disaster, they’d say, no mention of the people these items belonged to or where they’d gone. And before all this, I would say it, too.

Didn’t Maggie and Tim Donner owe me an explanation? If Andrea was telling the truth, they had not only maintained slight contact with her for the past three years, but they’d possibly fabricated the very facts of her disappearance. The knowledge of their lie – or at least their deliberate twisting of the truth – took residence inside my gut like the pit of a fruit, festering into something hard and rotten. Perhaps she really had gone missing at first. Perhaps she’d slammed the door and disappeared into the misty forest, and when she resurfaced, it was easier for them to say she’d never been found than to accept who she’d become.

I heard the soft hum of Andrea singing in the shower, her voice blending with the rush of hot water. It took me some time to recognize the tune: “High on a Rocky Ledge” by Moondog, the strange and lilting melody. When we were young, we’d performed a duet at a ballet recital to the song. It was her first time dancing en pointe, and she’d been practicing for months until her feet blistered.

THE KNOWLEDGE OF

LIE

LEAST

I remembered the way our buns were pulled so tight from our scalps they hurt our temples and stretched our eyes. The way her thin wrist felt when I grabbed it and swung her into a leap. I would never touch her that way now. The moment I stared into the faces of the audience, noticing their eyes for the first time, and saw that they were all looking at her.

Andrea and I had always been different, but we’d been close until our senior year, when we could no longer avoid the way our differences were leading us down different paths. Or at least, that was how I put it to my family and friends. We grew apart – and it was true, we really had – though this was only a part of the truth. I had locked away the truth of Michael and her at prom our sophomore year, but it came bubbling back up in my throat as I heard her sing.

Michael had been her date, and the way he told it to me, she’d been pushing her body against his all night, giving his teen brain signals of attraction. When she threw the soda in his face, he was nothing but surprised: had he made a wrong move, something she wasn’t asking for? He relayed the story to me when we first started dating, the summer after my graduation, sitting in the dark of his car. He had no memory of me from that night, he said, though his friend had been my date, and we’d taken pictures together. I was always invisible beside Andrea, and for the first time with Michael, I felt myself emerging from her shadow.

Of course, when Andrea found out, she was ruthless: expletives, hurling insults, and ultimately shattering the mixing bowl in one swift and angry motion. It was at the Donner graduation party, where our families and friends excused themselves inside and pretended not to notice our argument. The pool was rippling, the May air tinged with a slight breeze.

At first, to my dismay, she shed tears: After what he did to me, how could you? But this hurt evolved into anger as quickly as it arrived. You’ve always wished you were me. This is all just another version of that, she spat, and I told her, without thinking, that I never wanted to be a burnout like she was. This was long before she dropped out; she

was going to a respectable yet second-rate college, but it was as though I could prophecy her entire future in that moment, as though I willed it all to happen. You’re seriously caught up in all this bullshit? she asked me, gesturing wildly around her at the house, the trees, the world. You think this is the only way to live?

I shook my head and said, you don’t know him like I do. That horrifying platitude rang true at the time, though now I supposed she may have seen in him back then what took me ten more years to realize. It was then that she dropped the bowl, the shards scattering around both our feet. Her parents took her upstairs as the maid swept up the glass. They returned downstairs shortly, saying that Andrea was not feeling well, and the party continued, as though nothing had happened at all.

The rush of water stopped, and I heard the nozzles squeak. She emerged from the bathroom wearing a fluffy bathrobe, her hair wrapped in a thick towel. I could see her younger self in her face, visible yet subterranean beneath the lines and scars. The older I got, the more I could see these younger selves in everyone: my mother, my brothers, the people in Coyote Camp, the mirror. Time can only be understood in reverse, I knew, but I wished for a moment that when we were kids together, Andrea and I could have looked at one another’s faces and seen the adults we might become.

“Can you do me a favor?” she asked. I braced myself for it, my mind running through the amount of cash I had in my wallet, the places her parents kept valuables, the family portraits of the three of them on the wall. They looked the part of parents who had lost a child, and I suppose they had: they were conditional people.

“Okay,” I whispered.

“Can you braid my hair?”

She sat on the chest next to me and turned her back to me. I could see her spine poking from her ribcage, the smattering of freckles on her neck. Her hair was slippery in my hands, as though she’d put oil in it. I snaked it into one single braid, and while my hands worked, we sat for a moment in silence.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

“No, you don’t,” I said.

“I want you to know that I wouldn’t trade my life for yours,” she said. “Despite it all.”

“Of course not.” I tied a rubber band around the plume of her braid. “We’re different people.”

“We’re not so different,” she said.

Perhaps she was right. Thirty, and here we both were in the same place we’d once been: her childhood bedroom, the one that overlooked the backyard pool and the lemon tree. The ladder leading to the loft leaned against the eastern wall where it always had, and I looked at it and briefly considered asking her to climb it with me. I did not, though. I understood that up there, we might find ourselves other people entirely, an entirely different space. n

I WISHED FOR A MOMENT THAT WHEN WE WERE KIDS TOGETHER, ANDREA AND I COULD HAVE LOOKED AT ONE ANOTHER’S FACES AND SEEN THE ADULTS WE MIGHT BECOME.

Shadow Self (mixed media on canvas, 48x36) by Sherry O’Neill

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

FINALIST, 2023 DORIS BETTS FICTION PRIZE

AS A KID, YOU’D BEEN SIX FEET EASY, STOOP-SHOULDERED TO DISGUISE YOUR HEIGHT, WHICH MADE YOU SELF-CONSCIOUS. YOU’D RETAINED THE POSTURE, BUT NOW THERE WAS SOMETHING MENACING IN IT, LIKE A PREDATOR COILED TO SPRING ON ITS PREY.

By Jeremy Griffin

ALL THINGS WORK TOGETHER FOR GOOD

Like everyone else in the Blue Bottle Cafe, I assumed the man in the stained hoodie to be a bum trying to scam a free drink. He shambled through the door a little after six, the cuffs of his sweatpants, at least two sizes too big, dragging beneath his sneakers. Mouths soured as he made his way toward the U-shaped bar, as though a bad smell had wafted in. This was in 2015, postrecession, and the vagrants were a common sight all over town – on corners and at stop signs and outside the shuttered shops downtown, there they were offering up their tales of woe, pleading for food or, more commonly, money. You felt bad, sure, but what could you do? In the South empathy is a limited resource, and most of the folks in the Blue Bottle wanted nothing more than to tune out the real world, fantasize that they were somewhere more exotic than Fayetteville, North Carolina.

JEREMY GRIFFIN is a teacher of Creative Writing at Simpson College in Indianola, IA, who has previously worked as a college professor at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, VA, and Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina, during which time he lived part-time in Fayetteville, NC. He is the author of the short fiction collections A Last Resort for Desperate People: Stories and a Novella, from SFAU Press; Oceanography, winner of the 2018 Orison Books Fiction Prize; and Scream Queen: Stories, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. His work has appeared in such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Iowa Review, Hopkins Review, Oxford American, and Shenandoah, among others.

JIMMY FOUNTAIN grew up in North Carolina and is currently living and working between New York City and Carrboro, NC. Primarily working in still photography he has previously exhibited film/ video, installations, and drawings in galleries and museums across the United States. He graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Except, that night the sounds of mortar blasts coming from Fort Bragg on the opposite side of town, where the 10th Marine regiment was conducting its semi-yearly round of artillery drills, made pretending impossible.

