Fried Chicken and Coffee

Cartin's Brick, fiction by Jarrid Deaton

2009-12-28T16:04:00.001-05:00

My daughter, Laney, she got pregnant not long after her sixteenth birthday. Me and Nora were disappointed, sure, but we didn’t come down on her with lectures or anger. We just told her that we’d help out as much as needed, but she had a whole new world of responsibilities getting ready to crack open on her way before she was old enough. Cartin’s father bolted a week before Laney went into labor. The first two years he mailed Christmas cards with fifty bucks in them, but then he was all the way gone. Cartin was born premature, all shriveled and tiny. He made it through the close calls with beeping machines sending nurses back and forth at all hours of the day. We thought Laney would do okay when we first saw her with him. That didn’t last long at all.

By the time he turned one, Cartin was, for the most part, Nora's and mine. We allowed for it because Laney made promises to go to the local community college and get a part-time job. She kept her word on the job, holding down a waitressing gig at Reno’s Roadhouse. Some nights she wouldn’t come by to pick Cartin up. Some nights she would come by to get him staggering drunk with some guy I never got to see close up at the wheel of a truck that, by the sound of it, didn’t have a muffler. If Cartin was sleeping, the roar of truck would send him bawling loud and red-faced out of whatever dream he was caught in and it would take half an hour to calm him down.

Laney eventually stopped coming to get Cartin altogether. It worried me and Nora, but we were more than happy to have him around. I’d watch him play in the backyard and smile when I’d catch him staring up at the hills behind the house. I knew he probably heard a squirrel heading for one of the tall trees, or maybe a rabbit getting brave and making its way closer to the yard.

“Papaw,” he said to me one day. “What’s alive up there?”

“Just about everything, buddy,” I told him.

The summer he turned ten, I started letting him wander around up in the hills. I always kept a close eye on him. I’d been all over the area looking for mushrooms and ginseng, so I knew it was safe. He’d spend an hour at a time roaming around before he’d make his way back to the house, dirty with scrapes from briars up and down his arms and burrs sticking all over his back and in his wild brown hair.

The next spring, I took out a loan and built us a new house the land where my father used to have a farm. It gave Nora plenty of room to plant her little garden and I’d always wanted more dirt to call my own. It was mine after my father died, but it didn’t feel like it belonged to me until I had a house on it. We deeded the old house over to Laney and her live-in boyfriend, Amos, that I’d only met twice. Nora told me he had a good job with the railroad, but, since Laney always borrowed money off of us, I doubt it was that good.

Not long after we moved in the new house, Amos drove over with a dog box in the back of his truck. I walked out to see what was going on. Amos went around to the back.

“Come on over here, Olin,” he said. “Look what I picked up for Cartin. Got him a pal to play with.”

Amos let the truck gate down and opened the dog box. A big mutt slinked out and took a nervous jump to the ground. It looked like a cross between a collie and a hunting dog. It sniffed at the ground and made a few circles around the truck.

“Name’s Winston,” Amos said. “Got him from a guy in Lexington pretty cheap, all things considered. Promised to do a little roofing work for him, but I don’t plan on it.”

Amos laughed and squatted down to pet the dog. It took a couple of steps back and stared at him.

“Hell with you, then,” Amos said. “Tell Cartin me and his mama will come back over this weekend and see how him and Winston’s getting along. We got some business to attend to down around Frankfort tomorrow. Take it easy, old man.”

They always had some kind of business to take care of in Frankfort. I never nosed around enough to find out what it was, but I can imagine it would have pissed me off enough to have whipped Amos’ ass, so I just let it go. I didn’t want to strain things between Laney and us anymore than she already had.

It was three days later when I drove up the dusty one-lane road leading to my house and saw Cartin with a wash rag held against his nose as he walked fast in the opposite direction.

"Cartin, what are you doing?" I asked. "Where's your grandma?"

"Damn dog bit me so I killed it," he said. "I was looking for you. I ain't sorry. It bit me."

The dog wasn't dead, but it was hurt. Cartin had cracked its head with one of the bricks laying in the yard, left over from the expansion of the house.

I looked at his nose, the bridge covered in dried blood. The dog had closed its jaws right between Cartin's eyes.

"I just tried to pet him," he said. "He growled and I tried to back up but he jumped on me."

"It's okay," I said. "Go in the house and get your grandma. You need to head down to the clinic and get that looked at.

When Nora left with Cartin, I went inside at took my .38 from the top shelf of the closet. I walked back outside and found the dog hunched up against the back of the garage. One eye was closed and it growled at me and bared its fangs.

"Winston," I said. "Laney. Amos."

I pulled the trigger and turned the crack made by Cartin's brick into a cave of blood, hair and bone. The dog was in the ground before he got back from the clinic.

Jarrid Deaton lives in eastern Kentucky. He received his MFA in writing from Spalding University. His work has appeared in Underground Voices, Thieves Jargon, Pear Noir, decomP, Zygote in My Coffee, and elsewhere.

Happy Holidays!

2009-12-21T14:09:00.001-05:00

More content in the new year. I'm going to be busy until then, though, turning 40 and reevaluating, uh, very important things, because I'm, uh, officially at what I used to consider middle age.

Here's a song a dear, dear, friend of mine sent me today (thanks Sue!). To say I love it would be an understatement.

I hope you all are well and have family around you, if you want them there. Right now, I'm going out back of the house to piss my name in the snow. Because I can.

That's Right--Drug the Little Fuckers!

2009-12-13T15:15:00.000-05:00

Who diagnosed this three-year-old kid (referenced in the last graph) with bipolar disorder?? Can someone in the medical professions please tell me a way in which this makes sense? Three-year olds are all over the place mentally because they're, um, three-year-olds.

And it only makes the cake taste better to know poor kids get drugged at twice the rate of their richer counterparts. I imagine that happens with adults, too, but I've not seen any research to that effect. Read for yourself, in the NY Times.

New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts, the data shows.

Those findings, by a team from Rutgers and Columbia, are almost certain to add fuel to a long-running debate. Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because they actually need them — but because it is deemed the most efficient and cost-effective way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-class children?

Cow-Tipping, fiction by Mark Staniforth

2009-12-10T13:58:00.000-05:00

The sight of all those schoolgirls’ legs unfolding off the buses at just past four o’clock every afternoon is almost enough to shut anybody up, except for Roscoe Williams when he’s got another one of them stupid ideas of his rattling around in his thick old head.

Squinting up at all that bare chicken-flesh parading right past you, it’s all you can do just to think straight, let alone talk. But Roscoe Williams, he’s so screwed-up with thinking where his next drink’s going to come from he could talk his way through a sixth-form orgy just so long as there was a bottle of Super waiting on the other side of it.

Maybe it’s because he’s so blurry-focused on the booze and his next means of getting it that the sight of all them shiny fawn thighs doesn’t seem so much of a big deal to him as it does to me. Me, I reckon I’d happily trade in swigging Super all day long on the bus-stop bench if it meant even the smallest improvement of getting any pair of them educated limbs of theirs lolled around my neck.

This time I’m trying my best to focus on the long curve of Kelly O’Mara’s calves, smooth and sleek as a sports car bonnet and guaranteed to top-speed her out of this place just as soon as she’s old enough to get behind a wheel. Only Roscoe’s blabbing in my left lughole about this weekend being a right ripe time to pull another of his ‘famous’ cow-tip scams.

Thing is, what gets me most isn’t so much Roscoe’s blabbing as me knowing how it’s going to turn out, no matter how much I try and stop it. Ever since my dinner-time drinking got me fired from the animal feeds, I’ve been desperate enough that there isn’t a whole lot left I wouldn’t do for money. Even most of those things would be tempting if you waved a bottle of Super under my nose.

Me and Roscoe go back a long way. We met when his mother threw a party when we were ten years old, snuck under the kitchen table and drank ourselves as good as unconscious on her cooking brandy. Sometimes it seems the screwcap hasn’t been back on since. Through it all, I’ve learned the hard way that Roscoe is exactly the kind of greasy-arsed bastard I oughtn’t to be listening to when it comes to the question of making up the next bunch of beer money.

So when he starts up with the famous cow-tip shit, I blink my eyes off all those perfect bodies and dribble a spit on the concrete and say, convincing as I can, ‘bullshit, Roscoe.’

‘Wayne-oh,’ sighs Roscoe. I hate it when he sighs my name that way, like he’s some kind of big-shot who can hardly lower himself to shape the words. The sun turns to shadow and there’s no need to look up to know it’s Patty Jenkins who’s blocking it out. She’s already replaced her school jumper with a tee-shirt saying ‘Frankie Says Relax’. It pegs the end of her balloon boobs then drops straight off, makes her look like some sort of slutty sandwich-board evangelist. She’s got tight scraped-back foster-home hair and smells of wet towels and cheese and onion crisps. She sags down between us and pokes a Benson in her cake-hole. She eyes up the bottle of Super and Roscoe hands it over sweet as if he was giving Kelly O’Mara a box of Black Magics on Valentines’ Day.

‘All right?’ I say, but it’s Roscoe who’s got her attention on account of the free slurp of Super and the always-likely offer of some more fat cash.

‘You fixed for tonight?’ says Roscoe. Patty shrugs. She slurps and bends forward to itch an inner-thigh. She passes me the Super. I take one look at the fuzzed-up rim and pass it right back. She takes another slurp, passes it to Roscoe who drains the last two inches.

‘Have faith in the cow-tip!’ he proclaims, standing and tossing the empty bottle of Super towards the village green bin and stomping across the street towards the public lavs.

***

Later, we’re in the Fox and Roscoe’s tipping the shots down Patty Jenkins’s neck, wrapping her round his little finger with what’s left of his charm and his cash. Strikes me there’s no need for Roscoe to be so generous with the doubles, since Patty would good as guarantee herself to anyone for keeps once she’s dosed up on Pernod and Blacks.

Patty’s swapped her Frankie tee-shirt for her best blow-job clothes, a cheap black bra just about big enough to hold them in under a two-sizes-too-small crop-top that shows off her folds. The way she’s rubbing up against Roscoe looking up at him with those big trusting eyes of hers, it almost makes me feel sorry for her. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s coming but I swallow my morals for the thought of a pocket-full of dough.

***

The tap-room’s full of boys with bare arms swigging pints like they know where the next one’s coming from. They’re here to give Jackie Bell a quaint old rural send-off. Jackie Bell’s hauled them up here supposedly on some outward-bound weekend but truth is he’s been after the chance to rub our noses in it ever since he swanned off to that college of his. He’s throwing twenties at Old Roy and Old Roy’s flapping about after them like a zoo-pond penguin at feeding time. It’s just as well we’re so practised in making our own pints last all night or we’d be detoxed by the time we managed to catch Old Roy’s eye.

Roscoe’s got his eye on a couple of likely lads. Reckons he’s like a lion picking out the weakest wildebeest from the herd. Calls it his sixth sense and I have to hand it to him, it hasn’t done us too far wrong in the past, save the time he didn’t account for a scrawny-arsed runt being a champion flyweight. They’re well-dressed townie types and it’s easy to see who shits it the most when the pissed-up farm boys barge past on their way to the lavs. Roscoe flicks his head and heads off, pulls up a stool. I follow him. Patty stays back by the jukebox, swivels her clack-shoes so her tits are spilling in their direction.

Roscoe nods at a pair of lads and asks if they can spare him a fag. The fatter one offers up a pack of poncey menthols and I know that at that moment Roscoe’s gone and struck gold again. Roscoe leans in for a light. He nods his head at Jackie Bell lording it up at the end of the bar and says, ‘known him for years. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke.’

You can tell the pair’s nervous what with the proximity of Roscoe’s fucked-up face. Roscoe lifts his dregs and makes them clink glasses. He clocks one of them’s wearing a United pin-badge. When it comes to clocking stuff like that, Roscoe never misses a trick. A few minutes later, we’ve got fresh pints lined up courtesy of the townies, and they’re embroiled in a red-faced three-way over who’s better down the Old Trafford wing, Jesper Olsen or some other cunt I’ve never heard of. I’m looking over at Patty waiting for the signal, and I’ve half a mind to pull Roscoe aside and tell him a night on the beer’s enough for me without having to go through with all the famous cow-tip crap.

Roscoe flashes me the wink which says I’ll never see the end of it. He nods over at Patty and draws their heads in and says, ‘see that bird over there with the tits? Best blow-jobs north of Watford.’ He reaches for another menthol, sparks up. ‘Fact.’

They’re looking over giving her the ogle. She gives them the cutesy wave. ‘You’re in there.’ Roscoe says it so they both them he means them. Truth be told, they’re not the types it looks like pussy comes easy for. The fat one looks down, embarrassed. The other meets her stare.

Just then, Jackie Bell flits past and Roscoe pulls him over and steers his pint to the table and says, ‘good on you, Jacko!’

‘Hey-hey!’ says Jackie Bell, slaps Roscoe’s back. Roscoe used to be Jackie’s pussy-catching mate till too many nights on the glue turned him into an ugly sniff-faced bastard. Used to bore me senseless with stories of double-teaming sluts behind the Kwik Save. Now Jackie just treats him like another piece of shit ought to be stuck down the bottom of a brown paper bag.

Jackie says, ‘you’ve found yourself a right fucking pair here, lads,’ and I can’t work out who it is he’s talking to, us or the stag-do dickheads, but either way knowing we know Jackie seems to put the two stag-do dickheads at ease.

Jackie gone, Roscoe’s back to drawling on like a Match Of The Day pundit. Out of the corner of his eye he tips Patty the wink and she wobbles over.

***

Long past closing time we’re out in a field in the middle of nowhere and I hate to admit it but Roscoe’s plan has worked like a charm. Getting the pair of them out of the pub didn’t present much of a problem once Roscoe started gabbing on about quaint local activities, and Patty piped up about the cow-tipping right on cue.

It’s fair to say the fat one was a bit more reluctant to give up his seat in the thick warm pub for a spot of gallivanting round pitch-black fields getting his box-fresh Filas all fucked up with animal shit, but it’s nothing a well-placed hand on a thigh from Patty couldn’t sort out quick-sharp. We pile in the back of Roscoe’s Cortina Estate. It’s had the back down so long now the seats wouldn’t sit up if you tried. Roscoe uses it as a mobile bed most nights given as he’s pretty much permanent estranged from his folks these days. Colder it gets, the more litres he gets through for insulation. It smells of old fags and stale piss and the bearings squeal like a yard of pigs as Roscoe bathes the pub car park in full beam. ‘Jesper fucking Olsen,’ he says as he backs out, shakes his head in the best fake awe you’ve ever seen.

Soon we’re bouncing up the pitch-black back-tracks so much it’s giving me a stiffy and I’m hating myself for it taking just a few stupid pot-holes to get me horny about Patty Jenkins of all people again. She’s squeezed in between the college cunts in the back and if everything’s going according to Roscoe’s well-laid plans she’ll have each of her hands down their respective boxers by now and be twiddling their no-doubt tiny nobs towards the point of splurge.

After more bumping and grinding than you get on the dancefloor of the Pickering Ritzy on your average Friday night, Roscoe pulls up and half-turns and his teethy smirk is lit up by moonlight.

‘Cow-tip time!’ Roscoe says, and we all lamp out the car and feel our feet sink in pools of warm shit. The fat lad stops to light up another menthol and by the look of his face in the match-glow he’s not all that thrilled with where we’ve took him. The other one’s more perving at the gigantic bouncing balls Patty’s got stuffed up her tee-shirt and they’re looking even bigger in the moonlight glow. Patty’s looped an arm round both the boys and she’s steering them off to the darkness as planned.

Roscoe hisses open a couple of cans of Special and we clank them together and glug them down. After giving them ten minutes we creak out after catching one or both of them in the act. Sure enough there’s the flabby lad silhouetted in the open field with his arms sticking out like a scarecrow and he’s mumbling to no-one in particular: ‘I knew it. I fucking knew it.’

There’s a slurpy sound coming from a block of black on our right which we take correctly to be a hedge, and closer inspection reveals Patty Jenkins down in her most convenient pose gobbling the other lad’s sweaty knob with his boxers tangling his knees. Patty’s still got her mega-baps well strapped in which I can’t help feeling is a mighty waste on the lad’s part, though they do say some are inclined to save a little mystery for their lovemaking.

The routine is for Roscoe to step out out and politely inform the chap that in order to keep such a sorry and perhaps illegal activity under wraps there may have to be a small session of financial transacting. But somehow the sight of Patty summoning up such enthusiasm for the one-thousand-and-forty-third nob she’s ever had in her gob seems to rub Roscoe up the wrong way. So while the flabby lad’s still stomping around the field moaning about fucking knowing it, Roscoe bellyflops over the top of the hedge and slaps the lad out of his fantasy and calls him a paedo.

Patty slops his nob out of her gob and wipes herself on the hem of her upturned top and gets to her feet and giggles at her mucky whore knees.

The lad’s staring big-eyed at Roscoe going, ‘I don’t want no trouble, like,’ but Roscoe slaps him round the chops and sinks him in the mud. He goes, ‘she might be a dirty slut but she’s only fifteen, like.’

The lad’s got his arms in the air and he’s starting to panic. He starts to yammer about not knowing, and it would look well funny if it wasn’t so serious because he’s plain forgot he’s still got his boxers round his knees and his danglies dangling. Then while he tries to get up Roscoe slaps him back in the mud and he plants his bare arse in the soil with a slop.

The fat lad comes over with all the commotion and Roscoe calms a little and gives it the, ‘your mate’s been knobbing my sister and she’s only fifteen,’ bit, and for good measure, ‘what with her mental what-nots, I’m afraid it don’t look good.’

The fat lad squints through the gloom at Patty like he’s checking if she’s dribbling enough to pass for a spaccer. Patty leers right back at him and licks her lips.

The fat lad starts cursing under his breath again and he reaches out his wallet and Roscoe’s most peturbed when he finds the two lads between them can only summon the paltry sum of thirty-five quid between them and their cash cards are stuffed safe behind Old Roy’s bar running up a fine tab.

Faced with the prospect of having a pocket-full of short change once he’s deducted travelling expenses and the cost of a couple of four-packs of Special Brew and Patty’s considerable pre-event bar bill, it doesn’t take Roscoe too long to get his radge back on. First he orders the thin one to kick off his air-bubble Nikes and the Levis from round his ankles and the boxers from his knees, then he’s after his dress-shirt and the lad’s left clasping himself white and blubbery in the nude. The fat lad’s got wind of what’s happening and he’s legging it away over the field stumbling as he goes, happy to spend the night tramping out on the moors if he means he’ll avoid having to get his own pair of floppy norps out in front of a lass. Roscoe gives the thin lad a boot in the ribs and the lad’s proper crying now. ‘Fucking hell Roscoe,’ I say, thinking the lad’ll most likely freeze to death just lying like that, and on second thoughts Roscoe chucks him his shirt back, and I might say it’s one of the touching things I’ve seen him do, only he spoils the effect by pulling out his car keys and chucking them and his trainers into the blackness for the spite of it.

Roscoe’s fair raging and we sit in the car in silence and neither me nor Patty has the courage to ask Roscoe for our cut. The car stinks of mud-shit and Roscoe’s got the Stone Roses on blasting which is totally wrong for the mood we’re in.

Roscoe swigs another Special while his lights search the road and I feel Patty sobbing in my armpit and I say, ‘you didn’t need to call her no dirty slut.’

Roscoe slams on his brakes and almost sends us arrowing through the windscreen. He turns and slurs, ‘get the fuck out of my car.’

Well the mood he’s in we don’t need no second invite, and I help Patty out and he zooms off with the door still flapping, and Patty sobs more till his red back-lights turn out of sight.

It takes us a fair few hours to make it back and those hours present plenty of time for thinking. Instead of risking waking her old man at her place we head in the site static with the broken window catch that those of us of a certain age been using for extra curricular activities for years. Patty sprawls out over the stinky couch and starts talking her fanciful notions about getting a one-way ticket out of here. They’re tempting enough notions all right and what with all that thinking time I find myself swept up with thought that it’s not too late to make a go of it somewhere else. Then I look into those eager-to-please blowjob eyes of hers and suddenly I hate myself even more. Truth is I know how tonight’s going to end up, just like I know how things’ll end up next time Roscoe cools off and comes back round spouting another of them stupid ideas of his.

Mark Staniforth lives in a small village in North Yorkshire, England. His fiction has been published in Night Train, Eclectica, The Dublin Quarterly and Suss, among others. He has a blog at markstaniforth.blogspot.com.

New Content Coming Soon

2009-12-08T15:55:00.002-05:00

Just letting you all know.

I think it's a sign my family's getting older and older, or just not hunting, or something. No one got a deer on the first or second day, or at all that I've heard of. And I know the PA deer population is exploding and has been for some time. I never got one. I had a chance a couple times. My brother and I were right down behind the house at joining of our feeder crick with Seeley Creek. I didn't have my mind in the hunt--I often didn't--so my brother tapped me on the shoulder and pointed across the water to the steep sidehill covered in pine. A buck was skittering his way down among the pine needles and rocks, a couple doe close behind. I can't remember what I was hunting with--probably my brother's 12-gauge-- but I remember drawing the bead down behind the front leg and waiting for the buck to stop at the bottom before he took off again. I waited and waited, in the way time turns like molasses before the shot, and realized I couldn't do it. I didn't want to do it. I liked venison, a great deal, but not enough to shoot and kill to get it. So I didn't shoot. My brother winked at me when I brought the barrel down, but didn't say anything. He didn't shoot either, but he has his own reasons for that. I don't know them.

As penance of a sort, I haven't eaten venison much since then. Though I do love the memory of seeing the deer hang from the apple tree overnight, and then butchering the cold carcass on the metal dining room table, seeing my dad or my mother slide the knife into the meat on either side of the spine, and how the backstrap would go straight into the frying pan with some butter, maybe some flour--I don't remember exactly--and then out on a communal plate, even while our hands were still bloody, and even though the carcass wasn't nearly done.

I have bad memories too, like trying to force the shot-meat and the gristle into something identifiable as hamburger, which meant through the hand-grinder attached temporarily to the kitchen counter,and often coming close to breaking the thing. That was my job, to grind.And grind. And grind some more.

Books

2009-11-20T19:20:00.001-05:00

I owe a whole shit-ton of you (meaning contribs) books. I've been so busy for the last two months I'd forgotten about that, uh, very important part of the deal for publishing here. Please remind me in comments if I haven't sent you a book and indicate your preference for fiction or poetry. Also send your snail-mail address to rusty.barnes@gmail.com.

Dark Hole, fiction by Rosanne Griffeth

2009-11-17T22:01:00.000-05:00

If you misstep just six inches to your right, you will fall right into it. It swirls brightly and is fit only for trout to live in. If you do misstep, you will plunge up to your neck in the freezing water. Of all the swimming holes along Big Creek, those deep pockets of cold water children play in all summer; the Dark Hole is the loneliest one. No one wants to swim there.

She was pretty and delicate in a Melungeon way, lighter of skin than most of her relatives and shy like a white calf. Her eyes were large and sloe and dark. The light would glint off them in the darkness of the forest like the flick of a trout tail in the deepness of the creek.

Her black hair was long, wavy and hung down her back, when he first saw her.