From the far side of the bar, I watched him dicker with the bartender, a baby-faced kid with the sturdy jawline of a soap opera star, whose expression told me he wasn’t giving in. Frustrated, he swiped the hood off his head, revealing a head of grimy walnut-colored curls, and that was when I recognized you – Jamie Lester, 2008 graduate of Cape Fear High School, a former student in my sophomore bio class. I lowered my face so that you wouldn’t spot me. A better teacher, one who still believed in the nobility of the profession, might have been delighted to come across someone he’d once taught, especially one with

whom he’d had a good relationship. But after more than two decades at CFHS, I dreaded running into my students outside of school. And one look at you told me that there wasn’t much to chat about. Your face, once ripe with baby fat, was now gaunt and sickly, plagued with shadows. It wasn’t all that dissimilar from the way Cam’s face had come to look, the hollowness of it, although I suspected your illness was far different than that of my son. On your cheeks and forehead and around your mouth, blisters as large as quarters. As a kid, you’d been six feet easy, stoop-shouldered to disguise your height, which made you self-conscious. You’d retained the posture, but now there was something menacing in it, like a predator coiled to spring on its prey.

It was Wednesday, mid-November. The only other people at the bar were a pair of tipsy middle-aged women who had been flirting with the bartender, so it didn’t take

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

with art by Jimmy Fountain

Untitled, 2001 (C-print, shot on 35mm film, 20x30) by Jimmy Fountain

I HELD OUT MY HAND, BUT YOU THREW AN ARM OVER MY BACK AND GAVE MY SHOULDERS A BROTHERLY SQUEEZE. YOU HAD A CLOSE, SMOKY SMELL ABOUT YOU, SOMETHING GRITTY AND UNWHOLESOME.

long for you to spot me across the room, at which point your face lit up like a jack-o’-lantern, and you shuffled over to me.

“Holy shit, Mr. Wretszky,” you said. “Do you remember me?”

“Sure, I remember you, Jamie.” Reluctantly, I held out my hand, but you threw an arm over my back and gave my shoulders a brotherly squeeze. You had a close, smoky smell about you, something gritty and unwholesome.

“Wow, it’s great to see you,” you said, sliding into the seat to my right. “You still teaching?”

“Yep. Still at Cape Fear.”

“Badass. Molding those minds and shit, right?”

“Something like that.”

The bartender tromped over. “Stop harassing my customers or I’m calling the police.”

“Go ahead, motherfucker,” you shot back. “I’m not bothering anyone. Mr. Wretzky, tell him we know each other.”

The man turned his gaze to me as though I were complicit in your scheme. Having just come from a tutoring session with a hulking high school football star who, despite my best efforts, couldn’t grasp the finer points of Mendelian inheritance, I was in no mood for company. Nevertheless, turning away a former student, even one I hadn’t seen in twelve years, felt cold-blooded. Especially considering that I doubted you had anywhere else to go.

“It’s okay,” I relented. “He can sit with me.”

The man eyeballed you for a second. “Your problem now,” he grumbled before drifting back over to the women.

When he was out of earshot, I said, “What was that about?”

“He’s just an asshole. I got robbed earlier, was trying to get a drink to calm my nerves, you know? Told the dude I’m good for it, just have to hit the bank tomorrow morning. But he’s being a prick.”

“You got robbed?”

“My car, yeah. Fuckers broke the window, got my wallet and my stereo.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Why, so they can tell me it’s out of their hands? They don’t give a shit about some guy’s stereo.”

“That’s too bad. I guess you can’t be too careful out there.”

“That’s the truth right there, Mr. Wretzy, you really can’t be. You hit the nail right on the head, yes sir.”

I angled my body away, pretending to be absorbed in the TV over the bar. It had been weeks since I’d had any time to myself, and my plan had been to nurse a drink or two before heading home, where Kate and Cam were sure to be bickering over her refusal to let him out of the house to see his friends. To Cam, the measure seemed draconian, but Kate was following the oncologist’s order to minimize his exposure to crowds, particularly now that it was flu season. Besides, the chemo had decimated the kid’s immune system to such a degree that he could barely stay awake past eight. Some days he couldn’t even move without the aid of a walker. Still, at fifteen, he just wanted his freedom.

And I wanted it for him. He’d been diagnosed with nodular lymphocytepredominant Hodgkin’s lymphoma nine months earlier, so rare that the oncologist had almost sounded

excited when he’d broken the news to us – you would have thought Cam had won a prize. Maintaining a semblance of normalcy was crucial for kids in his situation, or so I had read in an article I’d come across while doomscrolling in the kitchen one night as my family slept. But normalcy was a lot to ask when you didn’t know if your son would live to see his next birthday. The chemo had kept the disease at bay for now, but there is a world of difference between stalling an illness and eradicating it.

Amazingly, of the three of us, Cam was the only one who seemed unfazed. Since being confined to the house, he’d made a hobby of honing quirky new skills from YouTube videos; he’d already taught himself sign language and knot tying and was now into card tricks. He still listened to the same angsty music which, even through his earbuds, you could hear across the room. Still cracked up over The Office. Were it not for his shaved head and sallow complexion, no one would have even suspected he was ill.

“He’s acting like nothing is wrong,” Kate had complained to me a few weeks earlier. “It’s like he doesn’t even realize how sick he is. Or doesn’t care.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” I’d countered. Because truth be told, I admired his outlook. The boy wasn’t moping around, bemoaning his lot; this was all just business as usual to him. Like me, this had always been his way of managing his fear, to continue on as if nothing was wrong. “I think it’s great that he’s still the same kid.”

But Kate closed just her eyes and rubbed her temples. “He’s not even close to the same kid.”

Now you, either oblivious to my body language or choosing to disregard it, remained in your seat. “Look, Mr. Wretzky, I really hate to ask, but do you

think you could spot me a drink? It’s been a shit day. I’ll hit you back up, I swear.”

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. Snippets from the drug awareness literature we were required to distribute to students were barreling through my mind: Mixing drugs and alcohol can lead to sickness or even death. Your best bet is to steer clear of both! “How about something to eat instead? We could split a pizza.”

You made a sucking sound through your teeth. “Well, see, I’ve got food back at my place, is the thing. But I’m telling you, after the day I’ve had? A drink is really all I need, just to get my head right.”

You watched me with the shamefaced look of a dog who had been caught swiping treats, and maybe it was because the past few months since my son’s diagnosis had left me softhearted, but it was hard not to be moved by the pitch.

“Okay,” I acquiesced. “What do you want?”

“I’ll do whatever you’re doing.” You gestured to my glass. “What is this?”

“Johnnie Walker Red.”

You signaled the bartender and ordered a round for both of us. I could have insisted that you settle for something cheaper, but I was already two drinks deep myself, my thoughts thinning like vapor, and so when the bartender glanced at me for approval I just nodded.

When I took out my wallet to pay the man, you eyed the wad of bills inside. “Wow, look at Elon Musk over here.”

“Been doing some tutoring on the side,” I explained, embarrassed, as though I’d been flaunting my wealth. From the plastic insert, the photo of Cam smiled back at me. It was two years old, his hair still thick and full. A kid with a gleaming future. I stuffed the wallet back into my pocket, not wanting you to see the picture, but unsure why. “Supplemental income.”

“Guess I should have been a tutor,” you said.

When it came to expressing sympathy over Cam’s diagnosis, my clients, most of whom lived in gated neighborhoods and sent their kids to private schools, were content to throw extra money my way rather than offer any genuine sentiment, and the payment for today’s tutoring session had included a hefty tip. Not that I was complaining: in addition to the twenty percent of Cam’s chemotherapy not covered by mine and Kate’s insurance, we’d been

slammed with a litany of other costs, drugs and lab tests and imaging and doctor consults, not to mention the instructors who came weekly to the house to make sure he didn’t fall behind on his coursework. So I was happy to accept the donations, especially if it spared me the lazy platitudes I’d become accustomed to hearing, Everything happens for a reason or You’ll be in our prayers or All things work together for good, the latter of which someone had scrawled in a sympathy card weeks earlier. As if a terminally sick child were nothing more than a minor obstacle on the way to prosperity.

No doubt Kate would be livid, then, to see me dropping fifteen dollars on a round of scotches for myself and the scroungy character sitting beside me. But I was just glad I had something to offer you; I couldn’t recall the last time I’d felt that way about anyone. Even before Cam’s diagnosis, my job had become a source of anxiety. Whereas I had once viewed education as a means of

I WAS JUST GLAD I HAD SOMETHING TO OFFER YOU; I COULDN’T RECALL THE LAST TIME I’D FELT THAT WAY ABOUT ANYONE.

empowerment, it turns out you can blather on about the Krebs cycle and pyruvate molecules and the mitochondrial matrix – all the outworn content that turns freshman bio into a slog – only so many times before you start to question your own value: did my students need whatever I was providing, or was I just killing time between school bells? A lot of this had to do with the same bureaucratic nonsense that drives so many teachers crazy: standardized tests, obsolete evaluation metrics. But Cam’s illness had solidified for me that I’d given as much to the profession as I could. Call it burnout, but it had been a long time since I’d felt as fondly about any of my students as I had when you were in my class.

“It’s not too late, you know,” I said to you. “To tutor, I mean. You could do it, make some decent money. I could help you.”

Untitled, 2001 (C-print, shot on 35mm film, 20x30) by Jimmy Fountain

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

You laughed grimly to yourself. “Shit, Mr. Wretzky. If you think I should be tutoring kids, then you ought to give that money back.”

Spend enough years in the classroom, and the students start to meld together in your mind. They dissolve into vague approximations of people, the Overachievers and the Slackers, the Beauty Queens and the Weirdos, until the end of the semester when you purge their names from your brain like a tree shedding its leaves, making headspace for the next round. However, there are always a handful of kids who linger in your thoughts, folks who in one way or another make the job bearable. People you wouldn’t have minded holding onto for another year, if only because they made you feel like you weren’t just screaming into a void.

You were one of those kids.

At sixteen, you’d been quick-witted and mature for your age, a jokester who excelled at making your classmates howl. You liked to riff on the turgid passages in the textbook, of which there were plenty, like a comic working a crowd. Yet, despite being one of the brightest in the class, you’d had little interest in school, and my assurances that you could ace the course if you just applied yourself always went unheeded. Instead, you’d eked by with Cs, flubbing easy questions, phoning in lab reports. Like most class clowns, you seemed to regard your intelligence as a vulnerability, something to be ashamed of. Once, you replied to an essay prompt with a dirty joke which, despite its impropriety, made me cackle: Who’s the most popular guy at the nudist colony? The one who can carry a cup of coffee in each hand and a dozen donuts.

Kate had insisted that I report it to the main office. “These kids need to learn they can’t just skate by on personality,” she’d asserted. A college math lecturer, she resented the rapport I often shared with my students, though she would never admit as much.

Which was why I hadn’t pointed out that some students absolutely could skate by on personality, because it might have been their only means of survival.

This was what I was thinking as I watched you guzzle your drink, punctuating each long sip with a breath, like a man chugging water after a sprint. You were listless, slow in movement, like any second you might fall asleep on the bar. Whether it was

genuine fatigue or something other than the alcohol swimming in your bloodstream I couldn’t say, but it was contrasted sharply by the rumbling thuds from across town. Beneath our stools, the floor vibrated with each one. The purpose of the drills I could never determine, though I suspected they were simply a way of acclimating soldiers to the environment of combat. If there was one thing I’d learned over the past nine months, it was that you can get used to anything, even disaster. And in fact, over the years I had developed a peculiar fondness for the drills: while so many things remained in a constant state of flux, they were something to count on, reassuring in their regularity.

For Cam, however, it was a different story. As a child, he had been terrified by the blasts. Time and again, I’d explained to him that they were confined to the base, carefully orchestrated to pose no danger, but it didn’t matter to him. Nor did it help that, while the blasts usually lasted a few days, it was impossible to guess with any precision when they might end. “Make it stop, Daddy,” he’d cry, clinging to my leg, and what could I do but stroke his sandy-colored hair and assure him, rightfully or not, that it would be over soon. Even now, as a teenager, he’d spend those days on edge, grumpy, creeping from room to room like a frightened house pet.

Seemingly on cue, an especially strong concussion ripped through the restaurant, making silverware rattle against plates. The bartender reached up to steady the glasses hanging over the congregation of bottles. I watched the liquid in my tumbler ripple Jurassic Park style.

“Big one,” you commented.

“Feels like we’re in a war zone, like I should be running for my life.”

“I hardly notice it anymore,” you said, taking it upon yourself to signal the bartender for another round.

“You were always good at tuning out the noise.” I was on drink three, my words beginning to slur.

“You didn’t get distracted easily like other students.”

“Well, there’s a lot of noise out there. Most of it you just gotta ignore.”

I had the feeling you were speaking about more than just the shelling, but I didn’t pursue it. Something told me I wasn’t prepared to hear what you had to say.

Perhaps sensing this, you said, in a voice that suggested you were just humoring me, “How’s teaching these days?”

“Fine, I suppose.”

“You suppose?”

“It’s just a grind, more red tape every year, more obstacles. It doesn’t get any easier.”

You tossed back the rest of your drink in a single gulp. “I hear that. I don’t think I could do what you do.”

“Actually, I think you would have been a great teacher.”

You gave a wan smile but didn’t say anything. Maybe you suspected you were being placated. After all, I’d offered this commendation up to countless kids, and in most cases it was just a morale boost, hardly sincere. In your case, however, I meant it. It was the Shawna Kemp debacle that had demonstrated you had the combination of tenacity and objectivity that being in the classroom demanded. She was a sour-faced Baptist zealot who sat in the front right corner of the room, forever fidgeting with the cross around her bony neck, the kind of student you pray you don’t have to deal with. While the stoners and burnouts and fuckups posed their own challenges, at least you could count on them to ignore you. But the kids who were too invested, like Shawna? Those were the ones you had to watch out for.

That morning, we were starting the evolution unit. “The first thing you have to understand is that people don’t evolve, populations do,” I explained to the twenty-two glassy-eyed teens. “A single person cannot turn into a different species, not unless you’re a superhero.”

The quip, which I had employed every year for the past decade, was met with scattered chuckles, though already I could see a few of the conservative kids getting their hackles up, arms crossed, jaws set.

Working from the mental script I’d crafted over years of rehashing the same material, I led them through the lesson, from Olduvai Gorge to Homo erectus to Darwin’s finches. And for a while it seemed like I might make it through without any pushback, until Shawna, who had spent the period glaring at me as though this was all a personal attack, piped up, “How do we know this all actually happened?”