When she first saw him.

Her Pa had beaten her that day, as he was wont to do. Her Ma died from the fever six months ago and there no longer was the comforting buffer of another woman in the house. Ferby sure did miss her Ma. Mostly, she missed her just being there.

She had risen before the men to fetch wood, stoke the stove and complete the rest of her chores she was expected to do before the farm stirred to life. Before heading to the barn with the milk bucket, she ran down to the springhouse for water, milk and butter. She put the water to boil on the stove then headed out to the milk parlor.

Tulla, the jersey cow, greeted her with her usual vacant stare. She already stood at the stanchion, waiting. Ferby hunkered down on the milk stool; her head leaning against Tulla's warm flank as she rhythmically pulled the milk down. Tulla's tail would whack her on the back of the head every so often. Ferby would slap Tulla's flank in response and both cow and girl breathed out clouds of mist. Milking time was a quiet time, a right nice time.

Ferby poured Tulla's offering into the churn and placed it behind the stove to clabber just as the men stirred around upstairs.

She made a pan of cathead biscuits and put the coffee on. Sure and swift, her hands flew as she checked the pot of hominy and sizzling ham in the skillet. She put some boiled eggs in a bowl and opened one of her Ma's cans of pickled beets from last summer.

Shade, her oldest brother, came up behind her. He placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed.

"What'cher got there, lil' Ferby?" he said, breathing into her ear.

She stiffened and shrugged his hand from her shoulder. "Get!" she hissed at him between clenched teeth. "I'm busy."

Shade was tall and squint-eyed. He snaked his brown, calloused hand down to her waist. Ferby turned and poked him with a hot spatula.

Shade drew back and shook his hand out where a droplet of boiling hominy had fallen. He sucked on the burnt spot and shook it out again.

"Get! I said!" She slapped him away and he grinned, but his squinty eyes were cold.

Her Pa came in with her other three brothers and stared at them.

The mountains themselves had carved Ransom Gorvins into a dark, hard man. Brown like gnarled walnut wood; Gorvins' eyes were dead black. He was a man of few words and he did not speak now.

He stepped forward, backhanded Ferby against the hot stove then calmly sat down at the table.

That was the day they met.

When the men went off to the fields and forests after breakfast, Ferby finally had a bit of time to herself. She ran, barelegged and barefoot, through the woods like a young doe to her special spot, the place where the rhododendron bushes bent, gnarled and twisted, down to the swirling water.

There she could be herself, a child—a wild mountain child. She lay on her stomach on a big slab of rock and trailed her fingers into the coldness. Sometimes if you looked at the water long enough, you could forget yourself and all your troubles. Sometimes, if you listened closely, God whispered. This was why she came here and how she remembered her mother.

He came through the forest trail on a snow-white mule. A mule as white as he was black and when Ferby looked up and saw him, she was afraid. Afraid, but fascinated at the same time. She had never seen such a man though she had heard of them talked about in angry tones by the men.

She stayed still like a fawn in tall grass, frozen on the rock, her hand in the water. She watched him loosen the reins to allow the mule to drink. When he saw her he startled.

"Oh—Hello," he said. "I didn't see you there."

His kind eyes belonged with his kind voice. Ferby pulled herself up from the rock to look at him. He was tall and spare. His chin was covered with a close-cropped beard. She looked curiously at his full lips and nose, so different from hers. The darkness of his complexion was different from the darkness of hers, and different again from any of the people she knew.

He dismounted and dropped to his haunches to fill his canteen up.

"Reginald Hooper, Miss," he said. "I'm in these parts doing a survey for Black's Mining. I'd appreciate it if you let your folks know I'm not going to be here long and should be moving through right soon. Don't mean no harm, just be taking some samples."

"I'm Ferby. Samples?"

"I'm with a mining company. I'm just going through taking rock samples."

"Oh." She understood about mines but was not sure what taking samples were.

He cut his eyes at her, warily. "I must be the first colored person you ever saw, the way you are looking at me."

"Yes," she whispered.

"Well, Miss Ferby, I'll just be getting some water here and be movin' on."

He fastened the water to the mule's pack and started to mount.

"Wait!"

He paused and turned, leaving a hand on the pommel of his saddle.

"Where did you come from? I want to know about where you come from."

He adjusted the stirrup leather on the mule's saddle and said, "I come from Kingsport, Miss."

"Where is that?"

"Oh, about sixty miles north of here. It's a city."

"A city? Do they have tall buildings and all?"

"Yes, Miss. It's a fair sized city."

"Do you live there?

He pulled himself up on his mule. "Yes, Miss, I do."

He reached back into one of his packs, pulled something out of it and reached down to hand it to her.

"Here you go. Here's something from the big city for you to keep."

Ferby took the object from his hand and stepped back as though his touch might burn her.

She looked at what he had given her. It was a cylinder about the size of a can of peas, covered in paper with a picture of a cow.

She frowned at it and asked, "What is it?"

The edges of his eyes crinkled. "Turn it over."

Ferby upended the little round box and almost dropped it when it made a sound like a cow mooing. She laughed up at him.

"It sounds just like Tulla when I'm late for milking!"

"Been nice talkin' to you. I'll be going along now."

He wheeled the white mule and headed off through the forest trail, like a ghost into the woods.

Ferby stumbled after him and as he faded into the deep cover of the forest, she called, "Mayhap I'll see you again!"

Her voice faded into the cricket song, floating off like a thistle seed in the wind.

Ferby took the little moocow box home, wrapped it securely and hid it under her pillow. This was her secret and she did not want to share the wonderful meeting with the strange city man with anyone. One day, mayhap, she would go to the big city. Mayhap, one day, she would see the strange man again and be able to ask him more about the world outside the mountain.

She hardly noticed the burn on her shoulder where she hit the stove that morning. No, hardly at all.

For the next few weeks, after the men left, she darted through the woods like a wild thing on bare feet as tough as wolf pads over the rocks and shale. She searched out the dark man on the white mule, and when she found him, she sat quietly watching from the cover of the rhododendrons.

He drilled into the rock and pulled plugs of stone and soil, then placed them in tubes, carefully labeling them before putting them in his pack. Ferby guessed this was "taking samples".

After a while, he would stand up, stretch, take some sandwiches out of his pack and sit on a rock, and say, "I wish I had somebody to eat these sandwiches with."

Ferby would giggle, shyly emerging from the mountain laurel and he would share his lunch with her. Mr. Hooper's life in Kingsport sounded exotic and exciting. A brassy photograph of his sweetheart, smiling with Reginald in a photo booth, entranced Ferby. She held it carefully from the edges and looked from it to Mr. Hooper, comparing him now and then. They looked happy in a way Ferby could not relate to--in a way foreign to the hardscrabble life on the mountain.

"What's her name?"

Reginald took the photo from Ferby and tucked it back in his wallet. "Her name is Evaline, but I call her Evy. We get married as soon as I have money for a house saved up."

So much of what Mr. Hooper described to Ferby about the city made her want to leave the mountain and experience this life for herself. He told the stories so well that she could see herself walking down the wide paved streets wearing a store-bought dress and white gloves. Her hands were smooth, white and soft, and a man brought milk to her back door in the mornings. Ferby imagined having a job where she worked indoors and had her own money to spend at the movies or to go to restaurants.

"When I come there I'll wear a hat all covered in lace and we'll go eat at one of them eating places."

Hooper looked down. "That's not likely to happen, Ferby."

"Why not? Don't you want to go to a fancy restaurant with me?" Ferby dug a bare toe into the dirt, flicking it up.

"No, Miss—that's not it at all. They don't let people like me in the front door of such places. We have to go to the back door. To tell the truth, you might have a hard time getting in yourself. You are a bit darker than most white folks, you know."

Ferby frowned. This hadn't occurred to her.

She broke off a leaf-covered twig of a sassafras tree, stuck it in her hair and twirled around, laughing.

"See my hat?"

Hooper laughed, then stood and dusted the seat of his pants off, putting his hat on. "Well, Ferby—you know I have to leave tomorrow. I'll be riding out early to catch the train back to Kingsport."

Ferby just stared at him for a moment.

"Will you be back?"

"I don't know."

Ferby didn't know what to say. And since she didn't know what to say, she ripped off her crown of sassafras and threw it on the ground. Then she just ran away, disappearing into the rhododendron grove. She ran all the way to her special spot and once she was there, she felt the tears on her cheeks.

Ferby washed her face, staring into the swirling water. Her reflection showed her face and wavy black hair in refractions of light and dark. Then she shouldered her sadness like a yoke and went back home.

The cook stove fire smoldered when Ferby popped open the firebox so she raked the coals from the ash and placed another log on the fire. She knew it was time to get supper started, but first she wanted to go up to her room and look at the moocow box, her one treasure and keepsake from her time with her friend, the mineral surveyor. As she climbed the narrow stair, she thought, mayhap she would go to Kingsport herself. She would leave this place and find a better life, an easier life. She felt, for the first time in her life, that her life could be her own one day.

Shade was sitting on her bed holding the moocow box when she pushed the door open. He squinted narrowly at her, and then turned the moocow box over so it made the mwah-ah-ah noise that sounded just like a cow. The cow cry hung in the silence of the room like the dust motes drifting in the sunlight.

"What th' hell is this, Ferby?"

Her hands clenched the flour sackcloth of her dress.

"Give me that. It's mine."

"Who gave you such a thing, Ferby?"

The little box sat precariously in Shade's big dirty hands. Ferby didn't say anything.

Shade stood up and held the moocow box out to her.

"Here—you want it—take it."

Ferby reached for the box, stepping forward.

Just as her fingertips brushed it, Shade dropped it and crushed the fragile cardboard under his heel. It made a forlorn broken noise.

Ferby flew at him in a rage, screaming and crying. Shade grabbed her by the forearms and held her there.

"You know what I heared, Ferby?" he said. "I heared you was seen with that nigger prospector. I think he gave you that there trinket. That's what I think."

Ferby struggled, spat and pounded Shade. The loss of her mother, the loss of her friend, her loneliness and all her longings, dreams and rage came shattering home with the little sound the box made. Something in her soul was lost and broken with that little noise. When Shade raped her on the hard plank boards of her bedroom, she took her mind to her special place, where the dark waters swirled and God spoke softly—where the dappled light burst through the rhododendrons and splattered the water with shadows.

After that day, nothing would be the same, and Ferby would understand what it was like to be broken beyond repair.

The days went by much as they had before. Ferby milked the cow, fed the chickens, fixed meals for her father and brothers and escaped to the place she always had run to on the creek. When she stared into the swirling water of the creek, her heart no longer heard God whispering to her. She strained to hear Him but her soul was frayed and ripped now. It was as if someone had fired a shotgun next to her soul's ear, deafening it. She went about her life, content to fade into the background like a moth on a wormy chestnut barn.

No one noticed when she started to look pale and tired. No one took into account the drab shapeless garments she wore. Ferby became a shade, hiding in the shadows of the wood and skulking behind the trees like a doe that had tasted lead yet had not died.

In truth, Ferby was not aware herself of what was happening to her. She went through the motions of life without thought. In her mind were happier memories and, occasionally, she found herself there and remembered God's whisperings. She played the happy meetings with her prospector friend in her mind, hiding from reality.

She became ill and lost her appetite. No one noticed when she would quietly slip out the back door and retch. When they did notice she was well into her eighth month.

Ransom Gorvins stood like a monument, unmoving on the back porch that morning. He had noted breakfast was late getting on the table and was impatient to get out to the fields. Spreading fertilizer was on his schedule and his brow knitted in vexation he would be late getting started. The days were still too short to cover the time he would have to spend to finish in one day. He had decided to give the daughter a talking-to since she seemed not able to shoulder her share of the farm duties.

Ferby struggled up the path from the barn with a milk pail. She would lug it a few steps, then would have to put it down and rest a moment.

Ransom watched her progress, but did not try to help. He had seen her make this walk before without such dallying.

She saw him and redoubled her efforts, but the task was too much for her. She stumbled, fell and spilled the milk all over herself. The milk drenched her baggy garments, making them cling to her body, now visibly pregnant. She struggled to her feet, darting eyes at her father.

Ransom Gorvins showed an uncharacteristic wave of emotion. His eyes widened, then narrowed, and his dark skin flushed bronze and angry. He strode over to Ferby with violence in his cold dead eyes.

She was terrified. She was sorry she had spilt the milk but she just did not seem to be able to handle it today.

"You little whore!" Gorvins' words snaked out like knives.

"I'm sorry, Daddy, I'm sorry, I'm sorry—" Ferby said. "I'm sorry ‘bout the milk—I'll get more this evening. I won't spill it again an' we still have some from yesterday. . ."

Gorvins hauled back and landed a blow with his closed fist to Ferby's cheek. She fell back, hard, and sat there holding her face and screaming in pain. The boys came out on the porch to see what the ruckus was about.

"I'm not talkin' about the milk. How dare you bring shame on this family."

Gorvins continued to darken with rage. Ferby still gasped in pain from the punch and her eye was swelling shut, making it difficult to see. She barely processed what Gorvins said.

"Who's the father, you little whore? Who you been steppin' out with?"

"N-n-nobody! What are you talkin' about?"

"Don't pretend you didn't know you was expectin'!" Gorvins stalked towards her. "Who—is—he?"

Ferby sobbed, her breath hiccupping. She felt the sticky wetness of the milk all over her body and she started to rock.

"I-I-I don't know. I don't know, Daddy, I swear I don't know! Please don't hit me again. I don't know!" A string of blood and spit dribbled from the side of her mouth.

Gorvins stood there looking at his daughter, his body trembling with rage.

Shade stepped down from the porch, keeping out of reach of his father.

"Well, I heard she was 'round that darkie, Daddy." He said. "I bet she let him have a poke at her."

Gorvins turned slowly and looked at Shade, his eyes basilisk-like, and Shade thought maybe he'd gone too far. Maybe he should have kept quiet, since the old man was just as likely to go off on him.

Ferby howled from the ground where she sat rocking, "No! No! That ain't true! H'aint true! He never touched me!"

Gorvins turned back to her.

"Shut up, you little slut! Shut your lyin' mouth! Time will tell if that be the truth. When you squirt your little bastard out into the world, time will tell."

With that, he stomped back into the house, leaving Ferby in a puddle of milk and shame.

Gorvins kept her locked in her room for the remainder of her lying in. Ferby sat in a straight-back chair looking out the small window, her gaze vacant and empty. Her mind focused not on the woods outside her window, but on the swirling pool where she had spent so much time. Her other brothers tried to intervene and get her to the local midwife, but to no avail. She heard their angry voices from below.

"Daddy, you gots to get her to Granny Wilson. We can't handle this ourselves!"

Gorvins stony voice answered back, "She brought shame down on us and I'll not have anyone else involved."

"Daddy, she ain't a cow! She don't know what to do, she ain't had a baby before."

"No. That's my last word on it."

Ferby spent those last weeks in her room. When her water broke, she barely knew what was happening. She looked beneath her chair at the spreading pool of fluid with surprise. The first contractions she had passed off as a stomachache.

As the contractions grew stronger, she paced the floor, breathing heavily and feeling the sweat bead on her forehead. Eventually the pain became so severe she began beating the door.

"Let me out! Let me out! I'm dreadful sick—let me out—please!" She screamed but no one came.

She wanted to bolt off running like a bloated sheep into the woods—run and leave the dreadful agony behind her. She beat on the door until her knuckles bled and after her pain was so great she could not form words, she screamed. She was not sure how long this went on. Time seemed to slow down and what took hours seemed to Ferby like years.

Finally, she collapsed on the floor, panting. When the baby came out, Ferby looked at it, small and still on the floor with its cord connecting it to her. It jerked to life with a puling wail when she picked it up and Ferby brought the little creature to her breast and sat there with it, nursing.

Her father and brothers found her in the middle of a pool of afterbirth, blood and fluid. The infant was latched onto her like a hungry leech. Gorvins came forward and tore the umbilical cord apart.

"Get some strong iodine."

The men cleaned the dreadful mess, working much as they would if a cow had calved in the barn in their absence. They took care of Ferby as best they could. She let them, and said nothing. She stared at the baby wailing on her bed where the men left it, like a growth they had removed.

"Go clean yourself up," Gorvins said.

Ferby hobbled to the door and looked back at the men cleaning off the baby. She did as she was told and went out to the springhouse and cleaned all the blood and birth fluids off. She was sick tired and hurting to the point nothing seemed to make sense.

When she made her way back to the house, Gorvins and her brothers were in the kitchen with the baby wrapped in a towel.

"Guess we know who the father is, now," Shade said.

Ferby examined the baby. He was an angry red, like most newborns and had a fuzz of coal black hair. His eyes slanted and a port wine birthmark spread over half his face and down his neck.

Her brothers were silent and grim looking.

"Look Daddy, it's the mark of Cain. That baby done been marked, it has." Shade looked from Ferby to Gorvins, his squinty eyes like a crow's.

Gorvins took the infant and pressed him into Ferby's arms. "I reckon your brother has the right of it," he said.

Ferby looked down at the baby and held him close to her. She looked at his little face and touched the mark.

"No—no—it's a stain. It's just a stain. Give me a cloth, I'll get it off." She wet her finger with saliva and started to rub the birthmark. She smiled shakily, "See, h'its coming off. Really it is!"

Two of her brothers turned away. As she continued to rub the baby's face, the infant started howling.

Gorvins reached a weathered hand over, grasped hers and drew it away from the child.

"Stop it. You can't rub that mark off. It's God's mark of your sin."

She teared up as she searched her brothers' and father's faces. She shook her head and grasped the infant tighter. She backed away from them, shaking her head.

"No. No-no-no-no-no."

She kept backing up until she was pressed against the door. The baby wailed as she held him too closely.

"You're wrong! It's just a stain. It'll wash off. God didn't mark my baby! It's not the mark of Cain! It's not."

Ferby pulled the door open and bolted with the infant out of the house. She ran blindly, ignoring her pain and tiredness. She ran with her baby as fast as she could, away from there.

She heard her father holler out the door, "Ferby! You get back here, now!"

Ferby ignored him. She ran through the woods with the child until she came to her special spot—the spot where she lost herself in the glinting water. The spot where you had to be careful not to step those six inches to the right, or you would plunge to your neck in the frigid, dark water.

Ferby took her baby and misstepped, entirely on purpose. The swirling waters where God whispered would remove the stain. For she was sure, it was a stain and not a mark. Mr. Hooper hadn't touched her, but Shade surely had. So the birthmark had to be a stain that God would remove it in this holy place.

She plunged to her neck with the babe and held him under the water, rubbing the stain, trying to erase the mark. She was not sure when the baby stopped breathing, but when she knew he was not drawing breath, she held him close, rocked his lifeless little body and sang, tunelessly, to him.

"It were just a stain. Just a little stain. God will make it right. You'll see." She kissed his tiny forehead and laid him on the big rock in the middle of the creek, like an offering.

Ferby wandered off, disappearing into the wood like a wild thing. Like the child she once was and was no longer. She faded into the mountain laurel like a ghost, humming a mournful lullaby. No one ever saw her on the mountain after that.

They say the Gorvins' buried that baby under the threshold of a cabin they built. They say, at night when the wind howls through the hollers like a red-tailed hawk stalking a rabbit, you can hear a baby crying.

No one swims at that spot on the creek. They say that deep, cold spot will suck the life from you and darkness lurks there like a panther in the woods. They say under the sound of the rushing waters you can just hear a lullaby being softly sung.

That's why they call it the Dark Hole.

Rosanne Griffeth lives on the verge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and spends her time writing, documenting Appalachian culture and raising goats. Her work has been published by Mslexia, Plain Spoke, Now and Then, Pank, Night Train, Keyhole Magazine and Smokelong Quarterly among other places. She is the blogger behind The Smokey Mountain Breakdown.

William Gay Interviewed at the Oxford American

2009-11-09T21:29:00.001-05:00

William Gay has carved for himself an enduring position in the modern Southern literary landscape, and the echoes of his work have reverberated far beyond the red clay hills surrounding his home in Hohenwald, Tennessee. The South of his books is often dark and violent, yet thankful for such simple sights as a hayfield at dusk filled with fireflies, or a demure feminine smile. In a 2000 NEW YORK TIMES book review, fellow Southerner Tony Earley wrote, “At his best, Gay writes with the wisdom and patience of a man who has witnessed hard times and learned that panic or hedging won’t make better times come any sooner; he looks upon beauty and violence with equal measure and makes an accurate accounting of how much of each the human heart contains.”

Gay has published three novels: THE LONG HOME, PROVINCES OF NIGHT, and TWILIGHT, as well as a collection of short stories called I HATE TO SEE THAT EVENING SUN GO DOWN, with a new novel, THE LOST COUNTRY, forthcoming. Recently, we traveled to Hohenwald to interview the author in the rural area of Tennessee that forms the backdrop of his stories. We found him there, tucked away in the misty hills where many of his characters have been lost and never heard from again, in his hopelessly idyllic log home. Inside, we sipped coffee and listened as he spoke candidly of his life and his work on a drizzly, cold day that lent itself to the unwinding of old Tennessee mysteries.

THE OXFORD AMERICAN: You’ve got a novel coming out soon. Can you tell us a little about it?

WILLIAM GAY: Yeah. It’s called THE LOST COUNTRY. It’s sort of a road novel, about a guy named Dewey Edgewater who’s just been discharged from the Navy and he’s hitchhiking back from California to Tennessee. The idea is like a place you can’t get back to, like youth or innocence, and Edgewater’s trying to get back to his life before he lost his innocence and became more worldly. And it’s about a one-armed con man—there used to be these con men that went around the South. They had these ways of ripping people off. When I was a kid this guy came through, and he was spraying barn roofs. And my grandfather’s barn leaked real bad, so he hired this guy. He told him that it was guaranteed to stop all leaks. So my grandfather came up with the money and paid the guy to spray the roof, but it was just like a mixture of black oil and diesel fuel or something. He just sprayed it and got the money and split, and then when it rained, it rained inside as well as outside, just like it did before. But that’s what the guy did for a living. There were people who sold Bibles. They had your name printed in a Bible and would tell you that two or three payments had been paid on it, you know, but they read the obituary notices in the paper, they knew when somebody had died. And then if it was a middle-class person, somebody with a little money, they would show up with a Bible that had their name stamped in it from the deceased person. And that person would want to own that Bible, you know, because her husband or whoever had already paid some on it for her. But it was just a cheap Bible.

The con man [in THE LOST COUNTRY], Roosterfish, is a guy like that.

A Writer’s Apprenticeship: Larry Brown – Part II of VIII

2009-11-09T15:18:00.000-05:00

Hi--here's a quick link to the next Larry Brown post on Darnell Arnoult's blog.

More from Fried Chicken later on this week. We're digging out from book boxes right now.

Larry Brown News

2009-11-04T00:08:00.000-05:00

I post it when I have it, folks. And as I'm right in the middle of moving sixty-five cases of books, along with the unimportant stuff, this is likely all you'll get out of me this week, so pay attention to Darnell Arnoult at Dancing with the Gorilla.