I summoned a smile. I was used to the resistance. In a town like Fayetteville, where many of my students’ military-affiliated parents sported Confederate flags on the backs of their trucks, it was virtually guaranteed. And I was good at balancing honesty with tactfulness, turning the challenge into a teachable moment. That morning, however, all I wanted was to get through the lesson without interruption.

“We have the geological and biological records to prove it,” I answered.

“Were you there?”

“Was I where?”

“When the apes started walking upright, were you there?”

WHILE THE STONERS AND BURNOUTS AND FUCKUPS POSED THEIR OWN CHALLENGES, AT LEAST YOU COULD COUNT ON THEM TO IGNORE YOU.

SOME PEOPLE JUST NEED TO BE PROVOKED. THIS WAS POSSIBLY THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON I’D LEARNED AS A TEACHER.

“Of course not. Although, it wasn’t like they just decided to stand up straight one day. It took millions of years for these changes to take place, and they were reflected in countless organisms.”

“So, you’re saying you weren’t there?” she said. I planted my hands on my hips. “Shawna, of course I wasn’t.”

“Then how can you be sure it’s true?” A couple of the other devout kids exchanged wily glances, spurred on by her impetuousness. I could feel myself losing the class.

“I’m only telling you what the science says.”

“Not all the science.”

Then, from the back of the room: “Where were you when Jesus was crucified?”

Heads whipped around toward the source of the voice which, it took me a moment to realize, was you. You were doodling in your notebook, as you often did, your eyes fixed intently on the page.

“That’s not the same thing at all,” Shawna snarled.

“How?”

“Because Homo erectus didn’t die for our sins. Jesus did.”

“But how do you know?”

“Because the Bible says so.”

Now you raised your head and looked at her head-on. Maybe time has colored my recollection, but it seemed there was something menacing in that stare, something that hinted towards brutality.

“Exactly. That’s all you have to go on, the Bible. At least with Homo erectus there’s, like, fossils and stuff.”

Should I have put a stop to it then, before the other students joined in, tossing petty insults back and forth? Probably. But it was good to see someone stand up to Shawna. As far as I could tell you didn’t really have a stake in the argument, you just wanted to test her. Some people just need to be provoked. This was possibly the most important lesson I’d learned as a teacher, and the fact that you seemed to grasp it better than your classmates strengthened my belief in your intelligence.

It wasn’t until Shawna stood and, gathering up her books, tromped out of the room toward Dr. Tolbert’s office, where she often fled in the face of disagreeable content, that I finally called the class to order and finished the lesson. You returned to doodling as if nothing had happened, and I managed to get through the remainder of the class with few interruptions.

When it was over, however, you hung back. “Sorry about all that,” you said, once the rest of the students were out of the room. “That girl just drives me crazy with all the God talk.”

“It was a valid point you raised,” I said, “but maybe not in the best way. Still, there’s something to be said for solid argumentation skills. You ought to put them to work in the classroom.”

“We’re in a classroom.”

“I mean as a teacher.”

“You serious?”

“Why not?”

You shrugged. “Just not how I saw myself in twenty years.”

“How did you see yourself?”

“Honestly, Mr. Wretzky? I try not to think that far ahead.”

And so maybe it was this memory, combined with the alcohol in my blood, that all at once made me want to spill my guts to you, because you struck me as receptive enough to appreciate my terror over my son’s condition – how when I would sit with him on the infusion floor at the clinic we would watch videos on his phone, laughing together at amateur skateboarders suffering crotch-related injuries or at men and women playing elaborate pranks on their spouses, and how desperate I was to say something of consequence, to tell him how I wished I could transfer his illness to me, to bear the weight of it even if it killed me, except that no

IN

THE

GLOW OF THE PARKING LOT

matter how many times I went over it in my head the words never felt like enough. A Band-Aid on a life-threatening wound. I wanted to tell you how looking at you made me want to hold my son to my chest and weep into his hair.

Would you have understood? The version of you I’d carried in my head for the past twelve years would have. But now I wasn’t sure I was speaking to the same person. Instead, I sucked down the rest of my drink and said, “Anyway, it was great to see you, Jamie. I’ve got to get home.”

“You sure you’re okay to drive, Mr. Wretzky?”

“I’ll get an Uber.”

“Here, I’ll help you outside.”

“You don’t need to do that,” I said.

But you climbed off your stool and followed me out the door into the parking lot anyway.

Outside, the sky was subterranean black, starless. Steam puffed from our mouths.

The Blue Bottle was situated off a busy main artery, and I could feel the cold rush of air from each car zipping past.

“Hey, Mr. Wretzky,” you said as I fumbled drunkenly with my phone, “you got a couple dollars on you?

Just so I can get a cab?”

“What about your car, didn’t you drive?”

“I left it at home,” you said, looking off toward the road, “because of the broken window and all.”

“Do you want to Uber with me?”

“No, that’s okay. Just, a few bucks would be awesome. I’ll pay you back, I swear.”

LIGHTS, I LOOKED YOU OVER, THE RIGID GROOVES AND ANGLES OF YOUR FACE. LIKE A PIECE OF MACHINERY THAT HAD SEEN MORE THAN ITS SHARE OF USE.

would have been miffed, but there would be other tutoring sessions, more cash thrown my way as if to make up for Cam being sick. If there’s one thing people are looking for, it’s ways to make themselves feel noble. But there was a hardness in your voice that made me uneasy: where was the liveliness of the past half-hour?

Was I being worked this whole time?

“Like I said, I’d be happy to split an Uber – ”

“I don’t want a fucking Uber. I need money.”

“Jamie, come on. Don’t be like this.”

“Be like what?”

I glanced around the shadowy parking lot, all at once aware of the four inches you had over me. “Don’t be angry. It’s not necessary.”

“Just please give it to me, okay Mr. Wretzky?”

Somewhere in the distance, a dog was barking. The mortars always riled them up.

“Well see, I don’t have much cash left, and I’m a little worried about what might happen if I come home broke. Kate might make me sleep in the guest room.” I laughed, an uncomfortable cluck.

“You’ve got plenty of cash, I saw.”

Your voice was pleading, suggesting dire consequences if you didn’t get it. “Just a few bucks, that’s all I’m asking. You know me, I’m good for it.”

“I can’t, I’m sorry,” I replied after a long moment.

In the glow of the parking lot lights, I looked you over, the rigid grooves and angles of your face. Like a piece of machinery that had seen more than its share of use. Ordinarily, I might have given you the money. Sure, Kate

You brooded over this and then edged toward me, as though cornering an animal. Stepping backward, I tripped on the curb and lost my footing. Had you not grabbed

the front of my shirt, I would have gone sprawling on the glass-strewn hardtop.

How long did you hold me there, dangling, while you considered your next move? Seconds only, though it felt much longer. Long enough, in fact, for me to consider that you probably didn’t even own a car and, more importantly, to notice that the explosions from the base had stopped, the drills having apparently ended – no far-off thuds rumbling the ground, just a brisk stillness that brought to mind the hush of the infusion floor, my boy thumbing his phone while taking poison into his frail body. I wanted to point it out to you, the absence of the blasts, as though that might have some bearing on your actions, but that was when you let go of my shirt, letting me collapse on my back, the air vacating my lungs in a pained huff as you began pummeling me, fists and feet seeking out the most vulnerable places on my body, my screams muffled by my own hands as I tried to cover my head, until you plucked my wallet from my pocket and, in a choked-up voice, said, “I wish you hadn’t made me do this.”

Lying on the ground, face and clothes bloodied, I watched you dig the remaining cash out, only to freeze when you noticed the picture of Cam. It wasn’t your first time seeing a picture of my son – my desk had been adorned with family photos when you’d taken my class – but still you peered down at it like a detective inspecting a clue, brow furrowed and eyes turned down at the corners. Briefly, you looked like you were about to speak, but then you dropped the wallet on the ground and stuffed the cash in your pocket and, without a word, hurried off into the night, your oversized pants threatening to fall down around your ankles.

With trembling hands, I picked it back up. Whatever it was you saw in that image, I can’t say. What I can say is that as I stared at the picture of my boy, thankful that you had left it for me even despite my throbbing face and ribs, I found myself longing to hear those blasts once more, if only to mitigate the silence. I wanted to call you back so you could feel them with me, the earth trembling as though preparing to swallow us whole. n

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Untitled, 2001 (C-print, shot on 35mm film, 20x30) by Jimmy Fountain

FINALIST, 2023 DORIS BETTS FICTION PRIZE

I FOUND OUT I WAS PREGNANT THREE WEEKS AGO IN THE FOOD COURT FAMILY RESTROOM.

WHERE I’M SUPPOSED TO BE

THERE’S ONE WEEK UNTIL CHRISTMAS and my baby is the size of a kumquat. I take it with me to work and try not to think about how its eyes have formed, still closed, waiting to see what I’m like on the inside.

It’s quiet in the store tonight. Besides the fruit growing in my belly, my manager, Meredith, and I are the only two here. We drag our tired bodies from ransacked fitting room to dress rack to stack of ravaged cashmere in an effort to recover the sales floor from the furious storm of holiday shoppers that descended upon us earlier today.

BY GABI STEPHENS

I’ve been pregnant for ten weeks. That might sound nice, like something I might want to share on the internet, or announce to my parents over the holidays, but there are several reasons it’s not ideal for me – a depressed post-graduate dancer with a fine arts degree, who occasionally teaches kindergarteners at her old dance studio, but mostly works at the J. Crew in the mall where her mother used to drag her by the wrist through the Belk’s department store after church. Yet.

With only Meredith and me haunting the sales floor, the store feels otherworldly, painfully bright and much too still. I try to find something to do in

GABI STEPHENS is a short story writer from Charlotte, NC. She received her MFA in Creative Writing and Certificate in Publishing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she also served as designer of Chautauqua . She currently lives in Wilmington.

MICHAEL GALINSKY was born in Chapel Hill, NC, where he and his wife currently live. He was known as

amateur photographer in high school

the stock room but make the mistake of checking my phone and see that I have unread texts from the kumquat’s father, Derek. I shove it in my back pocket without responding and spend the next few minutes staring, motionless, at the door that leads to the windowless hallway where we throw all our trash bags and broken-down boxes. It feels like if I stand back here, alone, for long enough, it might open of its own accord and suck me into the mall’s entrails, where I’d wander, helpless and gray, for the rest of time.

During other shifts I’ve worked this week, we’ve had to beg customers to leave as the mall shut down around us, have held up our hands and mouthed, five minutes, when they showed up before we opened, their faces pressed against the glass in panic. Their phantoms linger in the dust motes dancing under the recessed lights. The Christmas music still blares.

“Can we turn it off?” I ask Meredith. She looks at her Apple watch and frowns, shaking her head. There’s two more hours until we close.

I don’t want to go home, to my parent’s house, a midcentury split-level where I have only planned to stay until March while I save up money to move to New York. Where my mother will sit across the kitchen table from me and watch me eat the

reheated chicken and rice she made my father for dinner. She will ask me how I am, what my plans are for the next week, month, lifetime. She will ask if I’ve met any cute boys lately. Where I will inevitably snap at her and have to watch her recoil from me like a scolded child, claiming she was only trying to connect. Where, later in the evening, I will hear her whispering a prayer for me at the bathroom sink while I tiptoe down the hall from the couch to my childhood bedroom. She is always talking about me to God.

I don’t know if I believe in God, but I don’t have a problem with him either. I’ve felt something akin to his love when I’m dancing, when I’m under hot, buzzy lights on a stage, my body moving in tandem with those around me. When we all breathe together between movements, my God feels like a big bell of desire, starting suddenly to ring in my abdomen, clanging and calling out for movement and touch, crying out with delight as our bodies stretch and sweat. I tried to explain this to the little girls I teach at the dance studio, and they just stared at me, glazed over, until I stopped talking, then asked if they could play a game at the end of class.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHAEL GALINSKY

SHE HAS BABY FEVER. HER WORDS, NOT MINE. SHE ALSO SAYS SHE’S “ON FIRE FOR GOD.”

Meredith loves God – is quite devoted to him, actually. She prayed over us last month, before the Black Friday shift started. I held hands with my coworkers and felt surprisingly still as she asked Him to give us patience. Prayer usually makes me squirm like a child in a wool sweater, but something about Meredith makes me soft. She is a sweet, lonely woman on the precipice of her fortieth year. Her greatest dream is to find a man who is as equally devoted to God as she is and have babies with him, big fat rosy babies that gurgle and giggle when you squish them. She melts whenever one is schlepped into the store on somebody’s hip, asks the owner all kinds of questions about its name, its age, how much it weighed when it came out. She has baby fever. Her words, not mine. She also says she’s “on fire for God.” Seems like a lot of heat for a woman who’s all of five-feet and two-inches tall.

“Are you okay out here by yourself?” Meredith asks me, after refolding a table of pajama pants

I thought I’d refolded adequately only twenty minutes before. “I’m gonna go ahead and wrap things up in the back, so we can just get out of here as soon as we close.”

I nod and give her a weak smile.

“I’ll only be a minute,” she said. “Call me on the walkie if you need anything.”

I found out I was pregnant three weeks ago in the food court family restroom. The day before that, I ran to the toilet in the break room and threw up immediately following Meredith’s Black Friday prayer. I kneeled on the linoleum, my arms wrapped around the toilet bowl, and realized that I hadn’t had my period in a while.

The next day, I chugged a diet coke on my way to the food court and spread the instructions from the pink pregnancy test across the bathroom counter. It felt like a formality. There must have been something else wrong with me – I was exercising too much or was too depressed to bleed. I squatted over the family toilet and peed on the stick out of duty, to rule the option out. I peed and

PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL GALINSKY

American Mall, 1989, #2 (photography) by Michael Galinsky

LEA’S CONCEPTION

OF THE SOUTH IS

THAT IT’S A

HUMID MESS OF JESUS-LOVING BIGOTS WHO PUT ANIMAL FAT IN THEIR GREENS. LEA IS A STAUNCH VEGETARIAN.

I waited. Someone knocked and I yelled at them that the bathroom was out of order from where I sat on the sink’s edge, my knees pulled up to my chest, hoping for answers to materialize before me, like in a magic eight ball. When they came, all I could think about was just how small that window with all its big answers really was – not much larger than the clump of cells inside me –the undeniable weight of one little pink stick.

From the bathroom floor, with ten minutes left of my lunch break, I texted the only person I could tell, my best friend from undergrad, Lea.

“Fuck,” she replied. “Can you even get an abortion where you live?”

“At my mother’s house? No.”