Larry Brown (July 9, 1951 – November 24, 2001) is one of the most important contemporary Southern writers, and he is also one of the most important American writers. Brown’s work often focuses on the rural and small-town working class and those members of society who haven’t quite got their toe hold, or they’ve had it and lost it. He writes about men, women, and children struggling toward something better than what they have. His stories are real, they are gritty, and some would say they are gothic. I say they’re damn good, and through his work, Larry Brown has become one of my best teachers. You’ll hear more about Brown’s work in each installment this month.

Brown left this world with a lot of stories unwritten, but he also left a legacy of instruction any writer would be smart to study. Larry Brown has said a writer signs on for an apprenticeship, and no one knows how long his or her apprenticeship will last. Brown also once said he shot and burned an early novel and would have hung it if he could have figured out how to do it. Yet he learned enough from the writing of that novel to do a better job writing the next novel. Barry Hannah says in the introduction to Brown’s last novel, Miracle of Catfish, that when Brown showed him the short story “Facing the Music” Hannah was foolish enough to think Brown had peaked. Larry Brown was just getting his engine warm.

It strikes me that people may be interested, too, in an introductory essay to Night Train I wrote some years ago, an essay that concerns Larry Brown.

More next week, people, when I come up for air.

Norma White Dead

2009-10-26T13:27:00.000-04:00

Sad news. Thanks to Kevin Stewart off Facebook for the link. Her husband of course, was The Dancing Outlaw, Jesco White.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- In a West Virginia-produced film about them, Jesco "The Dancing Outlaw" White and his wife Norma J. White gave the world a glimpse into their unusual lives. Norma White, 70, died in Charleston Thursday after suffering from a terminal illness.

Filmmaker Jacob Young helped bring Jesco to the attention of a national audience when Young created his "Different Drummer" series for Public Television.

In the film, the couple compared themselves to Elvis and Priscilla Presley. They said their relationship had its rough patches, but Norma White was always in love with the man who became a cult phenomenon.

Some videos, in case you don't know of Jesco and Norma White.

Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mothers

2009-10-23T12:49:00.002-04:00

Still: Literature of the Mountain South

2009-10-20T10:41:00.000-04:00

Here's a magazine and a notion that's sure to become a favorite. Celebrate the inaugural issue of Still, edited by Silas House (fiction) Marianne Worthington (poetry) and Jason Howard (nonfiction). From their 'about the name' page:

About our name . . .

To be a writer is to learn how to be still.

The moonshine still is one of the stereotypical images of Appalachia.

As a culture, Appalachia has been told for decades that it is disappearing. We are still here, proud and strong as ever.

James Still, author of River of Earth, The Wolfpen Poems, and many other great works, is the grandfather of modern Appalachian literature and has inspired us all.

Just at a glance, this one's going to require your attention with every new issue.

Leveling Appalachia

2009-10-18T11:56:00.003-04:00

Link courtesy of Endless Emendation.

During the last two decades, mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia has destroyed or severely damaged more than a million acres of forest and buried nearly 2,000 miles of streams. Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining, a video report produced by Yale Environment 360 in collaboration with MediaStorm, focuses on the environmental and social impacts of this practice and examines the long-term effects on the region’s forests and waterways.

At a time when the Obama administration is reviewing mining permit applications throughout West Virginia and three other states, this video offers a first-hand look at mountaintop removal and what is at stake for Appalachia’s environment and its people.

Rosanne Griffeth's Errid and Delilah, fiction

2009-10-09T15:12:00.000-04:00

Some nights, running his rig down Highway 25 through Hot Springs, Errid would go past the brown brick building. He'd glance to see if any lights glowed in the three trailers out back, like maybe she still worked there. Maybe she worked there right now, her black nylon slip sticking to her belly and her bra digging a rash into her flesh in the summer heat. Maybe she turned her back to some stranger, tucked a strand of limp blond hair behind her ear and said over her shoulder, "Hey Mister, can you give me a hand and unzip me?"

She'd done that the night he met her, stepping out of the pool of her dress and kicking it away from the tangle of their feet. She stroked his sideburns, mussed his hair and when she touched the hump on his back, he'd flinched. He could still hear her crooning, "Shhhh, shhhh," low and smiling, like she comforted a hurt child. Sometimes he'd think of that and have to pull over.

She'd told him they called her Delilah, a biblical name, when she sidled up to him that night. His truck had blown a gasket and he pulled over at the little juke joint. Back in the fifties, it had been a beauty spot, one of those one-level riverside motels. The strip of rooms burnt down long ago and they'd replaced them with trailers.

Errid placed a hundred-dollar bill down on the bar and asked the bartender, "Can you break this for me?"

She knocked her drink back, slapped the lipstick-jeweled glass down and said, "Honey, he can't, but I probably got change back in my room if you want to follow me."

He trailed after the sway of her hips, the soft groove in the small of her back. He left that hundred-dollar bill behind in the beat up trailer and something else, something he couldn't lay a finger on it was so sweet and heartachey.

That's why he went back. He thought maybe he'd find that thing he left there. The thing that kept him up at night thinking about her and how she smelled like cigarettes and Jean Nate. He took another hundred-dollar bill, crumpled in his big hand.

Errid blinked into the fluorescent light. Change had come to the little brown house. Folding chairs now lined up facing the bar where a flame-eyed preacher man stood, screaming the word of God. She sat in the second row. He could tell it was her by round slope of her shoulders and the line of her spine.

"Welcome, Brother, welcome!" The preacher man's gaze cut through Errid and people turned to stare. She looked at him, cutting her eyes over her shoulder. He imagined she whispered, "Hey Mister. . ."

The hundred-dollar bill was hot, wet and small in his fist. He took a seat and when the service went on and everyone's eyes faced forward, she continued to look at him. "I've come back for you," he thought to her, like she could pick the notion from the dust in his eyes.

Her lips pursed and she gave a little shake of her head, settling back in her seat. Errid reached to touch her, but pulled back, figuring he had her answer.

The preacher passed a chipped dinner plate around and Errid dropped the soggy bill onto it. He slipped out of the place, unseen, unheard and drove off into the night where the road still murmured her name.

Rosanne Griffeth lives on the verge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and spends her time writing, documenting Appalachian culture and raising goats. Her work has been published by Mslexia, Plain Spoke, Now and Then, Pank, Night Train, Keyhole Magazine and Smokelong Quarterly among other places. She is the blogger behind The Smokey Mountain Breakdown.

Karl Koweski's Holly Go Darkly, fiction

2009-10-05T12:33:00.002-04:00

When I cup my palm against my mouth I can smell her on me. A not unpleasant odor that instills a desire for more. I stand in the bathroom of an almost expensive hotel. There’s enough light bulbs above the mirror to illuminate a Hollywood movie. I can feel my self-esteem puddling at my toes, seeing the bathroom spotlights emblazon my scalp through the sparsity of mousy brown hair.

The water continues to gush and swirl down the drain. The toiletries loosely gathered around the sink belong solely to Holly. A bottle of eyeliner represents her make-up. There’s a lone white tooth brush, bristles like an unmown lawn. I scrub my face with her bar of pink soap, it’s brand name worn away with use.

I have to go home soon. Never have I been more aware of time than during the last month. The warm taffy expansion of days leading to last night. The quick rubberband snap of our night together.

I have to go soon. And I can’t kiss my wife smelling like Holly. Returning home freshly showered won’t alleviate suspicion, either. Sera likely already suspects. I probably gave myself away the moment I took the collection of Leonard Cohen poetry off my book shelf.

Holly enters, except that’s not quite the right way to describe what she does or how she does it. Holly doesn’t enter a room; she expands into it, fills the room from wall to wall like a burst of light irradiating the corners and making one uncomfortably aware of one’s flaws.

I could have written this paragraph before I met her in the flesh, though, so badly did I want to believe she was more than just a woman, no less clueless than I. Don’t make me out to be more than I am, she warned early on, when the extent of our affair was the exchange of instant messages. I can never be what you want.

She trails her finger across my sweat damp back as she passes; her unpainted fingernails softly carves along the curvature of my spine. I watch her through the mirror. Her nudity such a novelty to me. I want it always to be this way. I want to memorize every inch of her pale skin. I want to map her every anatomical angle, every landmark blemish. I want to still know surprise every time I unwrap her.

I want the ability to express these thoughts without coming across like an utter fool.

Holly sits down and begins pissing.

“You don’t mind, do you?”

“Of course not.” Eight years of marriage, I’ve always managed to avoid seeing Sera on the toilet.

“In Japan the women are very self conscious about pissing within earshot of anyone else. A lot of restrooms have speaker boxes where you push the button and it makes a flushing sound so you can piss, covertly. I never used it. I think it’s kinda erotic, the sound of urine hitting water. Especially if it makes someone else uncomfortable.”

“It doesn’t make me uncomfortable.”

She wipes and flushes. “I was talking people in general, Vic.” She kisses me on the corner of my mouth as she leaves. Her exit contracts the room. Her absence threatens an implosion.

“You still smell like me,” she calls from the bed.

Though Tennessee born of German/Irish ancestry, six years of living in Fukuoka, Japan has given her English an odd, slightly slurred accent that makes me want to embrace her every time she speaks.

I dry off my face with the anonymous white towel. I lift the toilet seat, flush, and begin pissing.

Holly lies on the bed, arms stretched out, breasts lolling, legs slightly open, left leg bent at the knee. She said she’s gained weight since she arrived Stateside, but I don’t see it. If I had a canvas and oils and even a modicum of talent and training I could paint a masterpiece of her. As it is, the last thing I painted, a wolf in water colors, garnered a C+ from my eighth grade art teacher.

My clothes are draped over the unassuming chair. She catches my glance.

“You have to go already?” Her voice is alarmingly devoid of emotion.

I don’t look at the clock. “No. I have time.”

“Lay down with me.”

I slide into bed beside her. The sheets, moist from our recent love-making clings to my skin as we reposition ourselves. I lay on my back, Holly’s head resting on my shoulder, my hand dipping right into her black, shoulder-length hair, brushing the thick strands back from her temple. I’m aware of her pubic hair stubble sandpapering my hip, her erect nipples brushing my skin with every slight movement.

Her heart beats against my ribcage. When was the last time I felt Sera’s heart beat? When was the last time I did anything other than monitor the regularity of her breathing, ensuring her sleep was deep enough for me to escape our bed into the false life provided by my computer?

Holly, my melancholy angel, her life underscored with disillusionment and advanced disappointment. In my eyes, she wears this sadness, beautifully. I’ve always believed a tight smile and downcast eyes held more radiance than the bleached smiles and sparkling eyes of run-of-the-mill glamour queens.

The guttering candle light provided by the Home Interior candles Holly brought casts miniature St. Elmo's fires across the ceiling and walls. Maybe she’s wondering what I’m thinking. And if she asks I’ll say I’m not thinking of anything at all, just basking in the moment. But she’s never shown an interest in my thoughts.

"How much longer can you stay?” She asks.

"Until the hour and minute hand meet.”

Her lips draw into a smile against my chest. It’s an inside joke involving Edgar Allan Poe’s story “A Predicament”. We discovered early on in our get-to-know-you phase a mutual love of literature and a mutual admiration for Poe’s canon. We’d occasionally read each other passages on voice chat.

Holly’s favorite paragraph involved the female protagonist from the Poe story, her head caught between the hour and minute hand of a clock tower. The vise-like pressure increases minutely until, first, on eyeball pops out of its socket. Its ocular brother in the body politic watches the dislodged orb roll into the gutter before swiftly joining it.

First hearing Poe’s words from Holly’s lips, I entertained the possibility I could become more emotionally invested in her than we agreed at the outset to allow ourselves. We even scoffed at the notion of an internet love affair.

There’s no computers, no distances of DSL cable, separating us, now. Why should the old rules apply?

I kiss the top of her head and play with the ends of her hair. From those dark follicles, my fingers trace along her collarbone up the hollow of her throat. I draw her chin up until our lips brush. My eyes adjust to the darkness in her eyes.

And I know that I’m a liar. I don’t want her to remain emotionally aloof. I want her to love me. I want the victory such emotional attachment entails. I want to wear her love like a shiny medal on the lapel of my bad ass leather jacket. I want the entire world (excluding my wife and everyone associated with my wife) to know Holly belongs to me. Her love for me validating my love for her.

But she doesn’t love me. My thoughts turn to her more than her thoughts include me.

“You’re so tense,” she whispers, her hands in motion, fingers roaming my chest and abdomen, searching for weak points in the armor of my flesh. I’m weak all over.

“Lot on my mind, I guess.”

“Guilt?”

“I don’t feel guilt.”

“Why not? It’s an interesting sensation. Kinda like anticipation without all the giddiness.”

My thumb presses against the divot in her chin that she hates but I love.

“Holly, I love you.”

The words escape. Immediately, I want to apologize. My little ineffectual defense mechanism. She hates those two meaningless bullshit words. I’m sorry.

When she answers, her voice continues its trend of emotional vacuity. “We agreed from the beginning this wasn’t going to be a ‘love’ thing.”

“I’m sorry.” The words hang there. Holly draws away from me. “No, wait, Holly. I’m not sorry.”

“You can’t love me. I don’t love you.”

“Don’t you feel anything about me?”

She crouches on the edge of the bed, cat-like. Her eyes. I stare into her eyes, hoping for a flash of emotion, anything. Her dark eyes like vortexes suck the light from the room.

I can’t hold her gaze. My eyes drop down to her lips. So long I’ve fantasized kissing those lips. The reality of her lips pressed against mine is worth this. Her mouth that I’ve claimed is not given to smiles. I’m such a liar. She smiles all the time. She’s quick to laugh. She’s not my melancholy angel. Strange I should fictionalize her in such a way.

She’s not smiling at the moment.

“What do you want me to say, Vic?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

“No, nothing, never mind. What do you want me to fucking say? That you’re my number one man?”

“I don’t categorize people numerically. Guess again.”

“Oh, listen to you. How do you categorize people? By whether I fuck them or not? You’re the one always asking who I’m talking to. Always afraid you’re gonna get knocked out of the saddle.”

She’s off the bed and gathering her clothes. The boring white panties. The boring white bra. The jeans she has such a difficult time finding at the stores because her legs are so stubby and her ass is so wide. The shapeless blouse with the dollar store floral print she claims is of African design.

“I’m not asking you to marry me. I’m happy. I’m happy with you. So I tell you I love you. So what? I know you don’t love me. I know I like you more than you like me. You remind me this every fucking day. Or at least every day you’re gracious enough to make time in your busy schedule to speak to me.”

I keep talking as she keeps getting dressed. If there’s a combination of words that will make her stop, get undressed, lay back in this rented bed and forgive me; I’d spit in my mother’s face for a hint at the sequence of words.

Holly grabs her purse and the hotel key.

“How dare you ask me if I feel anything for you? I’m here, aren’t I?”

“I’m sorry, Holly. I didn’t mean...”

“Go home to your wife, Vic. Tell her you love her.”

She leaves the room the way she entered--furtively, like a thief.

It’s all I can do to keep myself from stepping, naked, into the hotel corridor and calling her name. I stare at the phone like an anchor dropped on the table. I could call her cell phone. It’d be long distance. What could I say?

I lay back down on the bed. Her smells are everywhere. I close my eyes and inhale.

Karl Koweski is a displaced Chicagoan now living on top of a mountain in Alabama. His chapbook of smut, Low Life, will be available within the month from www.zygoteinmycoffee.com. His poetry chap, Diminishing Returns, is available at www.sunnyoutside.com. He writes the monthly column, "Observations of a Dumb Polack", at Zygote.

Trailer Park Fragments by David Ensminger

2009-09-28T14:22:00.000-04:00

Mike Young published this e-book, Trailer Park Fragments: A Place called Whispering Lanes, through his Magic Helicopter Press. I urge you to check it out. I was going to say it gives you a perspective on trailer parks you maybe haven't seen before but that's horseshit. It just affects me, who has never lived in a trailer park but has known a few. It's an impressionistic set of pieces I think you'll enjoy-- proems, not prose poems--because if anything's linear here, it seems accidental. Great stuff at HTMLGIANT. Here's a taste:

In the longness of summers
in the pool with the fake green glow,
the sloughed off burnt skin,
and the tinge of chlorine ...

on the surprisingly smooth body
flying down the slide, and the under-
sized buoys bobbing like plastic eggs...
in the fence pressed together like uneasy
fabric, in the fresh face free of makeup,
in the swim cap and lone tree...
I dramatized a struggle
for human definition, a medicine show
of the mind ...

I used to sleep in the hallway
with the light on. Or in my sister's
pink bedroom, next to the drawer
with marijuana and Playgirls, between
the David Bowie poster and the
six inch harlequin doll from JCPenney.

Rural Brain Drain

2009-09-24T20:06:00.003-04:00

I left, too. They're talking about people like me, in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

By Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas

What is going on in small-town America? The nation's mythology of small towns comes to us straight from the The Music Man's set designers. Many Americans think about flyover country or Red America only during the culture war's skirmishes or campaign season. Most of the time, the rural crisis takes a back seat to more visible big-city troubles. So while there is a veritable academic industry devoted to chronicling urban decline, small towns' struggles are off the grid.

And yet, upon close inspection, the rural and urban downturns have much in common, even though conventional wisdom casts the small town as embodiment of all that is right with America and the inner city as all that is wrong with it.

The Harvard University sociologist William Julius Wilson famously describes how deindustrialization, joblessness, middle-class flight, depopulation, and global market shifts gave rise to the urban hyper-ghettos of the 1970s, and the same forces are now afflicting the nation's countryside. The differences are just in the details. In urban centers, young men with NBA jerseys sling dime bags from vacant buildings, while in small towns, drug dealers wearing Nascar T-shirts, living in trailer parks, sell and use meth. Young girls in the countryside who become mothers before finishing high school share stories of lost adolescence and despair that differ little from the ones their urban sisters might tell.

In both settings, there is no shortage of guns, although in North Philadelphia's Badlands or Chicago's South Side those guns might be concealed and illegal, while in small towns guns hang on display in polished oak cabinets in the sitting room. Residents of rural America are more likely to be poor and uninsured than their counterparts in metropolitan areas, typically earning 80 percent what suburban and urban workers do.

The most dramatic evidence of the rural meltdown has been the hollowing out—that is, losing the most talented young people at precisely the same time that changes in farming and industry have transformed the landscape for those who stay. This so-called rural "brain drain" isn't a new phenomenon, but by the 21st century the shortage of young people has reached a tipping point, and its consequences are more severe now than ever before. Simply put, many small towns are mere years away from extinction, while others limp along in a weakened and disabled state.

In just over two decades, more than 700 rural counties, from the Plains to the Texas Panhandle through to Appalachia, lost 10 percent or more of their population. Nationally, there are more deaths than births in one of two rural counties. Though the hollowing-out process feeds off the recession, the problem predates, and indeed, presaged many of the nation's current economic woes. But despite the seriousness of the hollowing-out process, we believe that, with a plan and a vision, many small towns can play a key role in the nation's recovery.

Silas House and Ben Sollee Read and Sing

2009-09-23T14:47:00.000-04:00

Two Poems by D. E. Oprava

2009-09-21T14:23:00.002-04:00

DEEP VIDALIA DIRT

Tomorrow he’ll be back at work cleaning rigs
on a truck-stop tarmac off highway forty-one, sucking
up diesel and putting more sweat, less love
in the hub caps that need to gleam brighter
than a southern sun. He’s had his eye on a girl
working in the diner, Melissa smiles out through
the plate-glass window as he hums a tune every
man here seems to know and at night
he’ll be on the porch playing guitar listening
to cicadas ring as others inside sing, music
seems to come from the very air in this place,
and he grins.

Getting off the blacktop for a break she winks
at him, her smile sweet as a Vidalia you can
eat raw like an apple, he grabs the nearest table
and ponders the peach or pecan pie with a glass
of orange coke to wash the choke of dust and exhaust
from his mind sometimes lost to the heat and the fierce
reverie he feels for home.

GOD'S DINER

Leaving a home
where she knows everyone
and they know her, it's the last
day the daughter
of the restaurant owner
has to mop the floor,
the place downtown,
service with a smile is always required
over ice cream sundaes
or thick cheeseburgers,
he’s a slick man
who built his business round
the Sunday morning church-going
crowd, come eleven o’clock every-
thing’s clean and right for the biblical
flood of hungry and pious ready
with conscience-clean-slates
to dig in to sin all over again,
a couple in the corner eye food
just landed on their tabletop,
they stop, clasp hands close over
the chili-cheese dogs, and pray.

D.E. Oprava writes, because he has to. He is terrified of what will happen otherwise. It makes him prolific. He has been in over eighty journals online and in print and his first full-length book of poems VS. was released in October 2008 by Erbacce Press. He is also the founding editor of the small poetry and prose press, Grievous Jones. When he isn’t writing he is battling against his raging sobriety and trying to live up to the high moral expectations of husbandhood, fatherhood, and humanhood. Not necessarily in that order and not necessarily succeeding.

You can find him at www.deoprava.com

Down by the Creek, fiction by M.E. Parker

2009-09-16T16:40:00.002-04:00

Stove up from working the harvest, Jessie hobbled up the porch steps holding his hand out for Chester. “Ches,” he called. The old bloodhound, “nothing but ears and ribs” snoozing in the shape of a question mark, usually stumbled up from his spot on a mildewed tarp behind a short-block motor when he heard Jessie coming. “Where are you boy?”

At fourteen, Chester wasn’t chasing rabbits anymore, but he still enjoyed a scratch behind the ears every evening. When Chester didn’t stir, Jessie gave him a soft kick to the ribs. A jolt that should have sent the dog scrambling to his feet with a snort did nothing more than scatter a family of flies making a meal out of his left ear. “Ches,” Jessie called, giving him a swat across the hindquarters without even a twitch from Chester.

Jessie shook his head and thumped a smoldering cigarette butt into the yard. “Well, I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later,” he said with a misty eye toward the south field, bending down to give Chester a scratch on the belly. “Come on, Boy. Let’s go.”

Jessie slipped his hand through Chester’s collar and hoisted him into his arms, planting a foot in Chester’s water bowl as they tumbled down the steps together into a heap at the bottom, Chester, Jessie, and the smell of a wet sack of potatoes left out in the sun. “God, you stink, Chester.” And as he had done his entire life, Chester simply listened to Jessie. He didn’t fire back with an insult or scream at him to fix the roof.

Jessie reached for a leash on the clothesline post, a symbolic gesture of one last walk, something they hadn’t done in years, and hooked it to the clasp on Chester’s collar. Then he made right the bloodhound’s ears that had turned inside out, straightened his tail, and stepped off onto the grass.

Along a worn patch of earth from the porch to the gate, what Jessie’s dad referred to as “a po’ man’s sidewalk,” Jessie tugged Chester over to Jessie Jr.’s faded red wagon, across an ant bed, and through a picket gate that clung to the fence by a lone pair of screws on a single hinge.

“Where you going? It’s almost time for supper.” Martha yelled from the porch.

“Me and Chester was going down to the creek.” Jessie hoisted the dog into the wagon.

“What’s wrong with that dog?”

After a moment, Jessie replied with a quiver in his voice. “Well, he’s dead, I reckon.”

“You mean to tell me you have a dead dog in Jessie Jr.’s wagon?”

“Jessie Jr.’s don’t use this old thing no more. Besides, Chester always liked ridin’ around in it.”

Jessie looked at the ground and gave the wagon a tug, his wife a distant memory on the porch as the two old friends entered the dirt path by the gate.

The wagon wheels slid across a muddy rut left by the pickup Jessie Jr. was using to learn how to drive. Jessie pulled the wagon up to the passenger side door and jerked it open the in search of something he could use to dig a hole. “Where’s that shovel?” He groped under the seat, but, instead of the spade, his hands landed on a half-full bottle of Old Granddad Kentucky Bourbon sandwiched between Jessie Jr.’s .22-caliber rifle and a pair of old gym shorts.

“What’s that boy been up to, Ches?”

Jessie held the bottle up to have a better look. The cap twisted off with a snap. He passed the open bottle under his nose for a whiff of whatever it was his son had put in that empty whiskey bottle, kerosene maybe, or extra gas in case of an emergency, but as Jessie’s lungs filled with the sweet, familiar aroma of Old Granddad Bourbon, he closed his eyes.

More than five years ago, the last time the sheriff’s department came to break up a fight between Jessie and his wife, he had sworn off Old Granddad for good. Not because he wanted to, or even because his wife wanted him to, but because Sheriff Boyles, an old high school friend who leaned on Old Granddad as much as Jessie, had a long “come to Jesus” with him before he threw Jessie in jail to sober up.

“Well, if you really do love her,” Sheriff Boyles had said, “do her a favor and lighten up on her a bit. That woman ain’t five feet tall. I enjoy a drink as much as the next man, but you got to control yourself, Jessie. You almost killed her this time.”

Jessie had only responded with a nod through half-open eyes.

“Martha’s a good woman. She’s a good wife and mom. You did all right with her. And if I get another call out to your place for anything other than a cookout, you’re going away for a long time.” Sheriff Boyles had given Jessie the last warning he would need before his long road to recovery began.

Jessie sniffed the open bottle again. Then he eyed his only friend, Chester, slung out on that wagon in a less than dignified manner and took a swig from the bottle. The cool burn of Old Granddad stung his throat. The bottle popped off his lips. He looked over his shoulder toward the house to make sure no one had seen him. His neighbor, Johnny, was plowing across the pasture, but unless he had a pair of binoculars handy, he wouldn’t have seen anything. Jessie put the bottle to his mouth a second time.

The wagon wheels slid in and out of plowed furrows along the fence as they made their way to the creek. Jessie glanced at Chester, then at the bottle hanging in his other hand, and took a drink. The fire returned to Jessie’s eyes before he reached the Johnson place, adjacent to his south field. Since he had given up Old Granddad and straightened out his life, Jessie had made a habit out of attending church with Martha nearly every Sunday. He recalled the pastor telling him one time, a joke he presumed, though Pastor’s jokes were anything but funny. “Dog’s don’t go to heaven,” he had said. “They don’t have to. A dog’s life is heaven.” Jessie could relate with that. He wouldn’t have minded living Chester’s life. With the exception of a stray bullet from Johnny’s rifle on a hunting trip, Chester had it pretty good.

The heel of Jessie’s boot twisted his cigarette butt into the soil by a fence post as he pulled Chester down the draw to the creek bank. He tipped up the bottle again for another quick visit with Old Granddad and stumbled over a driftwood log. A gust of wind plucked the green ball cap from his head, and the wagon wheel left a streak of mud over the faded feed logo above the bill.

With his shovel in one hand and bottle in the other, Jessie stood by the creek for nearly ten minutes, staring at the muddy, almost stagnant, water, before he turned back around to Chester and flipped the dog onto the mud by a crooked oak tree.

Two red dice popped off Chester’s collar when the dog’s body hit the ground. “I guess you’re not feelin’ too lucky today, Boy?” On the same day he found Chester, Jessie had the luckiest run he ever had at a craps table, the reason he outfitted Chester’s collar with a pair of dice to commemorate the occasion. He stumbled back to pick up the dice from the ground but fell flat on his face into a puddle of red mud, the bottle raised high in his free hand to keep it from spilling.

After staggering to his feet, Jessie swatted the mud off his cap and held it to his chest to offer Chester a proper eulogy. “You was always a pretty good dog. I’m sure gonna miss ya, Boy.”

Jessie knocked back another swig. “I think this might be your fault, Chester. Last five years I’ve been a sober, God-fearing man--a pillar in the community.” He glared at his dog, halfway expecting him to laugh.

“You go an’ die--and now look at me.” He leaned up against the tree, grinning the trademark Jessie Standman thin grin as he stroked his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. A cigarette dangled by half a lip as began to dig.

“I don’t know if the pastor’s right about dog’s not needin’ to go to heaven, but if there ever was one that should, it’s you, Chester.” The dog’s body, now caked with mud, rolled into the hole with a plop.

“I almost wish I was in that hole instead of you.” He bowed his head in remembrance of his old friend, and for the life he lead before he made his changes. He had kept so many secrets, lies that add a little extra weight every year until they become too heavy to carry alone. They were the kind of things that some men might brag about, others would pray about, and some might decide to cash in their chips and let the hereafter sort it out. In that regard, Chester had served him well--a sounding board for all of Jessie’s indiscretions. He had been Jessie’s confessionary priest, and on some occasions, his accomplice.

“Sleep with a woman,” Jessie’s daddy once advised him after a long spell of drinking. “Hell, maybe even marry one, but don’t trust one. Put your faith in your dog. It don’t never matter what you tell your dog, he’ll take it with him to his grave.” Jessie had taken his dad’s advice to heart. Marrying Martha had given him three children and a hot meal every evening around six. Trusting Chester had enabled him to sleep at night with the knowledge that his secrets were safe. His dad’s dog, Leftie, lived to be nearly fifteen. Jessie could only imagine what Lefty lugged to his grave. Lefty was a one-eyed Border collie with no depth perception herding livestock “in a damn circle, a good for nothing pain in the ass,” Jessie’s dad liked to say, but when no one else was around, Jessie remembered seeing his pop dote over that dog, baby-talking him and such like a little girl with a doll. A couple of days before Jessie’s tenth birthday, his pop grabbed the rifle and tugged Lefty around to the back of the barn to end his suffering. “Damn dog can’t even find his food bowl no more,” his dad had said. That was the only time Jessie could remember ever seeing his dad cry, and it still surprised him to see it even once.

Jessie never had it in him to end it for Chester the way his dad did for Leftie, no more than he could’ve have turned a gun on himself. Jesse looked down to his friend caked in mud hoping for a snort, anything, but Chester’s days of hearing Jessie cry into an empty bottle and granting absolution were finally over.

Chester knew everything about Jessie Standman. Jessie petted the fourteen-year-old bloodhound lying in the hole and sighed. “You ‘member them thangs I told you when you was a pup?” Jessie paused for a moment of reflection. “Well, that was between you an’ me. No need to go tellin’ nobody,” he looked up and pointed to the sky, “up there.”

With Chester gone, bringing back memories his pop and Lefty, Jessie thought about his own son. Jessie Jr. was almost fourteen, a lazy kid who, despite the fact that Jessie hadn’t spared him the belt, still spent most of his time lying on the couch watching TV. But he would soon be a man whether he was ready or not. And Jessie figured every man needed a good dog, a way sound off all those things men do without having them slapped back in the face, a dog to absorb those things that shouldn’t be out there for public consumption, and when the time comes, it all goes in the hole together.

The bottle of Old Granddad only had a couple of swigs left. Jessie dropped his cigarette butt into the hole and filled it with dirt. He tilted the bottle against his lips and let out a satisfied smack when he pulled it down again.

Jessie’s dad never threw him a ball or took him fishing or hunting much, but Jessie learned a lot by watching him. He wondered if Jessie Jr. had soaked up anything from him about what it means to be a man. Maybe a rottweiler, Jessie thought. No, too much dog for Jessie Jr. He needed a slacker, just like him, a Basset hound, or a shelter mutt.

By the time Jessie got back home, the house was dark except for the gray flicker of the television in the back room. Jessie plopped into the porch swing to sober up. If Martha was still awake, she’d stir up a hornet’s nest if she smelled Old Granddad. Hell, a man can’t even have a sip when his dog dies, Jessie thought. Alone on the porch, except for a cricket chirping under the tarp, Chester’s tarp, Jessie hoped Jessie Jr. would put less weight on his dog than what Lefty and Chester had to carry, but at least the new pup would have a good tarp to nap on.

M.E. Parker is a writer, a reader, web designer, a software enigeer and a carpenter who imagines a world of wooden computers with leather bound keyboards. His short fiction has recently surfaced or is scheduled to see daylight in numerous print publications and Internet haunts including 42opus, Alimentum, The Briar Cliff Review, Electric Velocipede, Flint Hills Review, The MacGuffin, Night Train, Quercus Review, Smokelong Quarterly and numerous others. Find him at http://www.meparker.com.

Rural Medical Camp Tackles Health Care Gaps

2009-09-15T12:08:00.003-04:00

Betty Lettenberger/NPR

Link gakked from AppyLove, story from NPR.

Think about this story for a moment. Or two. We need new, better, options for health care, and we need them yesterday. And that's probably as political a post as I'll ever consciously make.

It was a Third World scene with an American setting. Hundreds of tired and desperate people crowded around an aid worker with a bullhorn, straining to hear the instructions and worried they might be left out.

Some had arrived at the Wise County Fairgrounds in Wise, Va., two days before. They slept in cars, tents and the beds of pickup trucks, hoping to be among the first in line when the gate opened Friday before dawn. They drove in from 16 states, anxious to relieve pain, diagnose aches and see and hear better.

"I came here because of health care — being able to get things that we can't afford to have ordinarily," explained 52-year-old Otis Reece of Gate City, Va., as he waited in a wheelchair beside his red F-150 pickup. "Being on a fixed income, this is a fantastic situation to have things done we ordinarily would put off."

For the past 10 years, during late weekends in July, the fairgrounds in Wise have been transformed into a mobile and makeshift field hospital providing free care for those in need. Sanitized horse stalls become draped examination rooms. A poultry barn is fixed with optometry equipment. And a vast, open-air pavilion is crammed with dozens of portable dental chairs and lamps.

A converted 18-wheeler with a mobile X-ray room makes chest X-rays possible. Technicians grind hundreds of lenses for new eyeglasses in two massive trailers. At a concession stand, dentures are molded and sculpted.

More.

Wine and Cheese with Alexi and Natasha

2009-09-13T23:34:00.000-04:00

Last night in my apartment, I heard Natasha through the thin walls, “Nyet! Nyet!” Today I stare at her black eye when we have wine, whiskey and cheese as we do every month.

"You like my wife?" Alexi asks.

Natasha was wet-eyed like a puppy behind the glass of a pet store and he was the first man that wanted to take her home after high school. A month later they were in Florida, a place where the screen door blew off after each storm. Twenty years of fighting later she works an old drill and a can of putty, rigging the damned thing back into place until next time. Her life is the surrendering sunset, sinking and falling into the ocean.

I pretend I didn’t hear Alexi. “Bring me more wine,” he barks to Natasha. As he waits he stuffs two cubes of cheese into his mouth. I decide I’m not going to stand completely still. Her lip begins to quiver the same way it does when she comes against my mouth. Alexi breaks his wine glass against the counter. He charges and my feet stay planted.

Timothy Gager is the author of seven books of fiction and poetry. He lives on www.timothygager.com.

Aphelia and Leigh, fiction by Kyle Hemmings

2009-09-07T14:22:00.000-04:00

We were listening to Doodles Weaver crack jokes on Rudy Vallee’s radio show when it happened. We were catching dust from the open car windows, the dry wind from the Black Mesa. Maybe if Aphelia hadn’t driven her father’s rickety box-of-metal-on-wheels so hard, so reckless, the one she stole, along with his police revolver, it wouldn’t have broken down. Maybe if she didn’t hold up the pimple-faced kid shakin' in his knickers at the grocery store back in Reynes for a bag of god-darn breadsticks, we wouldn’t be stuck in the middle of Cimarron County. The throb of nowhere. The black heart of everywhere.

And what the hell do I know about cars, clutch parts, seal or something bearings? I ain’t a boy. Whoever designed this motorcar is a man with a well-greased heart and a pair of tin hands that leaves his wife longing for flesh and flowers. I know a man didn’t design a woman. She came from dust.

“Fiddlesticks,” says Aphelia, kicking some stones off the dirt road. Under her cloche hat her green eyes are the same ones that sting me at night. They belong to a beautiful feline living at the bottom of a well that is me. Every law-abidin’ girl has within her a secret feline squatter.

Aphelia is twenty-five. She once worked as a punch press operator before the plant closed. I’m seventeen, used to sling hash part time with my mother. The diner is where I met Aphelia, one morning, wearing a large floppy hat, a distracted glow to her face, grease smudges on her flower-print dress. She said she had been helping her father fix the car and asked me if I knew anything about repairing one. I said I'm not a boy and we both got giddy.

She had been talking about stealing a bag of breadsticks for days. Half this country is waiting in soup lines and the other half is digging ditches in the rain. And Aphelia and me are rich on bread sticks and queer sunsets. But I don’t think this is about the breadsticks, or about how I feel, or what I want. It’s more about the distance from here to the New Mexico border, or from here to Colorado, and how I’ll never come back to Oklahoma. In some strange town, I’ll find another earth mother with salt-lick wounds, a queen of rain whose flesh, whose breasts, the Black Mesa wind cannot erode. I will call my new earth mother, Aphelia.

“Hey, Leigh,” says Aphelia, turning, wearing one of her love-is-free smiles, “you wanna play Flip the Frog?” It’s something she always says before we fall into each other's pond and believe our shuddering reflections. Aphelia says that I make love like a Bolshevik. I’m not sure what she means. Do Bolsheviks shudder? Do they call each other in the heat of lovemaking--my crazy sweet-grass strumpet?

In the distance, I can make out the serpentine roads that appear, vanish behind hills, the wail of police sirens that will soon blot my thoughts. The cars are tiny misshapen dots growing larger.

I ask her the same question that I asked back in Reynes. “How many bullets you got in that gun?” I didn’t like the answer I got in Reynes.

“I already told you, darlin'. Just one.”

“Well, that's just swell. You really plan ahead, don’t you?”

She takes two small steps towards me. It feels like she’s at the other side of the world.

“Like I said, the one is for me. I know where I’m goin’. But you’re gonna run. Run until you can’t run no more. If they catch you, lie about your age and tell them you’re fifteen. Make like you're mindless--a witless girl who could only make a living capping mayonnaise jars. Tell them I took you as hostage. Tell them you didn’t know nothin’."

If she had one more bullet, I’d follow her off the edge of the Black Mesa. But all I have to offer is a dustbowl of girlish brown-eyed love.

Slowly, I walk up to her. She’s smiling and I’m drowning. I kiss her, our tongues swirling, the dance of two water snakes in love with the other’s slither. She gently pushes me away.

The sirens blare louder. Closer.

“Someday you’ll get back on the main road. You’ll have a husband who’ll stand by you, work sixteen hours a day. You’ll have children who’ll obey, do chores for you. And when they grow bigger, when they grow wayward, tempted by something they can’t define, you’ll see me in their eyes. There's no future for us, honey.”

I reach to grab the gun tucked in her pleated skirt. She wrestles my hand away, has a grip like a man's. Her eyes are wild, her voice, firm, edgy. We are both breathless--the possessor and the possessed.

“I’ll stall ‘em, put the gun to my head. They’ll negotiate. It’ll give you enough time. When you hear the sound, it means I love you a thousand times.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head of sunshine ringlets.

"They’re not takin’ me alive. No callused fingers in my pond and the dirt from this dry country."

I study my own fingers. So small. Fat twitching worms.

“Here,” she says, “take one of these. You‘ll need the energy.” She holds out the bag of breadsticks. I imagine how one will crack, like those tiny smiles in top soil, ones I will fall through. I close my eyes and hear the shot in the distance. I’ll never make New Mexico. I’ll drop from exhaustion and wake up with a different name. But the sound. The sound will stay with me for years, a reminder that I was once stranded in the heart of Black Mesa country.

“Take one,” she says, "don't be shy."

One for you. And one for me.

Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey, where he skateboards, falls, and sometimes doesn't get up. He has work pubbed in Why Vandalism, Zygote in My Coffee, Up the Staircase, and others.

High Cotton, by Barrett Hathcock

2009-09-04T02:27:00.001-04:00

When they cotton dive, the boys become serious. They coil into themselves, squatting on the lip of the metal cotton bins, and they thrust their bodies into the air. The boys go for distance, they go for height, but their main concern is arc. They’re trying to pierce the cotton deeply and completely. So, against the sunset, they curve together like dolphins into the ocean, and the cotton catches and folds around them as they disappear beneath, swimming into the soft waves, bits of husk floating by their bodies like shells. They do this over and over, pulling themselves back up to the lip of the bins and then hurling themselves off again. The bins grunt under the pressure. The boys dive until their arms and legs ache. In midair, wisps of cotton flutter from their hair and fall behind them like bits of sea foam.

When they were 16, this was their routine.

###

Though the boys were physically distinguishable—Jeremy, tall and dusky; Peter, dirty-blond—together they acted like a mechanically simple but efficient machine, first the tall body, then the short, moving together through their high school lives, chewing through each new day, benefiting from the technological advantage of two heads, four feet, four hands, four eyes. They had been friends since the fourth grade, though they never considered how or when the friendship started. It simply existed. They might have well have been fraternal twins for the way they finished each other’s sentences, inhabited and discarded each other’s clothes, were fed and parented in each other’s houses.

###

The diving always made them late. For Peter, dinner was at six, precisely. His grandfather, bitter and enfeebled, had always had his dinner straight up at six, and he wasn’t going to change just because he was forced to live with his goddamned daughter, Peter’s mother. As part of the family agreement, the old man had given up his car—a mid-80s Lincoln Town Car, a midnight blue monster that Peter did his best to rag out. Jeremy, whose mother was still litigating the proper amount of alimony out of his own father, was without a car and rode with Peter everywhere.

Peter always knew they had to get home, but he was loathe to leave the cotton bins, which they had found one afternoon while riding around the farmland north of Niskayuna High. The bins were huddled together in the corner of a cotton field, metal boxes of bleached orange peeling to rust. After diving, Peter liked to smoke while reclining, delicately flicking his ashes out through the finger-thick holes of the wire mesh, intent on not staining the cotton with his ash. Jeremy, on the other hand, was an incorrigible napper and liked to be submerged, the cotton tucked up to his chin. At an impossibly long distance away, his bare toes protruded.

At school, cotton had become a code word. Whenever they saw girls walking by, girls they knew or wanted to know, girls in boot cuts and belts, sweaters and pullovers, fleeces with and without hoods, the girls became “like cotton.”

“Just like cotton,” Jeremy would say with a contained smile.

“Fresh warm cotton at two o’clock,” Peter would say.

“Very uncotton,” Peter would sometimes say.

No matter the time, Peter would drive home slow and take the back roads into Jackson and roll down the windows and sometimes Jeremy would dial the soul station run out of Gluckstadt and they would listen to Al Green and smell the farmers grilling out behind their houses.

###

If, looking back, Peter had had to trace the beginning of Jeremy and Lina’s relationship, he would have said it began at a party at Robert Birch’s house in the winter of their sophomore year, not too long after that first cotton-diving season had ended. She was sitting on a couch in the living room, her legs folded under her Indian-style. A half-finished can of Beast rested between her legs. Peter noticed how the sweat of the can left damp marks on the inside thigh of her jeans. They had a button fly, shiny like new nickels. Lina was short with long black hair that mysteriously contained surprising strands of brown, and sometimes red, depending on the light. She was dark, even in the winter, and when the couples walked among each other at basketball games in February, it was obvious she wasn’t from around there. All the Mississippi girls had lost their brown, gone back to pearly white skin, tan lines gone for a few more months. Lina was from down further south, though the boys did not know where. She was telling some story, surrounded by other girls, gesturing with her one free hand, using the other to hold the beer steady between her legs.

“So like ro I am so not kidding that boy was fucking wasted,” Lina said.

She was famous around the school, although no one discussed why. All the boys who had been there at Niskayuna since seventh grade knew who she was, and remembered the day they first noticed her, the day she was pulled out of the junior high tableaux. Lina was the girl who had her first period publicly, during the morning break, as she ate an apple on one of the picnic tables out in front of the quad. Nobody remembers the actual scene when it happened. They only remember the small spot of blood that stained the picnic table bench. Lina went home early. Nobody ever questioned her about the incident or gave her a hard time. Nobody said anything. Though the junior high boys would never confess to this, most of them stopped by the table at some point during the day. They approached slowly, with the rolling crunch of gravel under their feet, and they stretched their necks out and looked down at the spot of blood, making sure not to bend over, not to get too close. They stood there looking at it for a minute and let out a breath, recognizing that what they had heard was true. They then turned around and crunched back to their class, or their friends, or their mothers waiting for them in their cars.

“What the hell does ‘ro’ mean?” asked Peter, later that night back in the car.

“I think it might be short for ‘bro,’” said Jeremy.

“That’s stupid,” said Peter. “Is that some sort of Florida thing?”

“Lighten up, Pete.” Jeremy lit another cigarette and spent the rest of the evening looking out the window, finally asking around midnight to be taken home, even though his mom was out of town, and he could have done anything, and could have done it all night.

###

Peter’s full name was Peter Allen Traxler. He called the car the Traxler Town Tank—“a couch on wheels handed down through generations.” When he drove people home from parties—he was always looking for an excuse to drive—he’d throw his arm up on the seat and crane his head backward and say, “Welcome to the finest automotive contraption in Northeast Jackson. Don’t worry about your safety”—and at this point he’d let go of the wheel and completely turn to the backseat passengers, Jeremy manning the steering—“if we hit anything, we’ll probably come out all right.”

###

On some weekend nights, months into their relationship, depending on the schedule of the evening, Jeremy and Lina would make-out in the Tank. If there was a party, Jeremy would snatch away Peter’s keys as he stood pumping up the keg, or if they went to a movie, Lina and Jeremy would take a long trip for snacks. Since both houses were on “permanent lockdown,” Jeremy claimed, they made time where they could. Once, when Lina’s father had to make an emergency business trip in the middle of a week, Jeremy begged Peter into driving him over to Lina’s house. Peter did his homework out in the car, hunkered beside the window to get the good streetlight, pre-calc notes spread across the dash.

###

In their second year of diving, junior year, their technique became more intricate, involving flips and twists and convoluted and ultimately foiled landings. Daylight Savings Time was about to end, and the specter of a 5:20 sunset haunted Peter. He whined about it at school so much Jeremy had to tell him to shut up before someone got curious.

The boys also became self-aware of their diving. They became finicky and pedantic about the details of the dive. They were harsh in their critiques of each other’s performance. They developed rules: you must always cotton dive shirtless. You must wait at least 48 hours after a rain. Sunset is the optimal time to dive, but full-on darkness is too dangerous. You should never cotton dive alone. Each person should act as the other’s lifeguard. You must check in with your diving partner after every dive to ensure he has not smothered.

Then, one day, while standing one the edge of a bin, psyching up for a backflip, Peter took off his shorts.