“Wait, when did you start sleeping with men again??” she asked.

“What if I kept my baby lol.” I text Lea now, squatting behind a rack of pleated metallic skirts.

“You’ve been at home too long,” she responds. Lea’s conception of the South is that it’s a humid mess of Jesus-loving bigots who put animal fat in their greens. Lea is a staunch vegetarian.

“Also sorry if I stop texting in a minute,” she messages again. “I’m about to hop on the train.”

Lea moved to New York almost immediately after we graduated and can’t seem to stop talking about it. When we left school, she already had a gig lined up with a group in Brooklyn that calls themselves a “multidisciplinary organization focused on empathetic movement.” They are a dance company. I love her, and miss her, and am inconsolably jealous of her life.

I’ve always wanted to be like Lea. When I met her freshman year, I was, like most people,

enthralled with her – all of us unable to look anywhere but her sharp face once she entered a room. I’d never seen anyone like her before that first day of our eight a.m. ballet class, like a fireball had rolled into the studio in her red velvet leotard. She wore her black tights pulled over it, and rolled up at the bottom, the ribbons of her pointe shoes wrapped around her bare ankles. There was something raw in her eyes, in the way she danced. She was fierce and lean and belonged completely to herself. I drew closer for warmth.

I was, for a dancer, doughy and had been wandering since birth, looking for someone to take me under their wing. And in her way, Lea did.

“What if I give my baby to Meredith?” I text her back.

“Girl, no. She wouldn’t vaccinate it. I’m getting on the train now.”

I used to make fun of Meredith with Lea. After my first day of work, I face-timed her and we laughed about Meredith’s square French tips and skinny jeans. We laughed about her devotion to a higher power. But the longer I spend in the store, the more I appreciate her hand squeezing my shoulder, or the way she lingers in a room when she wears too much perfume. I look forward to her offering to pray for me. I ache, thinking about how badly she wants to be loved.

Last week, in the break room, I mentioned that her pastry looked good and she offered to give me half of it. “I don’t need this whole thing anyways,” she said, tearing it in half. “I’m trying to lose weight.”

“I think you’re beautiful,” I told her, but it only made her cheeks go red.

Still crouched behind the clothing rack, I fantasize about raising my baby with Meredith. The three of us, making our way through the world as our own little radical family, being soft with each other and generous with love – eating sweets every morning for breakfast.

I hope we have a girl. I fantasize about growing her in my belly, the two of us swelling together in time as her heartbeat steadies. Maybe that could feel like God, I think.

Meredith’s voice materializes in my ear, calling my name, and I realize she’s trying to talk to me over the walkie.

“Are you okay?” she asks. “I looked at the camera and saw you on the ground.”

“I’m good,” I tell her. “Just cramps.”

I met the father of my child in high school, but he didn’t know I existed until I saw him again, years later, while he was working at Urban Outfitters. Our current combined assets amount to one and a half cars, two employee discounts, and a skateboard. I’ve been ignoring his daily slew of texts since I told him I was pregnant two weeks ago.

I had a crush on him when we were teenagers, even though we never spoke. Most of my knowledge about him was garnered through the Facebook page of a girl I was obsessed with from my dance studio. They became neighbors in middle school after Derek’s dad got a job at the bank that moved their family here from Connecticut. All her Facebook albums had pictures of him: driving her to school in his Volvo station wagon, playing his guitar outside her bedroom window, snowboarding on the tiny hill in their neighborhood park on the increasingly rare snow day. There was a softness about him that I hadn’t seen before from the boys I grew up with in this town – a place where a man had soft hands only if he used them to deal with large sums of money. A stiff place.

Through the lens of this girl’s social media, I developed a bond with a boy who’d never looked me in the eye, and convinced myself there was something that connected us on a deeper level. We’re different, I thought.

He still had that softness, that unabashed boyishness, about him that had enticed me as a teenager when I saw him smoking cigarettes in the mall parking lot or wandering the concrete floors of Urban Outfitters. He still looked like a kid, like he spent all his free time playing outside, his tan skin blending into the tuft of blonde hair on his head, brushing the lashes of his sleepy brown eyes.

For weeks, I followed him around the mall, quietly noting the spots he chose to sit and scribble in a notebook or stare out over the throngs of people chewing gum and dragging their children by their chubby little arms. It was true, what Lea said, that it’d been a long time since I’d been obsessed with a man like that, probably not since my initial fixation with Derek himself. I forgot how thrilling it could be to let a boy occupy your every other thought, quietly stalking him, taking note of his habits and tendencies, while his head stayed presumably quiet. The compulsion to give over my mental real estate to a man came back without me even noticing—my sleuthing skills as good in the mall as they had been on Facebook. It didn’t take me long at all to find out that his favorite place to eat lunch was the Nordstrom Cafe.

The first thing I asked him, as he slurped at a bowl of French onion soup, was if he ate there often.

“Huh, I guess I do,” he said, looking around like he’d just gained consciousness. It occurred to me that he wasn’t dumb per se, but perhaps did not reside on the same plane as the rest of us.

“Where do I know you from?” he asked, squinting at me. “I feel like I’ve seen you before.”

“Nowhere. Here, I guess. I work at the mall.”

“Do you eat here a lot too? It’s so much more chill than the food court. All this brown early aughts decor – it’s kind of zen, isn’t it?”

I FORGOT HOW THRILLING IT COULD BE TO LET A BOY OCCUPY YOUR EVERY OTHER THOUGHT, QUIETLY STALKING HIM, TAKING NOTE OF HIS HABITS AND TENDENCIES, WHILE HIS HEAD STAYED PRESUMABLY QUIET.

I laughed, but Derek only looked at me with confusion, a dog with its head cocked. “You’re right,” I said, composing myself, “it really is kind of nice.”

He looked at me like I meant something to him. “Do you maybe wanna eat lunch with me?” he asked. “I just got this feeling that I haven’t had a meal with someone in a million years.”

I said, disarmed, “I think I do.”

All through lunch, even as my high school dreams came true – Derek asking me about dance and telling me about music school – I could only think of how fun it would be to tell Meredith I’d met a boy, a boy I thought was cute. And sure enough, she squealed when I told her I’d not only run into my high school crush but had plans to go out with him too.

“The kinda weird thing is,” I told her, “Is that he obviously doesn’t remember me from high school.”

Meredith gasped. “He admitted it?”

“No, I just didn’t bring it up. And he never said anything. I think he really had no idea I existed.”

“Well, he does now,” she said with her lips pursed. “When are you going out?”

I told her about our plans and tried to find a current picture of him to show her. “Oh, he’s cute. Very you,” she nodded. I couldn’t wait to tell her how it went.

Derek and I met up one night at a bar near my parents’ neighborhood that used to be a laundromat,

a place where old people who’d either died or been pushed out of the neighborhood used to chew the insides of their cheeks and gossip while their cottons spun. The bar was dark and vaguely Irish themed, even though it religiously played football on the screens above the liquor shelves. It boasted an enormous rotating selection of local craft beers and served hot pretzels with mustard and melted cheese. I got there first and ordered one. In the time it took for Derek to get there, I ate half of it and finished a beer and a shot. I shoved it all in front of the empty seat next to me, and when he arrived, asked if he wanted to do a beer and a shot.

“Please,” he said. The bartender brought us a round of whiskies, and two dark green bottles. We giggled, clinking our glasses together. I knocked my tooth with the bottle as I swigged my beer and hoped Derek didn’t notice. Thankfully, he was distracted, taking in the bar’s regular crowd.