After landing, he began victoriously swishing his arms and legs in that way people do when they’re making angels in the snow.

“What in the hell are you doing?” asked Jeremy, who had turned around to Peter’s bin.

“I don’t know,” said Peter.

“You don’t have any clothes on.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Put your fucking shorts on.”

“Yeah, but Jeremy, it feels—”

“I don’t fucking care. Put your shorts on.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s against the rules, that’s why.”

Peter glared at him for a moment. Then Peter leaned up and reached for his shorts and grunted out a Fine.

“Oh, shit—Goddamn it. Put your pants on.”

“That’s what I’m doing. Jesus,” said Peter.

“No!” screamed Jeremy, his voice cracking. He was diving for his shirt and shoes.

On the horizon, a tornado of dust funneled behind a pick-up truck. It was speeding along the road next to the strip of thorny trees that led to the bins. “Maybe he isn’t coming—” began Peter. The furious cloud of dust only grew. The truck was coming right for them. The boys busted it. Peter had never dressed so fast. The boxers and shorts went on as one. Belts and buttons and zippers were left undone. Feet were stuffed into untied shoes. Shirts were on inside-out. Socks were crammed into pockets. And everything was accompanied by Jeremy’s wail: “Get in the car hurry up I can’t believe we’re gonna get busted for this shit I hope he didn’t see your naked ass we are so dead oh my God would you just hurry the fuck up.” The Tank tore away. The pick-up was about fifty yards behind them. You could have seen the dust for miles. They drove so fast that the speedometer—a bright orange toothpick—peaked out at 80 and stuck there vibrating. The car shook, and the wind gushed through the open windows and pummeled them. Three minutes later when they swerved through the gate at the school and parked behind the observatory, Jeremy pronounced the coast clear.

###

Peter heard his mother come into his bedroom early to put away clean clothes, the socks and boxer shorts and generic white undershirts. She did not do this quietly, the warped dresser drawers needing two hands, their metal pulls clinking when slammed shut. Peter pretended to sleep. She let out a heavy sigh, a sigh that Peter recognized as his mother’s trademark, a theatrical expression of her martyrdom. He wasn’t sure—lying there encased in the down comforter—if she were sighing because of him, or his father, or his Grandpa. Same difference, he thought.

“What’s this?” she said. “What’s this?”

Peter feigned sleep. She had picked up Peter’s dirty clothes that had been shed in a wad next to his bed, peeling undershirts out of knit shirts, boxers out of khaki pants. Peter mentally inventoried all the contraband he could remember. Cigarettes and lighter? Wedged underneath his car seat. Plastic traveler-sized bottle of Southern Comfort? Wrapped in a Piggly Wiggly bag and bundled with the spare-tire gear in his trunk. The half-smoked dimebag of pot bought from Binc Manchester? Was in car, now given to Jeremy to hide at his house once he heard rumor of drug dogs patrolling the Upper School lot. String of six condoms acquired two years ago at camp? In the Lincoln’s glove compartment, hidden inside the owner’s manual. Three consecutive issues of early ’93 Penthouse? Accidentally thrown out the fall before, still sad about it. Peter could think of nothing else.

“Peter, what’s this?” his mother said, her sad presence now sitting on his bed, impossible to ignore.

“Mom?” he said, emerging, playing his best. “That you? What’s up?”

“Peter, what’s this? It fell out of your clothes.”

She held a tuft of raw cotton in her hand. Peter, dramatically groggy, worked at the wicks of his eyes with his fingers until they squeaked, and leaned over her hand, breathing hard. He tried somehow to reverse the blushing; he could feel the heat rush up his throat and over his cheeks. His lips felt chapped. He tasted the rusty morning taste in his mouth. Fabulous excuses began developing in his mind, intricate plots involving car wrecks and hospitals and emergencies and trauma.

“I dunno. Is it lint or something?” he said.

“It’s not lint, honey. This is cotton. Like the kind you pick off a bush.”

Peter just kept staring at her hand, its fine wrinkles like the depthless cracks seen on old paintings.

“I dunno, Mom. Where did you get it?”

“It was in your clothes—where did you and Jeremy go last night?”

“Just the game. Like we always do.”

The hand retracted. The lint clutched tight, her face a blank hardness.

“Did we win?”

“No. Of course not,” Peter said, coughing up a laugh. “They beat us like a drum.”

“Wonderful,” his mother said. She got up, leaving the rest of the clean clothes stacked next to Peter in a neatly squared pile, the lock of cotton caught tight in her hand.

That next week, without explanation, Peter inherited his father’s cell phone. “Just in case something comes up,” his mother said.

###

“I had a strange afternoon,” Jeremy said.

He looked off to the horizon, the way Peter had seen people in movies do when they are about to expel a great secret. They were on their way to a Halloween party.

“It was different. Like nothing else. Ever.”

Jeremy was very solemn when he spoke. He was dressed as Ricky Martin, with squeaky leather pants that Peter insisted were too shiny and radiant to be merely leather, that the pants were either pleather or vinyl. Vinyl, pleather, whatever, Jeremy had said. It ain’t cotton. He wore a cream-colored, tight shirt. Neither tried to identify its material. It was collarless but had a diagonal slit at the throat-line that flapped open at will in a way that Peter said was either distinctly Ricky Martin or distinctly Vulcan.

“What is so different?” asked Peter.

“Can you keep a secret?” asked Jeremy. Peter nodded automatically. “I was there when you came by this afternoon.”

“So why didn’t you come to the door?”

“Well, Lina was there, too. But no one else was around. So, you know, we started to make-out.”

“Yeah?”

“And well, we went . . . further.”

“You did it? Oh.” Peter was at a total loss. He was dressed in his normal clothes. He didn’t have a costume but an injury; a fake, rubber screw was glued onto his forehead with trickles of blood dried down his face and throat. His grandfather had said it was so lifelike that he wanted to vomit. Peter was proud and asked for pictures.

“No no no. We didn’t do it. I told you that we are not going to do it for a while. Not until we’ve been going out for at least a year. We just said we loved each other like a month ago.”

“But—”

“We didn’t. We just. Well . . .”

“Well, what?”

“I don’t want to say it.”

“Why not?”

“Well, it sounds so cheap when you just blurt it out.”

“Aw, J come on.” They were quiet. Peter checked his screw. It still looked perfect—blood spreading like branches across his face. It had tickled horribly when his mother squeezed the fake blood out of the dropper. But it had tasted oddly sweet, as if sugared. He glanced over at Jeremy, whose hair was a caramel bouffant. Peter wondered if he would try to carry the impersonation completely through the party that night. He had been practicing.

“What she going as?” Peter asked.

“Huh?” And then after a moment, he said, “Oh, yeah. She’s going to be a geisha girl.”

“A geesha girl? What’s that?” asked Peter.

“I don’t really know. Some oriental thing.”

“So are you going to tell me?” Peter asked, sounding more eager than he had intended. They were almost at the house. He could see the cars half-parked on the lawn.

“Listen, just.” Jeremy crossed his arms. Peter pulled up and killed the engine. The house thumped with faint music.

Jeremy stuck his right hand into Peter’s face. “Sniff,” he said. Peter knitted his brows. “Do it. Sniff.”

Peter inhaled. Jeremy’s index and middle fingers floated under his nose for a brief moment.

They were both quiet. And then Peter said: “That’s way better than cotton.”

###

The party was lame. The boys mulled around on the back porch. Their breath was the same white cloud as their cigarette smoke. Lina and Marianne, Peter’s date, were somewhere inside. Around eleven it started to sleet.

“Do you think she wants to?” Peter asked. They were standing under the overhang of the roof. Peter’s sneakers were slowly soaking. The bottoms of their jeans were damp, as if they had been running through tall, wet grass.

“I don’t know. Probably. Maybe,” Jeremy said.

“How can you tell?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she’ll say something.”

“You could say something.”

“Oh, yeah.” And when he noticed that Peter wasn’t kidding, he said: “But how?”

“What do you mean ‘how’? You must have talked about this some.”

“No, I mean where? As you well know, I have no car.”

“Your house?” Peter said.

“With my parents? Are you kidding? My mom hears it when the dog farts. She’s up checking to see if it’s a burglar. We can’t get halfway through a movie, for chrissakes.”

“Hers?”

“No. Her father dates.”

“I think I’ve seen him. Homecoming?”

“Yeah. He was her escort.”

“How did someone so tall have someone that short?”

“Lay off.”

“Okay, I’m sorry. I’m just saying that if you ever had kids, they might be tiny.”

“Pete.”

“Okay, sorry.”

“Let’s not even go there.”

“Well, have you thought about that?”

“Yes. Duh.”

“So?”

“So . . . I got some condoms.”

“Good. What kind?”

“I can’t remember.”

“What do you mean you can’t remember? It’s not that hard. They’re either—”

“I haven’t actually gotten them yet.”

“Well, you need to.”

“I know,” said Jeremy. “I am. I will.”

Peter caught himself glaring at Jeremy, as if he was squeezing the agreement out of him. His bouffant had lost its shape and it was just regular Jeremy hair now, except lit with the glittery hair-paint Lina had bought him. The sleet was coming down heavier. It sounded like bits of plastic falling. The blood on his face had begun to itch.

“Is she on the pill?” asked Peter.

“Has been since she was fourteen.”

“Fourteen? What for?”

“I don’t know. It like helps them with their thing. You know.”

“It does? How?”

“I don’t know—I heard it somewhere.”

Peter, after smirking disbelief for a moment, said, “Has she been screwing around since she was fourteen?”

“Peter. Goddamn it. Why do you say shit like that?”

There was a knock on the sliding glass door behind them. It was Lina—her face ghostly white in the makeup. Her hair had come down too. It had been up, intricately braided and folded, and Peter had told her she looked like origami. Her small smudge of lipstick and the white paint around her mouth had faded from the drinking, so she looked like she was in reverse black face. Let’s go, she mouthed to Jeremy.

“Now?” he asked. She nodded and mouthed, please? He said okay and held up his cigarette, only burned a fourth of the way down. She mouthed okay and her floating ghost-face disappeared back into the house.

“She’s been on the pill since—” said Peter.

“Shut up,” Jeremy whispered. “It’s a fucking miracle I don’t kick your ass.” Peter started stamping his feet. His legs felt numb from the calves down.

“You couldn’t even try, Ricky,” he said back.

“How would you like it if I said something like that?”

“All I’m saying,” Peter said, still stomping, “is that you should ask how many partners she’s had.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s important.”

Peter was now bent over rubbing his shins. The rhythmic sound of his hands on his jeans. He couldn’t help but think of what this weather was doing to the cotton. It was probably turning into oatmeal and would take days to dry enough for another jump. And before they knew it, it would be Thanksgiving.

“What in the hell are you doing, Peter?”

“My feet are practically frozen solid,” he said.

“Well why didn’t you say something?” said Jeremy.

“Because you said you wanted to stay out here.”

“But not if you are freezing to death,” said Jeremy.

“Are you pissed at me?” asked Peter.

“No,” said Jeremy. “It’s just this night has so completely sucked.”

“Well, maybe we could—”

There was another knock on glass, much harder. They both turned around. Now, she mouthed.

“Okay,” Jeremy said back. Peter heard him curse under his breath and saw him drop his cigarette into his beer can and swish it around, like Peter’d seen cousins do. It was nearly finished anyway. But Jeremy didn’t move, only stood there looking at the glass door. He was probably watching Lina walk, Peter thought. She had been wearing a kimono but ended up borrowing someone’s sweat pants after about 20 minutes. At school, she had a way of positioning herself at the front of whatever group of girls she was walking with so that you could always see her, despite her shortness.

Peter remembered how she squatted down, like a catcher, to get her books for each class. She didn’t carry her backpack compulsively like the other students. She carried only the books she needed for the next class, propping them on her hip. (Because of some unspoken tradition, the lockers at Niskayuna High were mostly decorative.) When she squatted down, her shirt would sometimes separate from the waistline of her pants, so that there was a band of flesh uncovered, the amount depending on the type of shirt and pants. Peter had seen her shrink down to replace a binder, a highlighter, a copy of Othello, and when the portion of her lower back had appeared, he had once seen, just above the waistline, a glitter of metal. At first he didn’t know what it was and he tried to stare inconspicuously, while fiddling with his locker. But as she moved, the belly-chain moved, and the light reflected off it again, as if the metal were jeweled. Peter stepped closer, to peer down at what he thought looked like a necklace. He was almost over her, trying to decipher exactly what was tied around her waist, exactly what it was composed of. Then she stood up. Peter straightened and stepped back, suddenly self-aware. Lina walked off to her class without turning around. All Peter could now see were jeans and a sweater.

“Jeremy,” Peter said. “Come on. Let’s go.” He stood behind Jeremy, waiting for him to slide open the door. Jeremy was still looking into the glass, into his reflection. Peter gave him a little push, very soft, just under his right shoulder blade. After a second push, Peter felt him un-tense, and he finally slid the door open and the boys walked into the warm, dry party together.

###

After daylight savings passed, their trips to the cotton bins became short and intense. They had seen the pickup once more, pulling up a dust storm on the horizon as they’d pulled off the road, and it had turned toward them, so Peter gunned it back onto the road. But they still returned, only once or twice a week, one of them standing on the edge of a bin, fully clothed, the car keys held tight, keeping watch, while the other jumped and whooped and flipped and cursed the farmer, wherever he was. Peter typically took the first lookout.

###

Now that it was getting dark early, Peter’s mom wanted him home first thing after school. He needed to bring his grades up, she’d said. He had come home the week before with a scratch on his nose he couldn’t explain. He had scratched himself on a cotton bulb husk, but he was sure she thought it was drugs.

Jeremy was out sick, and Peter had been driving around Niskayuna after school, thinking about going diving solo but always deciding it was too risky. He would get home by four and his mother would ask where he’d been, and he couldn’t even come up with a good lie. She knew Jeremy was sick and trusted him even less alone.

After three days of his mumbled evasions, she said, “What part of come home right after school don’t you understand? Either get home or give me the keys.”

The next day after school, walking out to his car, Peter saw Lina waiting at the curb, amidst the backpacks and the baseball hats.

“Need a ride?” asked Peter. She shook her head. She was in a black skirt that touched the tops of her knees. A black sweater buttoned twice over a sky blue stretchy shirt. Her hair blew in the wind and a strand stuck to her lip.

“My dad’s coming. He’s bringing me my car.” And then as an explanation: “It’s my birthday tomorrow.”

“Oh. Happy birthday. Jeremy hadn’t told me. You’re getting a car?”

“Mhmm. A Forerunner.”

“Sweet,” said Peter. “You talk to Jeremy?”

“Still sick.”

“Bummer. I haven’t seen him in like a week.”

“How do you go on?”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Why do you hate me so much?” he asked.

“I don’t hate you at all.”

“Right.”

The flow of cars kept running through the carpool line with a stuttery consistency, like the time-lapsed photography of blood circulation he’d seen in biology earlier that day.

“What’s he getting you?” Peter said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I hope he just gets well enough to go out. His mom keeps saying he’s got mono.”

“Really?”

“Ro, I totally did not give him mono. Don’t even joke.”

“I didn’t say that. I wasn’t even gonna.”

A hunter green Forerunner was making its way around the curve of the entrance road. Lina’s hair swirled around her face in the wind. It looked almond-colored in the bright November sun, Peter thought.

“So that it?” Peter asked.

She nodded, her excitement undisguised. “That’s really nice,” Peter said.

“Thanks. Maybe when J gets better, we can all go out. I’ll drive.”

“That would be nice,” Peter said. “Is it four-wheel drive?”

“I have no idea. You could ask my dad.”

“Nah. Just curious. If it was we could take it mudding.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

The truck pulled up in front of them and Lina put her stuff in the backseat, and then did a sort of hop to get into the front passenger’s seat. She made some indecipherable, excited noise to her father. She gave a quick wave before closing the door, and Peter waved back, but by then the door was closed, the glass tinted, the truck pulling away, and Peter was left alone in the carpool line, another car pulling up and jolting to a stop and another person jumping in and leaving.

###

The next day, a Friday afternoon, was perfect for cotton diving. The air was crisp; the sky was cloudless, a deep, blinding blue. Peter sat out on his back porch, smoking a cigarette. His mother was happy. He’d finally come home straight from school. She gave him an exaggerated thank you before leaving for the store. Said she’d make him one of his favorites—chicken and dumplings—for finally listening.

Jeremy was still out of school. Peter had tried to find Lina, to see what the gameplan was for the weekend, but no luck. It was getting close to five, and he was growing desperate from the lack of communication and the vision of Friday night at home with the family, watching Grandpa’s mouth work on the dumplings at dinner, Dad turning up Nash Bridges too loud. He started another cigarette and called Jeremy.

Jeremy’s mother was startled to hear from him. “Yes, Peter. He’s doing much better. Doctor gave him a shot yesterday. Turned out not to be mono—just a bad cold, I guess. Anyway, he told me he was with you,” she said.

Peter tried to cover, but his voice went shaky, and he could tell from the way hers became thin and angular that she did not believe anything he said.

He called Lina’s house. He felt odd doing this. He had seen Jeremy do it so many times. The number-pattern was not familiar but the sound of their touch-tone keys was comforting. The voice of a very large man answered. She was out, for her birthday. She would not be in until late. Peter beeped off the portable phone and began to pace. It was almost five. Three cigarette butts lay crushed in black, ashy smudges at his feet on the back porch. His mother would be home soon with with the dumpling mix. Birds chirped. Everything outside turned a shade darker, as if the world had just slightly condensed. The old man was out with her, riding shotgun, guarding all the coupons, reading the obituaries, telling her to slow down. Leaves were turning orange, a purplish-brown. It was four forty-five. Thanksgiving was two weeks away. He dialed Jeremy’s cell phone. It rang and rang, went to voicemail. He imagined it bleating next to him, sitting on the seat against his thigh, wherever he was. He re-dialed.

###

They measured the circumference of the four bins with their feet, one placed carefully in front of the other. Jeremy took off his shirt, his watch, his shoes, his socks, his belt, his jeans, his boxers, one leg at a time so as not to fall. Lina began undressing as well, sandals flipped over the side, T-shirt on the edge of the bin, bra thrown back toward the truck, jeans unbuttoned one at the time—the delicate tambourine jingle of the button fly—sliding off the left leg, then the right, holding her hand out to Jeremy for balance. She tossed the jeans over the edge. She wore no underwear. A thin wire sparkled around her waist. She pranced away from Jeremy on the balls of her feet. The bin whined underneath, and Jeremy followed her out to the center, to the cross created by the conjoined bins. They embraced, their two vague shadows momentarily congealing. Holding hands, standing side-by-side, they turned to face one of the bins. After glancing at each other, they leaned back, together, falling backwards into the cotton, swimming in back strokes. Again, over and over, together or on their own, they dove with a deep arc into the cotton and pulled themselves towards the bottom and found the metal mesh that now covered urine-colored dead grass, and then they turned around, pushing upwards, towards the orange light, towards the air.

Peter saw it all. He was squatting behind a row of trees, delicately holding back a ring of thorns. It was almost dark, and the world had blurred. He couldn’t control his breathing; his undershirt was stuck to his chest; the thorns were pricking into his palms, into his fingers; one scratched his neck like a broken fingernail.

He saw the pick-up truck, almost gray and invisible in the dusk, slowly creeping down the dirty road towards the bins. It was already almost a hundred yards away.

Peter had summoned it. He had seen the Forerunner on his initial drive by the field, and in silence, with no thinking, no pause to consider what he was doing, he drove around the circumference of the field, looking for the nearest one-story farmer’s house, trying to find the one with that truck. It didn’t take long. The truck was innocently parked in a carport, and Peter idled in front of the house, leaning on the horn, until a curtain twitched in one of the windows, and he was sure he had been seen. He then stomped on the accelerator and sped back to the cotton bins.

Lina’s dark green SUV floated next to the bins like a fat shadow. They continued to dive—an awkward and sincere motion. Peter heard Lina giggle. A cell phone chirped from inside the Forerunner, but it was ignored. Their clothing lay strewn on the lip of the bin. A couple of articles rested on the top of the Forerunner. Jeremy was a pale shadow, with dirty shadings where his hair was supposed to be. Lina was compact and dark. The belly-necklace sparkled.

The sky behind the bins had turned a navy blue.

Peter heard a twig snap under the tire of the approaching truck.

He thrashed, twisting his body. A thorn traced across his forearm, and he felt a sizzling sting. It left a thin, red scratch—the kind that never bleeds but always appears to be on the cusp of bleeding. Lina and Jeremy continued to dive. He saw them perform a flip into a bin together, hollering as they dove. Peter could almost see the fluff and recoil of the cotton as it caught them.

The truck was fifty feet away. Peter saw the vague outline of a driver bent over the wheel.

Peter sucked his scratch, hoping to make the sting go away. Lina and Jeremy did not come up from the cotton. He knew they were under its covers. He fought the urge to run for the bins and fling himself into the cotton. Instead, he turned around and walked back to his car, sloppily parked in the soybean field behind the trees. He left the couple naked in the cotton, floating together in the twilight with the pick-up truck approaching—he left them to go home, back to his mother who would be waiting at the dinner table with her old man.

###

Peter did not hear from Jeremy for another week. Both he and Lina were at school but neither approached him. He didn’t even see them together. All he got as he walked down the hall was a fake, partial smile, or a slight head nod. After a week, Jeremy finally approached Peter after school. “Hey, man.” Peter was leaning over his backpack, trying to force the zipper to close. “Ya think we could start carpooling again?” Without looking up Peter said sure.

They walked out to the parking lot. The dark blue Lincoln sat alone. Frost had hit and they moved slowly in their thick jackets and under their bulging backpacks. When they had almost reached the car, Jeremy said, “Hey, Peter. I’m sorry about the last week. About not talking.”

Peter nodded. “I’ve been in some serious shit.” Peter said, yeah, he’d heard things.

They crawled into the car. The doors whined. Peter put the heater on high but the air was cold at first. The seats and steering wheel felt stale.

Once they were situated—the backpacks put away, the wipers massaging the blurry windshield, the boys buckled in and rubbing their hands together—Jeremy looked over at Peter and with a frightened but elated smile said: “Pete. Man, I have had the weirdest fucking week. You wouldn’t believe it. You wouldn’t beleeeve what happened to Lina and me. We—”

“Get out,” Peter said, his hands now stuffed into his coat pockets. The smile on Jeremy’s face made Peter want to pummel him.

“What—”

“Get the fuck out.”

“Pete—I”

“I said: get the fuck out of my car.”

“Man, I’m sor—”

“Jeremy Moultas, if you don’t get out of my car right now, I’m gonna beat the shit out of you.”

Peter was now shaking, and his fists coiled around Jeremy’s undershirt, just below the soft, hollow indention of his throat. He yanked him close enough to see the darkness of his mouth, to feel his breath, the only warm substance in the car. In his grip there was a tear—perhaps only a stitch—that sounded to Peter like a distant explosion from somewhere deep inside Jeremy.

“I’m so not kidding, J.”

Jeremy grabbed his things and fled the car, and Peter sped away.

###

With no explanation to his mother, Peter insisted shortly thereafter that the family sell the Lincoln Town Car. His parents were flabbergasted, but Peter staunchly refused to drive it ever again, and after two weeks of acquiescing to his mother’s pleading (“I just don’t have time to take you to school every morning”), he dropped the keys on the kitchen counter and did not come near the car for the six more weeks it took them to sell it. Everyone tried to talk sense into him, even his grandfather. That’s a perfectly good car, he had said. It was good enough for me. (Everyone thought that Peter was embarrassed about the car’s model, its angular shape, its bruised color.) Listen to me, son, he continued, keep driving that car. I’ll buy you a new one as soon as you get into college. Grandpa pushed his glasses up on top of his bald head, a gesture known throughout the family as one of concrete sincerity. Son, he finished, it ain’t a bad car. I know it ain’t cool. And then, pulling Peter closer, he said: Son, listen, I promise you that car’ll get you pussy just as fast as anything else.

Barrett Hathcock was born and raised in Jackson, Miss., but now lives in Memphis, Tenn. He teaches writing at Rhodes College. For more stories, please visit barretthathcock.com.

History as a Weapon: The Question of Class, by Dorothy Allison

2009-09-02T11:30:00.004-04:00

Source: Berry College

Many years ago, when I first began teaching writing, I had the opportunity to design an introductory writing (essay) course, in which we read and discussed theory and criticism as well as original creative works. I thought for a long time about what I might do. I had done similar courses in the past,with safe topics like good and evil as seen through technological advances,that kind of thing. I wanted to branch out and give my students--mostly upper-class kids--something that they might not get in regards to the rest of their educations in class differences and isms of all kinds. I called it White Trash Literature.

Having come to Boston for grad school, light years away from the small rural community in Appalachian Pennsylvania that I grew up and went to college in, I suffered more than a bit of culture shock. I sat in my first grad workshop with a ballcap on that I'd stolen from my brother-in-law. The cap said 'Redneck Express Trucking.' I had on a flannel shirt over a pocket t-shirt, old jeans, and some high-top sneakers, a look coming into style then courtesy of the grunge movement located in Seattle. I was sort of hip, until people found out I'd been dressing that way my entire life. Then I became strange, or felt that way, anyway. The point being, I lived the life we discussed in class.

In hindsight, I probably should have prepared better and read more before teaching this, but I was 22 years old and determined to find my place in this new world, if indeed I had a place at all. I developed a syllabus, found texts that covered a lot of ground, and gamely went in to teach, jumping in with all my literary limbs flying, in that wind that can blow you down Tremont Street in Boston if you're not careful. The first day, I began pointing out signs of classism: TV, movies, literature, life, Jeff Foxworthy, etc. Once we'd covered a whiteboard with material, I set them at work writing about what they knew regarding people called rednecks or white trash or hillbilly. I anticipated papers full of cogent sets of examples and a great discussion forthcoming. Then a comment came, the next day, within the first five minutes of class, and froze me up.

"Why are we studying this stuff ? These people aren't an important part of history or literature."

I wish I could say I responded well, but I didn't. Someone mercifully pulled me back into the discussion by calling the commenter in question a fucking idiot, at which the class laughed a bit, uncomfortably, which gave enough time to pull myself together and toss the question out for discussion. I hadn't expected someone to challenge the course so boldly the first day. Every day after that I went in loaded for bear, swearing I would never be so caught dry and ham-fisted again. One of the big reasons I survived teaching that class was Dorothy Allison's baldly autobiographical fiction, and the equally eye-opening essays I found along the way looking for secondary sources.

After reading her, I knew it wasn't just me, though I certainly felt like I was the only quasi-redneck in this school most of the time. What mattered was that overwhelming sense of otherness you can only get in rooms full of white people, supposed peers, with whom you have little or nothing at all in common. The following essay (Allison's) is worth reading not just because she describes what I and others who travelled from the lower middle class to the halls and classrooms of academia go through practically, but also what it's like mentally. It's a lot more than 'which fork to use for what,' though I had that problem too. Read it and see what you think.

A Question of Class

The first time I heard, "They're different than us, don't value human life the way we do," I was in high school in Central Florida. The man speaking was an army recruiter talking to a bunch of boys, telling them what the army was really like, what they could expect overseas. A cold angry feeling swept over me. I had heard the word they pronounced in that same callous tone before. They, those people over there, those people who are not us, they die so easily, kill each other so casually. They are different. We, I thought. Me.

When I was six or eight back in Greenville, South Carolina, I had heard that same matter-of-fact tone of dismissal applied to me. "Don't you play with her. I don't want you talking to them." Me and my family, we had always been they. 'Who am I? I wondered, listening to that recruiter. 'Who are my people? We die so easily, disappear so completely—we/they, the poor and the queer. I pressed my bony white trash fists to my stubborn lesbian mouth. The rage was a good feeling, stronger and purer than the shame that followed it, the fear and the sudden urge to run and hide, to deny, to pretend I did not know who I was and what the world would do to me.

My people were not remarkable. We were ordinary, but even so we were mythical. We were the they everyone talks about—the un-grateful poor. I grew up trying to run away from the fate that destroyed so many of the people I loved, and having learned the habit of hiding, I found I had also learned to hide from myself. I did not know who I was, only that I did not want to be they, the ones who are destroyed or dismissed to make the "real" people, the important people, feel safer. By the time I understood that I was queer, that habit of hiding was deeply set in me, so deeply that it was not a choice but an instinct. Hide, hide to survive, I thought, knowing that if I told the truth about my life, my family, my sexual desire, my history, I would move over into that unknown territory, the land of they, would never have the chance to name my own life, to understand it or claim it.

Jim Harrison's Passions (interview)

2009-09-01T17:20:00.001-04:00

Jim Harrison is a touchstone writer for me,and I haven't had the opportunity to see and read many current interviews.

When Trees Pop, by Helen Losse

2009-08-31T01:29:00.001-04:00

Two men stand, fists clenched,

inside a ring formed by other men.

The other men cheer the two men on,

while the man knocks another man down.

Nearby, at an overpass, several boys

throw sand and shout the word queer

at certain other boys. Several women

stand shoulder to shoulder, seemingly calm.

But as they turn, one woman bites another

woman on her tongue. Dusk then settles on

the right of way. Tall evergreens and deciduous

trees turn black. A cool wind rocks the bird house,

rustles tree branches, plays a tune on the treble

wind chimes. Life is slowing from the rackets

of men: noise from their cars, trucks,

their thrumming, black jackhammers.

The light of a full, orange moon meets the fog.

That night trees pop, a man dies by another

man’s hand, and several young girls shun

the bad girl to whom they must never speak.

Helen Losse is the author of Better With Friends, published by Rank Stranger Press in 2009, and the Poetry Editor of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. Her recent poetry publications and acceptances include The Wild Goose Poetry Review, Shape of a Box, Distillery and Hobble Creek Review. She has two chapbooks, Gathering the Broken Pieces, and Paper Snowflakes. Educated at Missouri Southern State and Wake Forest Universities, she lives in Winston-Salem, NC.

Silas House Reads from his Forthcoming Novel, Eli the Good

2009-08-27T11:55:00.000-04:00

I have my copy pre-ordered; you should too.

On Cadillac Mountain, by Nathan Graziano

2009-08-24T10:14:00.002-04:00

On the night Darla died, Wayne was sitting at the kitchen table, washing down a couple of her Percocets with a cold Budweiser, when it he slapped him like a strip of leather across his bearded cheek. He knew. That’s how he describes it to his son D.J., just out of Y.D.C., who is sitting across from him at the same table, one year later. Of course, Dwayne points out, he didn’t know she would die ten minutes from that moment—as it would happen—but he knew it would be soon, before the sun came up.

He tells D.J. how the hospice nurse, an older woman named Linda with hardened skin and lips as thin as paper cuts, appeared in the kitchen doorway, and Wayne points to the kitchen doorway. Other than Darla and himself, Linda was only other person in the house that night and her voice seemed amplified, like it was passing through a loud speaker, when, in fact, she whispered, “Mr. Briggs, I think it’s time.”

Wayne nodded, keeping his chin pressed to his chest, his thick graying beard sprawled like a bib on his t-shirt. He hoisted his near seven-feet of bulk from the chair and followed Linda out of the room.

Darla was reclined on the bed a hospital had moved into the house, her eyes closed and bald head wrapped in a pink bandana. She lay in what was her daughter’s bedroom, before Jenny disappeared, before all of that nonsense that landed D.J. in the joint.

Wayne looked at Darla with a shock of familiarity. Despite having seen her like that everyday for the past six months— her cheekbones jutting through stretched yellow skin at sharp angles, her eye sockets like manholes with dull blue stones at the bottom—he could never get used to the idea that this bed of bones contained his second wife. He sat down on the edge of the mattress, placing his large hand lightly above her eyes.

“Baby, it’s me,” he said.

Her eyes flickered. Her jaw opened and closed like a mouth moving underwater.

“My sweet girl.”

“Where’s Jenny?” Her voice was barely a breath, a wisp of air tangled in words.

Slowly, his hand fell from her forehead to her sunken cheek, framing her face. “She’s here, baby. The kids are in the living room. We’re all here.”

“Jenny came back?”

“Of course,” Dwayne said. He paused and kissed the pink banana. “Do you remember the motel in Bar Harbor, The Cadillac Inn? I was thinking about that place the other day, and thinking about how we sat on that porch with a cooler full of cold ones and I was playing my harmonica. Then the next day we drove up Cadillac Mountain. You remember that? Seeing the ocean from one direction and Canada from the other? When you feel better, I think we should go back there. Just you and me, baby. What do you say?”

Darla’s breathing became labored. Maybe it was a struggle, that last taste of life passing through her lips, but a look came over her face and changed the shape of her mouth, twisting her colorless lips upward.

Dwayne tells his son that that look was a smile. The hospital bed is now long gone, and Darla’s clothes have been folded and placed in a hope chest in Jenny’s old closet, but he still remembers that look. That smile. And when D.J. asks his father—when Wayne is quite a few beers into the night—what I was like to watch Darla die, Wayne tells him, again, that she smiled. She opened her eyes and smiled. Easy. Just like that.

Nathan Graziano lives in Manchester, New Hampshire with his wife and two children. He is the author of Teaching Metaphors (sunnyoutside, 2007), Not So Profound (Green Bean Press, 2004), Frostbite (GBP, 2002) and seven chapbooks of poetry and fiction. His work has appeared in Rattle, Night Train, Freight Stories, The Coe Review, The Owen Wister Review, and others. His third book of poetry, After the Honeymoon, will be published in Fall 2009 by sunnyoutside press. For more information, visit his website: www.nathangraziano.com

Fla. doc fired over 'doughnuts equal death' sign

2009-08-13T21:34:00.003-04:00

Would anyone have complained if it was Krispy Kreme?

PENSACOLA, Fla. — Dr. Jason Newsom railed against burgers, french fries, fried chicken and sweet tea in his campaign to promote better eating in a part of the country known as the Redneck Riviera. He might still be leading the charge if he had only left the doughnuts alone.
A 38-year-old former Army doctor who served in Iraq, Newsom returned home to Panama City a few years ago to run the Bay County Health Department and launched a one-man war on obesity by posting sardonic warnings on an electronic sign outside:
"Sweet Tea (equals) Liquid Sugar."
"Hamburger (equals) Spare Tire."
"French Fries (equals) Thunder Thighs."
He also called out KFC by name to make people think twice about fried chicken.
Then he parodied "America Runs on Dunkin'," the doughnut chain's slogan, with: "America Dies on Dunkin'."
Some power players in the Gulf Coast tourist town decided they had had their fill.

The Pissed-off Poor Appalachian White. . .

2009-08-12T15:18:00.004-04:00

Here's something to think about: how many pissed-off middle and lower-class people, not just Appalachian natives, are out there? Quite a few, I'd guess. And we don't have to wonder about how they feel, because articles like this one by Kai Wright make the whole shooting match pretty clear. Thanks to Connie May Fowler who made me aware of this on Facebook.

If ever there was a “teachable moment” about race in modern America, now is it. With the birthers and the reparations conspiracy theories and the Nazi imagery at health care meetings, someone’s gotta explain why all these white folks are wilding out. We need an articulate, impassioned race man to clarify things. But not Al Sharpton; I say pass the mic to Jim Webb.

Remember way back when Webb, a Democratic senator from Virginia and the voice of Appalachia’s neglected white yeoman, was sniffing around a veep nod? In the midst of that media moment, he hit on an idea we’d do well to dwell upon. “Black America and Scots-Irish America are like tortured siblings,” Webb patiently explained to Pat Buchanan in a May 2008 Morning Joe appearance on MSNBC. “There’s a saying in the Appalachian mountains. … ‘If you're poor and white, you’re out of sight.’”
More.

My Friend is Dying, fiction by Matt Baker

2009-08-10T11:24:00.004-04:00

It didn’t take long for word to get around that our buddy Pooter was dying of lung cancer. Some of the guys got to talking one day and decided we should drive the four hours to go and visit him. Earl knew where Pooter lived so we agreed to meet at his house around eight on Saturday morning. I hadn’t talked to Earl in six years. But I had called him up and he gave me directions to his house and told me he’d drive the lead car down to Pooter’s.

I’m early and Earl is wiping Armor-all on his tires and I’m inside talking to his wife, waiting for the rest of the guys to show up. I’m watching Earl through the kitchen window.

“He sure loves his truck, doesn’t he?” I say.

“That’s about all he loves.”

“Yeah, I’d say you’re right about that.”

She hands me a cup of coffee and I watch the bouncing under her night-shirt. Now, that’s a pair. That’s what my dad would say if he were here with me. He’s long dead. Lung cancer. The same death Pooter is about to take.

Earl comes into the kitchen. “You’re driving your car too, right?”

“Yes Earl, you can pack in two more in the front of your truck and I can take a total of four in my sedan.” The sedan I’ve had for fifteen years. My grandmother left it to me when she died. She smoked cigarettes but lung cancer didn’t get her. She was knocked down dead by another sedan out in front of her house, while checking her mailbox one day.

Earl’s wife looks out the window. “That’s the same car you had in high school.”

“You remember that car?” I ask.

“Of course.”

“No, I mean do you really remember that car?”

She thinks for a minute, pours more coffee into my cup. Then she looks right through me. “I forgot all about that night.”

Earl comes back inside and asks what all the giggling is about. I wipe the smirk off my face and tell his wife she makes good coffee.

“Thanks,” she says and smiles like it’s her birthday.

“Look,” Earl says.

“What?”

“Well, so where is everybody?”

“I don’t know, Earl; we may be driving down by our twosome.”

“Looks that way.”

Earl’s wife picks up the coffee pot, “More coffee, gentlemen?”

Earl and I sit down at the kitchen table, glancing outside from time to time. Earl’s picking at the grease on his fingers and I’m watching his wife prance in and out of the kitchen.

“You boys going to drink coffee all day or get a move on?”

Earl looks at me. I shrug my shoulders.

“I’m going down the street and give Stewart his 5/16th back,” he tells us.

Earl’s wife tells me she’s going to go take a shower.

“Can I come along?” I say jokingly. She gives me a naughty-naughty point of the finger. Then she says yes.

His wife takes all her clothes off in front of me without hesitation. She holds a foot in midair, under the flow of the water. She doesn’t look the same as I remember her. But then again, that was more than ten years ago, a long time ago. I don’t even remember her name.

“Aren’t you coming in?”

“Oh yeah. Sure. Be right there.”

I sneak a peek down the hallway and close the bathroom door. She has the shower curtain pulled back so I can watch. That’s how some girls are. Half would die if you saw them naked no matter how good they look. The other half wants you to stare no matter how awful they look.

“Do you know what cancer looks like?”

“What?”

“Come here a second, I want to show you something,” she says. “I got this thingy down there, a bump, here take a look.”

She pulls back the rest of the shower curtain, angles the shower head towards the wall to keep water from spraying onto the already mildewed floor.

“Do you see it?”

I have no idea what I am looking at. Her belly button is there and her hair is where it should be, it looks normal to me. She’s working her fingers down there, trying to get at something.

“You know,” I tell her, “you should probably let a doctor check it out.”

“I know, but I just wanted your opinion. Earl won’t even look at me down there, let alone touch me.”

“Right, hmm.”

I hear Earl’s truck start up outside. He’s gunning the engine. Then it stops. He guns it again.

“What is he doing out there?” she asks.

“Hey! Aren’t you a little worried, if Earl happens to come in here and sees us like this?”

“Not really.”

“That would’ve been my guess.”

Then she kisses me.

The thing you have to remember is that our friend Pooter is dying and we’re supposed to be going to visit him. Poor guy is only twenty-nine and he’s already got cancer splattered every which way. The doctor said it started in his lungs. When I first heard the news, I wasn’t surprised. Pooter was the only kid in our high school who had a smokers cough. The guy smoked two packs a day. I feel bad though. He always said, he’d quit when he turned thirty. Even when we were younger, he’d say, “Hey, I know this is bad for me, but I’m going to quit when I’m thirty, before I get the cancer.” Poor fucking Pooter.

The phone rings. Earl’s wife stops kissing me and listens. I listen too, even though I don’t know what I’m listening for. It rings, rings, and rings. “Get it,” she says.

“Who me?”

“Yeah, you, Earl’s outside.”

“This isn’t my house.”

“Just get the damn phone.”

“Okay, okay.”

I pick up the phone.

“Earl?” the voice says.

“No, this isn’t Earl.”

“Sorry, wrong number.”

“No, no, wait! You got the right number.”

“Earl!?”

“No, this isn’t Earl.”

“Then I have the wrong number if you ain’t Earl, asshole.” I recognize the voice.

“Half Pint?” I say.

“Yeah this is H.P., who is this?”

“This is Tom.”

“Oh shit, I was looking for you.”

“Where are you?” I smile, relieved that this who’s-who has been resolved.

“At home.”

“What about Poot?”

“Not going to make it today, I’ve got the funny shits so bad it ain’t worth it.”

“All right, thanks for the call. We’re about on our way out.”

Half Pint starts to say something else, he pauses, then I hear this groan, a loud, and obnoxious, anyhow I hang up the phone and look out the window. Earl’s underneath his truck. I walk back into the bathroom.

“Who was that?”

“H.P.”

She’s got a robe on and is drying her hair.

“What did he want?”

“Not going to make the trip.”

“Look, no one else is going, haven’t you figured that out already?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

She leaves the bathroom.

“Where you going?”

“Bedroom,” she smiles, “coming with?”

“Oh yeah. Sure. Be right there.”

Half Pint is pathetic. The guy worms out of everything, usually on the account of an imaginary illness. The funny shits is a new one though. He’s the oldest and the biggest of the group we all run with. He used to play football in high school, defensive end. A couple of colleges recruited him but he never left town, not for one play. He was kind of the star in town back in the late 80’s, early 90’s. Dumber than a doorknob but all the folks in town still loved him. He got written up in the papers a few times. When Skipton Wells, the local sports reporter, asked why he should get offered a scholarship to play Division I ball, Half Pint offered up that he could “jump real high” and “memorized the play book four times.” How do you memorize something four times? I don’t know either. Anyhow, his name. We call him half pint because that’s all it takes him to get fall down drunk. Funny how that works. It’s always the scrawny, wiry, big ‘ole-ball-cap-too-big for-their-head wearing ones that can drink 19 beers in a sitting and can still drive home during a snowstorm in reverse.

One thing though, Half Pint can bounce some skulls together. This guy could punch grits out of grandma. That’s why we still lug him around with us. There’s trouble everywhere, never know when it will pop up. That’s why H.P. comes along. One more thing on the scrawny guys, they can’t fight for shit. They talk about being quick and jab this and jab that but to tell you the truth, in a real fight, it takes one punch to win it. One punch to turn the tide of the fight and usually it’s the bigger guy. Enough about H.P., our friend is dying.

In the bedroom, Earl’s wife is naked again. The robe is on the floor and she is combing her long blond hair in the mirror.

“Do you know that Earl can’t give me an orgasm?”

“Uh, no. I don’t recall Earl mentioning that to me actually.”

“He can’t even do it with his mouth. I mean most guys can at least do that.”

“Uh, huh.”

“You can, can’t you?”

“Can what?”

“Are you playing stupid on purpose or you really this slow?”

“Look, uh. Earl could come inside at any minute.”

“Uh huh.” She continues combing her hair, watching me in the mirror. For lack of anything better to do I lay down on the bed. Then I hear Earl’s voice. He’s calling for her. Honey? Honey? Honey? “In here, Cupcakes,” she shouts. Cupcakes?

Earl politely stands outside the bedroom door.

“Honey, have you see Tom?”

“He’s in here.”

“What’s he doing in there?”

I look at Honey. She ignores me.

“What are you doing?” I whisper to her.

“Oh, relax.”

“The door is open, Cupcakes.” Earl opens the door.

“What’s going on?” Earl asks. I stand up off the bed.

“Nothing.”

“Cupcakes, Tom was asking why you can’t bring me to climax.”

“What’s that mean?” Earl asks.

Honey snaps her fingers to get my attention, “See what I mean?”

I tell Earl about HP and all he has to say about it is, “He’s got the funny what?” About that time the doorbell rings. I figure this is our out. One more shows and we’re gone. But it’s a little girl with a box of cookies in her hand. Earl invites her in and eats the little girls’ entire box of samples. “Sir, this is just to show you what they look like, they’re not really for you to eat.” Earl tells her whatever they are he wants more of them. “You place an order and I come back in a year with your cookies,” she explains. Earl fishes for some bills out of his wallet; the girl prefers checks but takes his cash. At the end of the sidewalk is the little girl’s mother. As she walks back down toward the street, I hear the girl tell her mother, “That guy ate my whole sample box. We got to go home and get another one.”

“He ate the whole thing?” The mother shakes her head and looks up at me. I wave at her and smile.

“So what are we going to do? We going or not?” Earl is getting impatient.

I look at the clock; it’s a little past ten.

“Where does the time go?” Earl asks. I tell Earl that time doesn’t actually go anywhere. It’s just the clock that makes it seem that way. “Yeah anyhow, get on the phone and see where everyone is at, I got other shit I could be doing.” His wife steps in, “Go do your shit Earl, when you all go, you go, until then get out of the house and do your shit.”

“Fine then, I’ll be back in an hour or so,” and Earl leaves.

His truck really roars. Earl hauls off down the street. Then we hear the screeching of brakes. “What in the world?” I start to run to a window.

“It’s nothing. Earl and I have lived here nine years and he still forgets there’s a stop sign at the end of the street.” His wife struts off to the bedroom where she removes her robe, which she had temporarily put on when Earl came to the room and then kept it on for decency sake when the little girl with the cookies banged on the door. I stand outside the open bedroom door.

“So how are things going, Tom?”

“Fine.”

“Just fine?”

She’s putting lipstick on.

“Yeah, fine.”

“Your wife?”

“She’s fine too.”

“I hadn’t seen her in years, what’s her name again?”

“Connie.”

“That’s right, the little redhead?”

“That’s the one.”

“Tell me something,” she says stepping into a pair of black heels.

“Nice outfit, is that all of it?” I ask.

“I knew you’d like it.”

“Tell me something,”

“What’s that?”