“Everyone here looks exactly the same. I feel like we’re in a simulation,” he said with a shiver.

I looked around. There were, in fact, a lot of blonde women around us, and several men in golf shirts.

“You’re from here, right?” he asked. “I mean, I don’t know why else anyone would end up here,” he said, gesturing to the other patrons.

I shrugged. It felt like a lot of people were choosing to end up in the city. I didn’t have any memories of it feeling so cramped, all the wide open four-lane

PHOTOGRAPH

BY MICHAEL GALINSKY

roads of my childhood, once congested at the end of workdays, were now packed indefinitely. High rise apartments seemingly constructed of plastic were erected in any and every empty lot, and inside I imagined the bankers fit together like anchovies, peeling apart from each other in identical outfits every morning to start their cars and run the world.

“I guess I mean there aren’t any real people,” he said, “like you and me. People who are into art and culture and want to do something other than work in finance and have blonde babies.”

“Weren’t you a blonde baby?” I asked him.

“Well, yes, but my father is an asshole.” He smiled. He’d told me about his father at lunch, how he constantly reminded Derek that if he hadn’t gone to Nashville for music school he wouldn’t have ended up at home, in fear of his student loans, playing guitar at theme parks and working at the mall for as long as his mom would let him live there – an interminable amount of time, his father guessed.

I offered him a laugh and excused myself to use the restroom, really just looking for a chance to check my phone. I wanted to text Lea and joke about how cool and alternative this guy who worked at an Urban Outfitters thought he was but didn’t want to explain to her how I’d ended up in the situation, how much I’d wanted him once before. I thought about texting Meredith but decided not to. Would it be inappropriate, I wondered? She wasn’t really my friend.

I watched Derek sitting alone at the bar for a moment when I left the restroom, intermittently scrolling his phone and looking around the room like a meerkat. His leg bounced incessantly. I felt a pang of something for him – a little bit of pity that could turn into affection if I willed it. I rebuked any passing recognition of myself that I felt in him.

“Is this place weird?” he asked, as I returned to the bar. “Like, should we go somewhere else?”

I admitted I didn’t know where anyone went out here anymore and he laughed. “Did you ever go to Stumps?” he asked. “It was over near the stadium. Before they built that parking garage over there.”

“Of course I went to Stumps,” I said. “So many good shows.” Which wasn’t a lie per se – a lot of great bands had played at Stumps. I’d just only been to see one of them. My mother had both dropped me off and picked me up and I hadn’t known what to wear. Besides leotards, all I wore were skinny jeans and floral dresses. There wasn’t anything cool or different about me until Lea taught me how to roll a blunt and watched all of The L Word with me our sophomore year of undergrad. I’d been plain, belonging not to myself, but to some general sense of normalcy that kept me from causing a fuss.

“I don’t think there’s a spot like that here anymore. Where there’s, like, a community. Have you been able to connect with anybody since you’ve been here? Like, artistically?” he asked.

American Mall, 1989, #4 (photography) by Michael Galinsky

PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL GALINSKY

IT EVEN WORKED FOR MY PLAN THAT THE ACT ITSELF

TOOK PLACE IN THE DIRT, AT THAT PARK WHERE ALL I EVER DID WAS RUN OR READ, LIKE A CHILD OUGHT TO.

I thought of the little girls at my dance studio, their round bellies, and the fascination in their faces when they watched their little arms and legs moving through space in the big floor to ceiling mirrors.

“Have you?” I asked Derek.

“No.” He shook his head and we sat, momentarily, in that lonely truth, perhaps both knowing that we wouldn’t be able to be that connection for each other either.

The conversation turned. He asked me where I’d gone to high school and was shocked to find out that not only had we gone to the same school but had graduated the same year – wanted to know if perhaps I’d changed my hair. My hair was the same. He just wanted to sleep with me now.

“Maybe we just missed each other,” I said. “I was at the dance studio a lot.”

“Did you dance at Nina Masters?” he asked. I nodded yes.

“My best friend in high school danced there! I bet I’ve seen you perform. Damn dude, how did I miss you?” he asked, incredulous.

I laughed. “I don’t know. I was quiet. I guess you just did.”

“No, I mean, I’m sure you know this, but you’re so hot.”

I was surprised that one could blush and feel disgust all at once.

Derek smiled at me and chugged the last of his beer. Derek thought I was cool. Derek, who couldn’t identify me from any other mousy brunette at our high school, thought I was different from other girls.

“Do you smoke?” he asked.

He took me to the park where everyone used to smoke weed in high school, where I had never smoked weed, because I didn’t at all until college.

“I used to be here all the time,” Derek said, looking up at the willow oaks that swayed above us in the night breeze. “It feels weird to be back. Regressive.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, watching him look up at the muted stars.

I followed him silently to a spot among the trees, a small clearing littered with crushed beer cans and cigarette butts. He pulled a joint from a pack of cigarettes he kept in his back pocket, inhaled, and passed it to me.

It was always my plan to sleep with Derek. Not because I wanted to, but because I needed to. To win high school. To prove something about myself to myself, or to God, or the girls I had crushes on when I was fifteen at Nina Masters’s School of Dance, spinning like a top, trying not to let my eyes linger for fear that someone might find me out.

It even worked for my plan that the act itself took place in the dirt, at that park where all I ever did was run or read, like a child ought to. The adolescent inside me, the girl who so desperately wanted to be different, to be dirtier than her pink tights and baby-blue leotard, needed to know that she could get down, let the dirt grind into her back, her knees, the pink palms of her hands. It was supposed to feel triumphant, and on some level it did. But it was also underwhelming. There wasn’t anything wrong with Derek – I just wanted something different.

What I hadn’t planned for was the condom breaking, Derek pulling out and staring down at himself in disbelief. It was dark and he stuttered, trying to explain himself.

“What happened?” I asked, and he pointed between my legs. I reached down and felt how warm I was, how sticky. I sat up and looked at Derek, on his knees, the condom split.

STANDING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STORE, I PUT MY HANDS ON MY NOT YET SWOLLEN BELLY AND WONDER IF MY MOTHER SIMPLY MOURNED MY CHILDHOOD, OR FEARED WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN TO ME ONCE I WAS NO LONGER TRULY PRECIOUS.

“I’m on birth control,” I told him, getting up and brushing the dirt off my back. “We’re good. Let’s just get out of here.”

Derek was tense as he drove me back to the bar where my car was waiting, both hands on the wheel and his jaw set tight.

“Are you sure you’re gonna be okay?” he asked, pulling into the parking lot. “Will you text me if you need anything, or, I guess, will you just text me?”

I promised I would and tried to forget that anything had happened, not knowing that even then a small miracle was spinning inside me.

I am making finger spaces between clothes hangers when my phone buzzes in my back pocket. Thinking it’s Lea, finally off the train, I open it and see it’s another text from Derek.

“Are u at the store today? Can we talk?”

I feel green and wonder if all of motherhood is this nauseating. I worry that life might just be this way.

Meredith comes through the door and unleashes a great sigh, her shoulders slumping over with cartoon exhaustion, and starts checking off items on the old wooden clipboard she carries around the store. When she looks up and sees me, my complexion skewing sage, she asks if I’m okay.