“Promise me you won’t tell anyone what happens.”

“What happens, when?”

“I don’t want Earl to find out, it’d break his heart.”

“Find out about?”

“About us.”

Earl thought it was strange that my hair was wet when he came back an hour and a half later. “Just jumped in the shower real quick, that’s all,” I explained to him. “Not have a shower where you live?” Earl is quick. Not quick enough though.

His wife is making lunch and Earl was surprised to find out I hadn’t made any phone calls. I was worried about Earl’s toothbrush. I had used it after my shower. People say they can smell sex, so I figured a shower would erase all pheromone indicators that could still be floating around in the bedroom or anywhere else for that matter. His wife cautioned that I needed to brush my teeth, you smell, she told me. Like sex? I asked, looking for a toothbrush in the drawer. No, like me. I had never done this before. Not in all the years I’ve been married, never even close. I’ve known Earl as long as I’ve had the sedan.

We sit down to eat lunch.

“Looks like it’s just you and me buddy,” Earl says, chewing on a huge bite.

“Yeah, I don’t know Earl. I don’t think I’m up to it.”

“Come on, we got to go see Poot.”

“I don’t know.”

His wife stands up, grabs some pickles out of the refrigerator. She sets them on the table. Earl is studying me.

“We have to go see him. The guy may not be around much longer.”

I look at his wife. Then I look at Earl.

“I don’t want to.”

Earl’s wife says, “Jesus Tom. Y’alls good friend is dying. You haven’t seen him in how long? And you don’t want to go?”

“No shit, the guy’s dying, Tom,” Earl adds.

“I don’t have it in me,” I tell the both of them.

“What does that mean?” Earl asks. We sit in silence and eat our lunch. Earl keeps giving me this pissed off look. His wife is doing the same.

“It won’t kill you to go see Poot,” his wife says balancing a kosher dill between her fingers.

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

Earl gets up, so does his wife. They drop their plates into the kitchen sink. “I’m going to go see him, you going or not?” When I don’t say anything, he darts out of the kitchen. His wife goes into the bedroom. I hear his truck start up. Then I hear the screeching of the brakes. Then I hear the phone ring. Then I hear her heels clicking in the hallway, coming closer and closer, when I turn around, I hear, “You’re a real asshole, you know that?”

Matt Baker lives in Arkansas. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cimarron Review, Santa Clara Review, FRiGG, and elsewhere. His work has not been translated into any languages.

The Corporeal Chromium Anti-Dowsers Of Elliott Bay, by Dennis Mahagin

2009-08-05T00:17:00.004-04:00

After eight straight sunny days, with bare clavicles

pink-tinted as candy canes, Pike Street people keep

thinking positive in wrap-around Vuarnet

sunglasses, especially

the Wallingford gals with teardrop frames

and pinafores, down at the Public Fish Market.

Rhinestone barnacles cling to their lens rims,

they call the hop sing sushi boys by Blues Bro names, curtsy,

and drop their granny glasses an inch below the nose bridge,

rifling buckskin, pushing sound around:

Hey, you’re awful cute Jake,

but what does it take for a Seattle girl

to get some Sockeye?

Wallingford babes chew Bubblicious, they’ve come to soak

sun, and watch the flying fishes. Meanwhile, Ray-Ban Ninjas

nod and grin, tossing king salmon back and forth

like Sumo medicine balls.

Outside, on the pier, for the eighth straight day,

two mimes pray like manta rays, with twin monocle mirrors

for catching the sun glint, slippery as sequins wrapped in upside-

down ok signs. Dad's what I'm talkin' about! cries a five-year old

boy, perched on the shoulders of a poker-faced Akroyd clone.

Pike Street people

have got to believe; they High-Five, holding

their iced lattes at arm's length, careful not to spill

a sweet drop of this drought. Back up the Pike,

photogenic Filipinos take butcher’s block choppers to a row

of slimy Cohos, while the Wallingford girls get ready to go:

Awwwww, Mary, just SO! . . . See it thru,

see the world, Rose! Now. . . let’s wrap it up

for sunny Sally. . . Just one more time, Joe!

Dennis Mahagin is a writer from the state of Washington. His poems and stories appear in magazines such as Exquisite Corpse, 3 A.M., 42opus, Thieves Jargon, Juked, Storyglossia, Absinthe Literary Review, Pequin, Keyhole, FRiGG, Rumble Microfiction, Underground Voices, and Stirring: A Literary Collection. A first book of his poems, entitled Grand Mal, is forthcoming from Rebel Satori Press.

Southern Appalachian English from the University of South Carolina

2009-08-03T09:53:00.006-04:00

I don't want to take away from Gabriel's great story, but I had to post this, which is a nifty resource for hearing Appalachian speech (if you don't already live there or don't hear it regularly).

Welcome to this website on the speech of one of America's most often misunderstood regions - southern and central Appalachia, which stretches from north Georgia to West Virginia. It's been romanticized as the language of Shakespeare, and it's been caricatured, ridiculed, and dismissed as uneducated, bad grammar, or worse. But too rarely has it been appreciated for what it is: the native speech of millions of Americans that has a distinctive history and that makes Appalachia what it is just as sure as the region's music does.

Dig Well, by Gabriel Orgrease

2009-08-03T01:02:00.006-04:00

For all the wells which his father's servants had digged in the days of Abraham his father, the Philistines had stopped them, and filled them with earth. Genesis 26:15

Damn, I hate August. . . hot, humid, stinking dead days entombed in boredom. Dead summer, an armpit-perspiring stink. Worm fodder doldrums. August here is a burning pisshole.

Discussed with the family when Pop suggests —as he suggests many projects—that we dig out the old stone well in the back yard. Enthusiastic, I am for it this time, it fits me. For one, I like to dig holes, and then, it keeps me out of trouble to go along and do whatever.

Don’t go down to that place, I say inside, but I can’t help myself. My earliest memory of Pop we are at the kitchen table eating and we are joking and laughing and he throws a washcloth at me. You can say it happened then and not now, it is the past and over, and I should not talk like it is happening right now, but whenever I remember, it is just like it is happening all again, I’m afraid inside and want to escape. The cloth strikes me in the eyes and I laugh. I throw it back at him. It is a worn brown washcloth thin with holes and slightly damp with his hand sweat. It strikes him on the mouth. I throw it back at him, laughing at our game, like he has thrown it at me with the force of a child. Not funny. Pop swings with the back of his heavy arm and hits me in the head. I am knocked out of the chair onto the floor. I am not allowed to cry. A strong boy never cries. I hold my lips, they want to break.

Desperate for two wells. Pop argues. The house well beneath the garage is hardly good for one shower per day. We cannot use the new Kenmore dishwasher without waiting an hour to flush the toilet, before and after. I’m sick of washing dishes in the sink, my chore. No labor saved, we are thirsty half our lives. With budget we could have a well drilled hundreds of feet deep through gray mud and boulders to the aquifer above the clay line. (Money, who has money for sensible stuff? We live on onions, kidney beans and ground chuck. We collect food in the woods like it was a convenience store. He buys a Cadillac.) Drill a well for good water, more of what we already get, or. . . run into sulfur water like our neighbors. Sulfur. A stench all year of bad eggs, drill a well and then sulfur.

Depression. August. At the homestead well ring near the garden, fat Pop splays in his lawn chair. Nearby, I cut brown sod, repeating an old beginning. The stones uncovered look like a fire ring, the opposite of the water ring that these stones are. I struggle, with my ratty sneakers slipping on the shoulders of a shovel blade. I jump up and sink down, alternately swatting black no-see-ums that want to sting my eyeballs. I do not know what Pop is thinking, straining the nylon strapping of the chair, diddling around with a recent copy of Clutch wrapped in Popular Science.

He says, “Son, you have to lean into the shovel when you break ground.” I lean my very hardest, and break a skinny wind.

Down we dig, then dig more, and dig again. The sun recedes into a radiant halo above my head, a 40W light bulb slowly diminished by a rheostat, or a candle sputtering as the wick sucks up the very final drop of wax. Dimness of lost light. Everything burrows down to darkness, while Pop explains stuff. Pop, his mind wandering into the fading sun of a dead August wind, drones on camped there, describing amazing wonders of the modern universe. Above me the last gasp of an aperture to the 4th dimension. I burrow. More days pass digging. I am clumsy with tools. I want to dig with my hands and sharpened sticks, claw the deep blanket of earth with my teeth. Just me and solid ground.

Days go subterranean, burrowing into the coolness of earth. Progress slowly downward day by day into a mayfly cocoon of stone. In dimmer and dimmer light I scratch mud and fibrous roots from within the circle of glacial-deposit boulders. As if they were here, those pioneers that planted our apple, lilac and quince trees, I join them in this digging.

Drops down the ladder, every morning. I climb down. Pop pulls the ladder back up. I dig with a rusty trowel, a hammer, and a Chock Full O’Nuts coffee can. Earth beneath bare feet, cold feeling to squiggly toes. Crouching in this shirtless hole, abysmal. Then mole farther downward. Fill the coffee can with loosened earth—with it, crouch over and fill a tin bale bucket. Pop, when he is there at the top, pulls the clothesline rope. A tin din is echoed off the sides of the stone tube as the bucket weight rises. Some dirt escapes from the bucket and filters down through the dim light, landing on my head. A centipede crawls on the back of my neck.

Dirt, I love dirt. Snuff of dirt. Sucking out the brown-caked crust under bloody fingernails between dry lips. Sifting it through the hair, scratching my head. The funk smell of dirt clogged in my nostrils. Any time, digging well or no well, I suck and squirm and roll and bathe in dirt. When Pop is not there to pull up the bucket I wait alone and am happy with the dirt and imagine. There are no productive discoveries in an imagination frozen with fear of life, but a constant returning to the same aborted hole.

Thirst of life. Digging past everything, all the scenery down there. I look upwards to the sunlight, and Pop sits there in his regal paternity talking to the hole in the yard. On occasion he remembers to let down the wooden ladder. I ascend. Drink raspberry bug juice. “Piss in the woods, Son. Save on the well.” Pop spreads his weight and basks in the lawn chair, sweating in his shorts, and gives educational pronouncements to the hole in the yard. “I killed a man in Korea. I was lying at night in a hole I had dug, freezing in the cold, when this Chinese came out over me to kill and I stabbed him with the bayonet. We were just there on the land with nothing and we dug a hole.”

Destination eternity. I’m no longer sure what direction to go in, like a beaver trapped in an amusement park cage: eternity. At Bible class they tell us about God the Father and Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit, a trinity. Quite a big project, this beginning and end of everything. I quickly learn not to say what I think. I do not want to blow it. I learn from Mrs. Meyers in Bible class that God may speak to you, but you don’t talk back. You never throw in the towel with God. Are there times when nobody gets the complete message? Or am I alone? Even when you are sitting at the table for the chicken dinner in the church basement and people are easy with each other and laughing, you behave yourself and take a small glass of water when the pitcher is passed. Reaching out, there is nothing but pain.

Digging a hole. Whenever I surface, the smelly neighbor kids tease, “Esek is digging a hole to China.” I don’t know where China is, but now I want to be there if that is where the hole goes. With all Pop’s other projects on the property, I also hear about Orientals. Pop says, “In China they would put one hundred coolies on your job. It would be done in one day.” Pop says he knows torments that I will never know. Hiding in the well I am one alone. There are only so many days in August. In time I will escape, though the velocity of pain is forever.

Down past the layer of worms. Remnants of a rusty hinge and a broken medicine bottle, things that I finger and turn over and examine before sending the fragments upward for further scrutiny and classification and the comment, “Keep digging.” Down past my own height. The earth towers over as I reach out from side to side, not quite able to stretch fully, confined within the tube of boulders, some larger than my belly, some smaller. I will find this water. Down I dream, and down I dig in dreaming to the core of the world or beyond, downward in search of muddy water. Like any other immigrant to here, I am mud-hogging the stone lining of a dark womb. After a lengthy silence Pop shows up. “How does it look down there?”

Dark, divining thoughts. The ladder hardly reaches this day’s work. There is no clue as to how deep this well will go or how deep it will have to be to give up life and find us water. The digging continues. Pop is distracted: we are too close to success, and success is to be avoided at all cost. He goes back to the house to watch an Abbott & Costello movie on the new color television. He does not stay with any one project for very long. If we do not arrive soon at the end of a task, he changes direction. When I follow him we are always going in circles, like the circle of the stone in this darkness. We never know when we will find water, or food, or money—but we keep on in this searching.

“Death and taxes,” is what Pop says. Yet some of us keep digging. Some of us go off in the woods looking for another hole to talk to. Some of us wander around looking for a hole that will deliberate, that will respond when spoken to, that will give up answers. Some of us keep digging despite the fact that all we find is a replenished source of dirt and murky water.

Diverted to another search, Pop comes back in the afternoon and tells me about this atomic scientist, Edward Teller, talking on the television. I do not know who Mr. Teller is. Pop says he blows things up for a living, like dynamite, but I know “atomic” means that. All the kids know about the bomb. I wonder, listening to Pop speaking from the top of my hole, how many days Mr. Teller would spend digging his well whether Mr. Teller hates August as much as I do. Does Mr. Teller wash his dishes by hand in the kitchen while looking out the window above the sink and dreaming of escape? Pop says we can turn the well into a bomb shelter if we do not find water. I go back to picking, with a piece of broken tree limb, at the pungent soil compacted in the spaces between boulders of sandstone and gneiss, feeling with my fingers the coldness of laid stone. I wonder how old this well is.

Delivered as fifteen days for fifteen years, on the afternoon it is about the sixth hour of digging, as when Isaac's servants came and told him, “We have found water.” It springs up suddenly between my toes. At first I am not sure what is happening. I see brown water mixed with mud. Then I am excited, an everlasting spring. It appears slowly between two stones and then rapidly increases in flow to fight for clearness, to be free of mud. The heel of my foot is now wet. The well is deep, and without the ladder I have no way to climb out. I yell for Pop. My ankles are muddy, and the water is cold. I call for Pop some more. There is no answer from above. My knees are shivering. I’m screaming, for no answer. The water is cold, around my waist. Praying, I think about floating to the top. I think about climbing the stones. I am thirsty and wet, all at once. There is nothing more to dig, as the water ascends. Now my shoulders are shivering. Pop finally sets the ladder down.

Drenched, I climb up. My hair is wet, and my breath is labored. He shows me a puffball mushroom that he just found in the woods. Cut open, the inside looks like white brains. He says that when it is fried in bacon fat it tastes like hamburger. I pay attention and wonder what the lesson behind all this is going to be. He is an artful cook, learned it in the Army. I tell him about the water. “Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.”

Disengaged, Pop leans over toward the hole and says he is worried. “It smells like shit. Too close to the septic tank. I think we should fill it in. You did a good job, though. I’ll say that. You dig well. A real good job.” I stoop perplexed next to the well hole, basking in the depth of my accomplishment and Pop’s pride. I want to slam a rock into his head. I’m no longer sure what direction to go in, like a beaver trapped in an amusement park cage. Trapped. Sometimes I think it is just not good to follow too close to Pop. Silently I want to slip away behind him into the woods and take a leak, then climb a pine tree to the top and watch the wind above the world, from one of those places where he cannot follow. Holding to the topmost crown, the last limb, with pitch stuck to my hands. I will never come down, until supper.

Pissed, I stick around and help Pop pull up the ladder, and then I begin to fill the hole. The trowel and coffee can, my digging tools, are left down there, to await a future excavation. The wood tools float on the surface, rising, fake battleships, which I pretend to explode and drown by dropping shovels of earth on them. The sound of a released dirt storm splashes and echoes within as it is dropped from the spade.

I do not dig a hole to China. There is no climax. I do not explode. I go inward. The dumb motion of work takes me.

Pop goes off somewhere into the basement to play with the wah-wah pedal on his electric guitar. Oddly, shoveling the dirt back into the well does not take me enough days to notice. I work mornings and evenings to avoid the heat. I take little notice that the midges have gone to sting other eyes.

On some days there are thunderstorms, lightning and rain striking the earth around us, and the air chills, though only for short snaps. Pop decides to trade for a cheap horse, a black stallion that will let nobody but Pop ride him. We stable it in the garage above the good well.

In time I pretend it was not such a bad thing to fill in the old well. I went down behind the first diggers until I found water, and now I follow others in the act of refilling the well once again. In the Bible they stopped talking about digging wells and giving them these really weird names once everyone had their fill of drink. I’m still thirsty.

Today Pop talks about building an experimental airplane, but I am not so interested in crashing. I’m learning to shovel horse manure and lime it. We still take care to not flush the toilet and run the dishwasher at the same time.

September is a cooler month.

Gabriel Orgrease dug out the well in Besemer, near to Brooktondale, near to Slaterville and Caroline, NY. If you check on a map that is up north for Appalachia that thereabouts is pronounced different than in the south. It is like almost another place but it still has rocks, cricks and woods and hills. He likes to play with stones. He now lives on Long Island very close to the Atlantic. When it rains heavy or snow melts his basement floods without his having to do any work. Though he does not love flat land he has got a bit used to it.

If Only it Had Rained Cats and Dogs, fiction by John Sharp

2009-07-28T11:23:00.007-04:00

When hurricane Katrina finished burying New Orleans it swept up the central United States, turning into thunderstorms that dumped rain and hail on the Midwest, and ultimately dropping an alligator into the backyard of Joe Pringle of Wingett Run, Ohio, which promptly ate his Yorkie, Puddles, who was out for a potty break. Joe saw the whole thing from the porch, where he was having a cigarette since Lucy banned smoking from the house after her lung biopsy came back negative.

Joe grabbed the baseball bat he kept by the door and headed out to have a chat with the "murdering bastard." The alligator was only four feet long but that was plenty big enough to make Joe slow down halfway there and reconsider. Standing in the pouring rain he decided a gun would be better, and he went in the house to find his deer rifle.

"You're tracking mud all over," Lucy said. "Get back in the kitchen and take off those shoes."

"Can't," Joe said, "an alligator ate Puddles." Then he disappeared into the basement.

"What?" Lucy yelled down the stairs.

Joe came up a minute later with his .280 Remington, shoving the magazine into place. "A goddamn alligator ate Puddles."

Lucy's eyes popped wide and she followed Joe to the back yard, screaming. The alligator was pretty much where Joe left it and he got close enough for a good shot.

"Are you sure?"

Joe nodded. "I saw."

Lucy fell to her knees and sobbed. Joe had gotten Puddles for her when she thought she had cancer, to give her something besides herself to look after. The first thing the puppy did when he brought her home was pee on Lucy's foot. Joe laughed and took Puddles outside for the first of a thousand such times. He'd let her loose in the yard while he sat on the porch enjoying a smoke, letting his thoughts wander into territories bright and dark. For the few days they waited for the test results they were mostly dark, and with tears in his eyes he begged God to let Lucy live. He promised God he'd give anything. Anything.

"Where'd he come from?" Lucy cried.

"He fell from the sky."

"God sent us an alligator."

"God didn't send us no alligator."

"It's like one of the plagues of Moses," she said, "like the frogs."

Joe grimaced. "He's not from God, he's from Louisiana. Storm must have scooped him up and carried him all the way here. I saw a show about cows and tornadoes once."

The rain fell harder and it was difficult for Joe to get a good bead on him. Joe moved closer and the gator swung around to face him. Joe retreated.

"What if he swallowed Puddles whole?" Lucy said. "What if Puddles is still alive in there?"

"I don't think so," Joe said.

"Did he chew him up?"

Joe couldn't remember. "It happened so fast," he said.

"You got to shoot him," Lucy said. "You got to shoot him and open him up. You got to do it right now before Puddles suffocates."

Joe tried to figure out how he'd dispose of an alligator. Maybe chop him up and put him in bags. Or bury him. Or take him to the lake and dump him. Just then the alligator decided to make a break for the neighbor's yard.

"Go get my hunting knife," Joe said. He turned, aimed and put two rounds into the alligator's head. He dragged him behind the garage and Lucy brought him the knife. Joe sliced him open from end to end and reached inside. He found a big lump that must have been the stomach and made a slit in the side of it. Puddles tumbled out. Joe picked him up and shook him—he only weighed four pounds. Puddles was lifeless and wet, and smelled like he'd been dead a month. Joe tried again and squeezed the dog's chest but nothing happened. He looked at Lucy and shook his head. Lucy cried as the rain drove harder than ever and washed the alligator's blood into the muddy lawn.

Joe looked to the sky. The rain beat on his eyes and he couldn't hold them open, but he didn't want to close them either, didn't want to get hit in the head with another alligator or whatever else the monster storm decided to drag along with it. Finally he covered the alligator and Puddles with a tarp weighed down with rocks, and took Lucy inside where they changed out of their wet clothes and climbed into bed.

Lucy could smell Joe's smoky breath and she wanted a cigarette. She wanted to take long drags and hold them in until the nicotine filled her bloodstream, until she felt like she used to before Puddles and before the cancer scare.

She turned her head toward Joe. "All I know is Puddles didn't deserve to be eaten by no alligator."

Joe held Lucy in his arms while tears filled his eyes. He had thanked God a hundred times since the good news, but that was before the bill came due. Tonight he simply hoped that was all he owed.

F. John Sharp lives just west of the foothills of Appalachia in Ah-hi-a, as they sometimes say. His poetry and prose have appeared in numerous online and print publications, including GUD, Salt River Review, Hobart, Pindeldyboz, Flashquake and Eclectica and he hopes you'll go to at least one of those sites to check them out. He is a little behind on building a web site, but asks you to check fjohnsharp.com every single day until he gets it finished, even if it takes years. If it says no such web site exists, take a few minutes to stare at the blank screen and contemplate his alligator story. (The photo was taken in 1959 when he was 2).

Justice Boys, by Sheryl Monks

2009-07-24T15:50:00.010-04:00

Rita takes the baby, still screaming, from the tub of water, lays him on his back on the floor between her legs, kneads his stomach, fit to burst, with her fingers. Beside them, shards of soap, homemade suppositories. His face the color of cranberries, tonsils raging, he stiffens, bucks when she tries lifting his legs. She is forced to pry him open like a frozen chicken, and even then, the soap does no good, brings neither of them relief.

“Stand away from the windows,” she tells the girls, but won’t let them leave the room. They want to watch The Wonderful World of Disney, but Rita has lit the front room only as much as she has to. “Rock your babies,” she says. “They’re sleepy.”

“Mine has a bellyache,” the younger one says, asking for a piece of soap, going to work on the doll when Rita says it’s okay, anything to keep quiet. Jesse, the eldest, does not offer to take up her doll. She pulls her sister to the floor covered in Cheerios, bribes her with toy bottles of orange juice. She turns the bottle up to the doll’s mouth, watches the fluid inside disappear. “Not orange juice,” the littler one says. “Castor oil.” Her brother’s cries do not faze her like they do her mother.

The baby, five weeks old, lays down hard on his scream, though now his throat tightens in a hushed blue choke that scares Rita more than the locked bowels, more than the Justice boys outside.

Arjay is still gone with Kenny, but the Duster’s in the yard, and that’s what draws them, firing their shots now and again at the bag of dog food leaning next to the house or at the tulip-shaped retreads Arjay cut up to hem in the peonies.