What would happen if I told her everything, I wonder. Would she take me into her arms and let me cry, right there, in the middle of J. Crew for God, and Santa Claus, and the final shoppers wandering through the mall to see? From some great beyond, I am struck with a deep yearning to be small again.

I miss feeling like a precious palm-sized thing, the small chunk of a girl that I once was, a gem in my mother’s crown. I stayed quiet in her tan arms in

the days when she could still carry me to church on her hip, her bracelets tinkling as she walked. Even now, when I hear someone rifling through the store’s jewelry section, I imagine her behind me all in gold, bent down to scoop me up and take me home.

When I was big enough, she dressed me in pink tights and painted me with blush, so I could dance with the other doll babies in anticipation of Jesus’s birthday. The night she finally got to see me do tendues in my angel costume, she told me I was just precious. When did I grow out of that?

I got my first period and my mother cried –not when I showed her the blood in the toilet, but later, in private with my father. “It’s happening too fast,” she whispered to him. From the crack in their bedroom door, I watched him place a broad palm on her back as she shook with hushed tears.

She cried, too, when I came home after my freshman year of college and told her I still liked boys, but that maybe I liked girls, too.

“I love you,” she told me, “I just don’t understand.”

Standing in the middle of the store, I put my hands on my not yet swollen belly and wonder if my mother simply mourned my childhood, or feared what might happen to me once I was no longer truly precious. I try to imagine how I’ll react when the small life inside of me inevitably becomes harder to love.

“Do you ever feel like you don’t belong anywhere?” I ask Meredith.

“Oh gosh.” She looks at me with her big green eyes, the thick mascara clumped around them somehow making them more earnest. I look for it in her face – anything that might confirm what I feel in her. The loneliness, that lingering sense of unbelonging that lives just under the surface of

every exchange, every laugh, and kiss she’s shared. I want her to tell me of her emptiness, so I can do the same. So I can tell her how alien I felt as a child in this town, how in college I was just a paper doll, how I’m afraid I might spend the rest of my life teetering on the edge of aliveness, getting by quietly, following someone louder around. I want to tell her these things, to be known.

“I think everyone feels that way sometimes, honey,” Meredith says. “For me, there’s comfort in knowing I belong to God. But I – I know that’s not for everyone, as much as I want it to be. I’m open about my faith, but I know I can’t make someone else feel God’s love. That’s something for you to find. All I can do is remind you that he’s there if you ever need him.”

When she says this, I want to cry. Her faith in God’s plan for her makes her look her age – almost forty, holding out for the perfect man. I wonder what that means for her. If that man exists. If she wants him to. I know she trusts God to bring him into her life. I imagine her alone in her apartment every night, wiping off her concealer and revealing the rings under her eyes. Curling up on the couch with her cat and drinking a single glass of white wine before falling asleep alone. It makes me want to hold her.

“You look pale, honey. Are you gonna be sick?” she asks, her brow furrowed, looking for the nearest trash can.

“I’m pregnant,” I say, and she stops in her tracks. “I’m pregnant and I can’t decide if I’m going to keep it. I don’t know what to do.” I start to cry.

Meredith freezes, but her eyes move back and forth, like she’s looking for a way out.

“Oh, honey” she starts. “Does your mama know?”

I shake my head no.

“Listen, I think you should go ahead and go home. Are you scheduled tomorrow?” she asks, reaching for her clipboard.

“I think so.”

“Why don’t you take the day? I think it might be more important for you to take care of yourself than come in here.”

“But I – ”

“And whatever happens with your situation –I’m not gonna ask you any questions about it, okay? It’s not my place as your employer. I just want you to be healthy and happy, alright?”

“Are you sure?” I ask, sniffling. “I can – ”

“I am. I’m very sure. Go ahead and get your stuff together, honey.”

On my way out I text Lea, “I need you.”

“Okay. Still walking home right now. Can we talk later?” she replies.

“Can I call you?” I ask her. I see her typing, but then the box disappears. I text again: “I need you.”

“Can I call in the morning?”

PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL GALINSKY

American Mall, 1989, #5 (photography) by Michael Galinsky

Anxiety consumes me, a fear that she’s grown out of me, or has better things to do. I imagine her at a dive bar that glows red in the night with some girl who has curly bangs and a double nose piercing. I can’t help but start to cry again, too undone to worry if any of the holiday shoppers or kiosk workers can see.

“I really need to talk,” I message back. She types for a while and, again, nothing. I call her, but after three rings she sends me to voicemail. I send her a row of question marks.

I sit down on the side of the fountain at the mall’s center unable to remember the last time I asked her a question. I feel selfish, embarrassed, abandoned. Down the hall, elves are putting their coats on and grabbing their bags. Santa Claus is closing up shop.

A woman walks in my direction, dragging a child by the arm. The little girl trailing behind her wails and yanks her mother’s arm, full of shopping bags, in the opposite direction. Her thin hair has escaped the red bow that is supposed to keep it out of her eyes and sweeps across her face, making her look like an opera diva on the brink of collapse. I love her. I feel closer to her than I do to her mother, calm and diligent on her mission to get her daughter home.

I close my eyes, listening to the soft rush of the fountain, that chemical blue water, and wish that someone would usher me closer to where I’m supposed to be.

“Are you still here?” I text Derek. He responds immediately and I tell him to meet me at my car.

When I get to the parking lot, Derek is leaned up against the car, hunched into himself like a turtle and shivering against the evening chill in just a jean jacket. He jumps up when he sees me, tugging his jacket tighter around himself. He looks seventeen in the parking lot lights, and I can’t stand it. I stare beyond his shoulders at the big glass food court with its lights still on. Inside, people on the closing shift are taking off their aprons and putting on their coats. I wonder who turns the lights off when they leave, or if they just stay on all night, like some kind of beacon.

Derek looks over his shoulder, following my eyes. “Where dreams go to die, huh?”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Nothing. Just being a dick.” He scuffs a dirty shoe along the asphalt. “Listen, I’m sorry I’ve been kind of aggressive about trying to talk about stuff – ”

“No, it’s fine. I – ”

“I get that the decision is up to you in the end. I understand that. I just – I gotta know how responsible I’m gonna have to be.”

“You won’t – ”

“I can make it happen if I need to. I mean, my parents will have to help, but – I wanna do this right. What’s in you is a part of me too. I can step up. I’m not some – ”

“Derek, please stop.”

He looks at me with watery eyes, and for a moment, I want to give in to him, let him think that the three of us, together in this parking lot, are something meaningful.

“We’re not having a baby,” I tell him, and he looks like he’ll crumble.

“Have you already?” he asks, and I shake my head no.

“Can I go with you when you do? I can even just wait in the car if you want me to,” he says.

I don’t know why, but I touch his smooth, boyish cheek. “I’ll let you know, okay?” I say and leave a kiss where my hand was.

I watch him walk away from the driver’s seat of my car. He turns around once, to wave, and I try to smile back. Orange light from a streetlamp pools in my lap and I want to be able to feel my baby inside me just once before she’s gone.

I want to be able to belong to her, but that was always too much to ask of someone so small.

Stale heat pumps through the car as I turn the key in the ignition, and it rumbles to a start. I think of Meredith, then of my mother, hoping that as they wash their makeup off tonight, they say a lonely prayer at the bathroom sink, and mention me to God. n

I WONDER WHO TURNS THE LIGHTS OFF WHEN THEY LEAVE, OR IF THEY JUST STAY ON ALL NIGHT, LIKE SOME KIND OF BEACON.

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