They leave the car alone, useless to her as the soap. Useless as Arjay, gone again as always, sometimes three and four days. This time, he takes Kenny and Jimbo and a stick of dynamite Kenny swiped from Litwar. Kenny is half senseless, especially when he’s drinking and that’s always. He tells Arjay they’re going to finish this thing tonight, but lot of good that does Rita now with them outside, the one Justice boy Arjay took a pool stick to at Lucy’s making turkey calls. Leon. Rita got a good look at him at Easter, up at the park, when they came driving by slow and pulled their van over by the slides where they could watch the kids.

Leon’s dull eyes had followed the kids running across the grass, jostling pink and green baskets too big for some. He’d singled out Rita’s girls tripping in the hems of their long dresses, the littler one squatting down in a frustrated heap, crying. He knew Rita saw him watching, knew Arjay was watching, too. He’d stuck a gray, leathered arm scabbed over with newly needled tattoos out the window of the van and pointed out Jesse and Sis to his kin with him there inside the van.

Arjay had glared at Leon and turned back to Kenny and Jimbo and the rest, all fisted up in a huddle, drawing hard on their cigarettes, issuing silent death threats over their shoulders.
Leon had got a good look at Rita, too, she was sure, wearing polyester pants and sitting on top a picnic table smoking a Kool. When she saw Leon, she’d scraped the fire off the end of it against the cement table and laid the butt down for later. Half in shadow, his arm draping the side of the van, Leon had smiled, rubbed his hand on the door panel like it might have been Rita’s ass and let go a lunatic laugh out the opened black window of the van to where she sat, crossing her arms, hunching forward. The wind had been chapping the kids’ cheeks and fingers all morning, but she’d left them alone. Leon leaned out the window, into the full sun, made a peace sign, then laid his fingers over his mouth and tongued the V that represented Rita.

She gave him the finger, and then Leon laid down on the horn that issued forth a tinny version of reveille and the kids stopped searching for the lucky egg and looked, panic-stricken, toward the van at the edge of the woods. Leon gunned the engine and balled tire marks over the pavement. “We’re watching!” he called out, and the panel doors swung open wide now to show their number. Rita knew it wasn’t even half of them, but still it must’ve been six, seven maybe.

Harley, the youngest, had stood behind Leon’s seat, his bare, muscled arms fixed overhead, braced against the van’s ceiling to keep from being thrown. His jaw was set and showed the same worry Rita felt. After a minute or two of being taunted by the other men inside the van, he was coaxed into throwing glass bottles against the road as they’d been doing, but Rita sensed that Harley had values prevailing over the bonds of kinship. He shared the hollowed face of his relatives, the same sharp nose, same deep-set eyes. But the flesh on his back was clean, like his dark, shaggy hair and the whites of his eyes.

Arjay and Kenny and Jimbo and the others had gone back to their vehicles and stood like sentinels around the perimeter of the park. Leon stopped the van suddenly in front of Rita and swung an arm out the window, his filthy fingers grazing her blouse. She jerked away, but still they were close enough now to pull her into the opened door of the van if they’d wanted. Rita’s eyes searched for Harley, but he’d been slung deeper into the group toward the rear of the vehicle. The others stood in his place, each of them with their eyes locked on Rita’s body, some gesturing blowjobs or fondling themselves to put the fear in her. They knew better than to do anything though. There were more guns in that park than at Appomattox.

Inside the house now, Rita almost wishes they’d come in and see for themselves that Arjay’s not there. But not really.

The baby has squalled himself into a stupor. He has Arjay’s light hair, broad forehead. Rita imagines it full grown, under a carbide light like the one her daddy wore. She can still smell it, still see the buckets of water he carried with him.

Arjay’s own wet-cell battery and hardhat hang permanently on a peg by the door with his miner’s belt. She’d nearly cried when she washed up his dinner bucket and put it away.
Wildcat strikes have shut down the mines, and this time, Arjay told Rita, he hopes they stick it to the coal bosses good. Carter can order them back in under Taft-Hartley all he wants, he says, but he’ll not scab work. Not even if their food stamps are taken. Not even if he’s left hunting scrap iron for the rest of his born days.

That’s what started things with the Justice boys. Arjay and Jimbo had been driving up and down hollers looking for pieces of scrap iron to sell to Luther Linny over in Mile Branch. Arjay said they drove deep into Mingo County, found themselves in nameless backwoods. Drove clear up the top of a mountain. Was about dark by the time they found anything worth salvaging, an old engine block they threw into the trunk and counted as the day’s last.

Arjay says he backed the Duster up onto the bank and turned around. They hadn’t seen house lights before then, but all of a sudden, a truck drew up front of them and about twenty big hosses jumped down off its fenders and started cussing Arjay and Jimbo. One took a crowbar and ripped the chrome off the Duster and then smacked Arjay down across the head with his fist. Then the one that hit him walked around and pried the trunk open, said, “This don’t belong to you” and rolled the scrap iron down into the branch where it could keep on rusting.

When Kenny heard what happened, he said, “Let’s go kill them son-of-a-bitches,” and handed Arjay a stick of dynamite he took off the job. They’d been standing around outside Lucy’s, a tavern Kenny laid up at most of the time. Arjay stood listening to Jimbo retell how the nameless elder Justice had cold-cocked him.

“Yeah,” Arjay said, “but you get one of them pussies alone.”
Leon had pulled into the gravel lot then and walked brazenly into the bar, figuring, they guessed, no one had balls enough to fuck around with any of their clan, lest they wanted hell itself unleashed. Arjay had followed Leon inside and shoved him into a bank of empty stools lining the bar.

“Who the hell!” Leon yelled, grabbing a pool stick. Kenny and Jimbo dragged Leon back toward the pool tables, away from the other drunks, then walked back and sat at the bar and watched the beating Arjay gave Leon with the pool stick he’d taken from him.

When Arjay was satisfied Leon wasn’t getting up again, they lit out of the bar, swaggering. Outside, Kenny reached through the window of the Roadrunner and pulled the dynamite out of the glove box, handed it to Arjay. “Let’s go kill them son-of-a-bitches,” he said.

Arjay turned the explosive over in his hand and nodded.

“Awright,” Kenny said, and the three of them hopped in the car and took off.

But for all Rita knows, Arjay and Kenny and Jimbo could be dead, floating somewhere along Tug River. In a few days, they might wash up like those do who meet up with the Justices.
Right now all she really cares about is working the knots out of her infant son’s belly. He writhes and screams a white-hot holler and Rita sees the face of her younger brother, dying in a jungle in some place called Lang Vei and realizes there is no getting out of this struggle but by death. The baby sweats and bays low now like something wild from that jungle or from this one, like maybe a mountain screamer. But he quits moving, just like Arminta’s baby had, and Rita knows her son has little fight left in him. She grabs him up quick.

“What’s wrong, Mommy?” her eldest daughter asks with an aged little face.

Rita surveys the room, finds the keys to the Duster hanging on the nail by the door. “Nothing, Baby,” she says. “Everything’s awright.” But as she cradles the burning hot infant in her arms, Rita tries to remember when she heard the last shot fired at the porch and can’t. “We’re taking Brother to the clinic.” She hopes a doctor will still see her, now that the medical card is gone, but she has to try. “Stay close to me,” she tells the girls. “When I open the door, y’all climb in the backseat from this side. Okay? This side closest the house.”

“You know how to drive, Mommy?” the littler one asks. “I never seen you drive before. Where’s Daddy?”

“Don’t be scared,” the eldest says, taking her sister by the hand. “Mommy’s a good driver. We go driving all the time. Don’t we, Mommy?”

“That’s right, angel. Now you girls stay behind Mommy and keep quiet as mouses.”

“I can keep quieter than a baby mouse this little,” says the youngest, measuring a size almost imperceptible with her tiny fingers.

Rita considers turning off all the lights, but decides against it, thinking it better not to do anything that might signal the Justice boys. The baby is quiet now, but she is not grateful and half hopes that when the wind hits him, he’ll come screaming back to life. Only the girls wince, though, when the wind lifts the tails of their nightgowns.

“Okay, hurry, hurry, hurry,” whispers Rita, holding open the car door. Then she scooches across the front seat and lays the baby beside her. Holding a hand to his hard belly, she fumbles with the keys, but the car won’t crank. It hops forward, though, and now she is sure the Justice boys are watching.

They’d probably seen her all along. Rita imagines one poking another in the ribs when she came creeping outside with the kids. “Lookey, lookey,” he probably said, digging an old clump of chew from his jowls and packing in new. She hears another birdcall, turkey or duck or some such, and thinks it sounds like Leon maybe.

The clinic is in Welch, thirty miles away, but if she can get through the gears, Rita knows she can steer that car all night if she has to. It is the pedals that bother her. Arjay said to use only one foot for the brake and the gas, but she can’t work the clutch to keep the car idling.

“Jesse, climb up here and keep a hand on Brother for Mommy.”

“I want to,” the younger one whines.

“Awright,” Rita says. “He can ride between you, but don’t be poking him, Sis. He don’t feel good.”

“I know, Mommy. That’s why we’re going to the doctor.”

“That’s right. Now don’t hold his belly too tight. Just keep him from falling in the floor.” Rita looks at her eldest and then out the back windshield into the dark. She tries again to crank the car, talks herself through it once and then somehow they lurch forward.

Behind her a set of headlights come on and she realizes hers are not. “Shit,” she says, twisting knobs until she finds them. She grips the steering wheel with both hands and glances too often in the rearview mirror.

But let them follow her if they want. They only mean to scare her. She spoke to Harley once, at the produce stand, when his mother had died. “Real sorry about your mommy,” she had offered.

“Thank you, lady,” he’d said, and Rita had wondered if anyone had ever called her lady before.

No, she thinks.

Harley won’t let the others do anything to her, if he can help it.

But he is the youngest, and Leon has a score to settle.

“Sing ‘The Stars at Night,’ Mommy,” the youngest girl says from the backseat.

Rita steps on the clutch and grinds the last gear. The curves scare her, so she touches the brake and the car chugs. Downshift she hears Arjay telling her. The car begins to stall, but she pushes the clutch and brings it back to life at a speed she can handle, though the sudden jerking makes the younger girl shriek. “E-e-e-e! Are we wrecking, Mommy?”

“No, Sis,” the eldest says. “Mommy’s only playing. Right, Mommy?”

Rita’s voice is thin as she begins to sing. “The stars at night.”

The littler girl belts out, “Are big and bright!”

Then Jesse. “Deep in the heart of Texas.”

“Coyotes wail.”

“Around the trail!”

“Deep in the heart of Texas.”

In the dark, Rita can’t spot a single star for the heavy swag of tree branches that flank the road as it winds itself around the mountain. The night air is nippy, but she leaves a window down for the baby when what the baby really needs, she knows, is more than a breath of fresh air. Maybe she leaves it down for herself, to cool her face, flushed with heat and worry. The baby hasn’t stirred at all, and she doesn’t ask if he is all right, just begs God again that he will be.

Behind her, the Justice boys keep a watchful distance, and in Rita’s mind they are biding time until she turns the car over the hillside of her own doing. The roads are bad to break off at the edges where coal trucks have softened the asphalt, so she keeps an eye out for potholes that will stall the car and scare the kids and then do in her nerves altogether. The window is fogged from the inside with old cigarette smoke, and the more she wipes at it with her sleeve, the more blurry things outside become. If an animal leaps out, she has already decided she will run it over. Anything to keep from stalling.

“Blow the horn loud, Mommy, when we get to the underpass,” Sis says.

“You don’t have to honk at night,” Jesse says. “You can see the headlights coming.”

“I don’t care. Will you honk anyway, Mommy? Ple-e-ease?”

“Okay,” Rita says. “Now, sit back.”

When the road finally straightens out a spell, it comes down along the Tug. Even tinged with mud, and even in the shadows of night, water sparkles now and again like flecks of fool’s gold across the wide gulch that is the river’s bed. How many fools are down there Rita does not know, but she guesses that Arjay and Kenny and Jimbo with their dynamite might be. Even if they had already called the other Justice boys out and held the dynamite overhead and said, “Let this be the end of it here and now,” that doesn’t do Rita an ounce of good. Four or maybe five men are in the vehicle behind her, she is sure, and even with Harley among them, she has the clearest notion that she and her babies are soon to become a message to Arjay and Kenny that nobody fucks with the Justice boys.

On the straightaway, Leon guns his engine as if he intends to ram Rita in the ass-end. Then he swerves into the passing lane and edges up alongside the Duster. He leans across the seat and two other men and waves fiercely for her to pull over.

Rita trains her eyes on the road, only half-glancing at him, and when she does, she sees Harley lean up from the backseat to tell him something. She seizes the chance to outrun Leon while he’s distracted. If he reaches the underpass before she does, there is no getting by.

She will get by, though, she tells herself. She will.

Still, she begins making plans of how like a feral bitch she will fight. She supposes it might only make them laugh, that they might hurt one of her kids. So help me God, she swears in her head, and then briefly ponders whether it might not instead be better to play up to them. She will do anything to save her babies. Whatever it takes.

She checks the rearview and suddenly cannot find them. She looks beside her. Nothing. They’re in her blind spot, but gaining on her. She imagines what Leon will do if he has the chance. She sees his tattooed arms reaching for her, tearing at her clothes; and turning onto the bridge that spans the river, she plunges the Duster into the ditch running alongside the mountain.

Jesse bolts up, looks through the back window. “Hurry, Mommy. They’re coming!”

“Who’s coming?” Sis wants to know, and she begins to cry so loud Rita thinks surely it will startle the baby and bring him screaming back to them now. But it doesn’t. He lays as quiet as before, though now even Jesse begins to whimper, “Hurry, Mommy, hurry!”

Rita stomps hard on the clutch and cranks, and when the engine fires, she lets off the pedal quick. But the car is stuck hard and the engine stalls again. “Lock the doors!” she tells Jesse, hurrying, herself, to roll up the window. “Hold onto Brother, girls.”

Behind them, six men step out of the van and walk in front of the headlights, then march forward issuing catcalls and whistles.

Rita holds down the clutch and cranks, but the engine turns over again and again without firing. She can hear Arjay giving her instructions, but she can’t tell what he is saying. She closes her eyes and concentrates.

There is a tap on the window and Jesse screams and jerks Rita’s shoulders. Her eyes fly open and she is face to gray face with Leon, pressing against the glass beside her. His eye is busted up, the eyelid turned back, everything bloody and blackened. “You need a jump start, little woman,” he says. “Harley, bring over the cables and van.” Men circle the Duster and Harley hesitates, moves instead to a window where Rita can see him. Leon moves between him and the Duster.

“Get the jumper cables.”

Rita’s heart hammers inside her brain when Harley leaves. “Please,” she says. “My baby is so sick, Leon. Please, just let us go to the clinic.”

“Nobody stopping you,” Leon says, grinning sideways at the other Justice boys. “Looks like you’re stalled. Want me to give you a lift? I’ll give you a good lift. Now roll down the window.”

Harley cranks the van and it backfires. The men startle, then laugh loudly. Rita is disappointed it’s not the sound of a bullet barreling toward Leon, some unlikely rescue attempt come lately by Arjay and Kenny.

“Get out of the car,” Leon says.

“No.”

He pounds on the window and the rest of the men circle the car, knocking on the glass, scaring the kids. The Duster is set to rocking, and Jesse holds onto her brother and sister to keep them from being hurt. Rita tries to think, but there’s nothing she can do.

Harley pulls the van around in front of the Duster and pops the hood. Leon tells Rita to pop hers, too. She’s afraid. What if he does something else to the car? If she waits a while, the flooded engine might correct itself. “It’s okay,” Harley says. “I swear.”

Leon watches. She releases the hood. She has no choice.

“I hate you,” Jesse tells Leon through the window. He smacks the glass and she jumps back. The baby is still quiet, but Sis screams unremittingly. She climbs over the front seat and Rita holds her, stroking her head. “It’s awright, baby,” Rita says, kissing her, trying to steady her own heart, to keep her voice even for the girls. She begins to sing. “The stars at night, are big and bright. Deep in the heart of Texas.”

Standing frozen on the hump in the backseat floorboard, Jesse sings, too, through tears she doesn’t remember allowing. “Coyotes wail around the trail. Deep in the heart of Texas.”

Then there is another sound, a horn. “Someone’s honking, Mommy,” Sis says, pulling up from Rita’s lap to look for the car coming through the underpass.

She’s right. Across the river, a car is coming through the underpass. The men step away from the Duster and Rita tries the ignition again, but the battery is too weak. If she lays down on the horn now, it might finish it off completely. She waits for the headlights of the approaching vehicle to near. When they do, Leon steps into the highway and flags the car around. It is an old man. He slows the car, looking around at the group surrounding the Duster, lowers his window and asks if there’s anything he can do. It is dark inside both cars, Rita realizes, reaching overhead to turn on the interior light inside the Duster, hoping he will see them and realize the danger they’re in. She can’t see if the old man is alone or hear what he is saying, but she is certain Leon will scare him away somehow. There may not be another car come through the underpass for hours. Then what’ll she do? There’s no way she can get the Duster started again. This is it, her only chance. She has to try to save the baby if she can.

She scrambles to gather up her son from the backseat. She wraps him tightly in his blanket.

“Lock the door behind me and don’t open it for nothing,” she tells Jesse. Jesse’s face flushes red, her pale eyes are wild with fear. “You’re Mommy’s brave girl. Love you.” She kisses both girls, then opens the door and makes a break for the old man’s car. Leon is explaining that his wife has slid off into the ditch and that he and his brothers are there to pull her out.

“Much obliged, though,” he is saying when Rita comes running up behind him with the baby.

“Help!” she screams. “Help me!” She reaches the window and by now, Leon has threatened the old man to move out. The car rolls forward and Rita runs with all her strength, begging the old man to stop. “My baby!” she says. “Take my baby!”

The old man glances in his side mirror and sees her coming at him with the bundle in her arms and slows to a crawl. Leon runs alongside and strikes a fist on the car’s trunk. “Move along!” he shouts.

But Rita reaches the open window in time and pushes the baby through to the old man. “He’s sick. Get help. I have two little gir—” Leon reaches inside to grab the old man or maybe the baby, but the old man lays down on the accelerator and the car is gone.

Now Rita is left standing alone in the road with Leon and the others. Jesse is watching from the Duster as one of the men, the scariest one, grabs her mother and forces her to the blacktop. She wants to cry out for Rita, but before Sis sees what’s happening, Jesse pulls her to the floor of the car and begins singing again. “The stars at night/ Are big and bright/ Deep in the heart of Texas.”

Outside, Harley approaches Leon. “She ain’t to blame,” he says. “Let’s get out of here.” But there is no reasoning with Leon. Rita has scratched his injured eye, and now he is good and pissed. Someone has pulled the van around and shined its headlights on her. She is already naked from the waist down but does not bother covering herself. She holds her arms out in defense.

“You think I give a flying fuck about blame?” Leon says. He unbuckles his belt, draws it slowly through the loops of his dark cotton pants, and wraps it twice around his right hand. “She ain’t to blame for being so pretty either. I don’t blame her for that.”

Harley steps toward his brother. “Her youngin’s are watching, Leon. For God’s sake at least turn off the lights.” Leon spins around and strikes Harley with the belt.

“Mother-fuck!” Harley yells.

“Step away!” Leon orders and two other men sidle up next to Harley and take him by the arms, muscle him back into the van. Leon turns around and strikes Rita with the belt now. She hops and twists to avoid the lashes, but there is nowhere to go. The belt snaps hard on her bare flesh. Each blow is met with a yowl and a welt, but she spits at him anyway. She will fight him to the death, she has already decided. He cuffs her square in the face with his fist.

Jesse cups her hands around her face in the car window so she can see outside. She catches her breathe and turns her head with the first strike, sings hysterically to the top of her lungs. Rita’s shrieks come every now and then between rests in the song, and Sis lifts her head to find her mother. But the light inside the car is still on, and the child can see only her own reflection in the windows. Still, she waits for the sound again, the sound of Rita’s voice, even as Jesse sings louder and hands her a baby doll. “The stars at night! Are BIG and BRIGHT! DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS!” Louder and louder Jesse sings. Scary loud. Bossy loud. “Play with your doll! Play with your doll!” Jesse screams at her. “Play with your doll!” She pulls her sister’s arm, shoves the doll at her, then climbs down in the floorboard to search for the magic bottle of orange juice. It must have rolled up under the seat, but Jesse cannot find it. It has disappeared, the magic bottle of orange juice. Disappeared itself. Altogether vanished. Maybe it never was there. But it must be. It was. Jesse knows it was. It was right there. A minute ago, it was there in the backseat. She flops over the rubber floor mat, caked with mud and wrinkled up around the hump in the floorboard from their hiding down there from Leon like Rita had told them to do. She slides her hand up under the seat, pushes her whole arm under, and feels something. Something hard, something cold. She has her hand on it, pulls it out. It is Arjay’s Colt. Jesse has never seen it before, but she knows her daddy has guns. It looks real, like the ones on T.V. It is heavy in her small hands, and so cold, cold like ice almost. Her sister recoils at the sight of the gun. Her shiny, blinking eyes widen. They are in trouble. Big trouble. She wants her mommy and daddy. She wants her brother.

Leon hits Rita again with his fist. He beats her until she falls to the road, balls up to protect her face. He yanks her by the hair, pulls her to her feet, rips her blouse. “Yes,” she says. “Let’s go somewhere, Leon. Away from here. Me and you.”

Leon presses his mouth to hers. She gags on his tongue and he jerks free of her. She reaches for him frantically, kisses him again. Her eyes look toward the Duster. She sees Harley. He is moving toward the car. Thank God, she thinks. He will rap softly on the window until the girls open the door. He will sneak them back to the van and take them out of there. She can see the girls clearly inside the car.

Leon forces her back to the pavement, pries apart her legs with his knee, unzips. She doesn’t fight him; she weeps but clings hard to his wiry body, hopes Harley will be faster than his brother. She can no longer see him. She closes her eyes, waits to hear the welcome sound of an engine firing up.

When Harley reaches the Duster, he holds a finger to his lips, says “Shhh.” But the girls cannot see him, so he tries the door handle, and when she hears it rattle, Jessie turns with the Colt in her hands. She sees a man. He is a bad man. She raises the gun and there is a noise. A loud noise. A bang. The car window shatters. Sis screams. The man is gone.

Leon jerks at the sound of gunfire, pulls away from Rita. She clutches for him to stay, but he is up and running with the others toward the Duster. “No!” she screams, begging him not to go, scrambling after him. Leon lags behind his kin, righting his pants and belt. He yells Harley’s name. Rita watches Leon fall to his knees beside the Duster. She hears him cry out in anguish. Hears them all curse and cry. “Oh, Jesus,” they wail. “That fucking kid!”

The dome light inside the car flickers. It looks like a star. It is big and bright.

Until she was about ten years old, Sheryl Monks lived with her family in McDowell County, WV, the poorest county in the nation, at least at one point in time. All her writing comes from there. Anything that matters anyway.

Sheryl's stories have earned recognition and awards, including a Northwest NC Regional Artist's Project Grant, the Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award, and finalist recognition in literary contests sponsored by Backwards City Review and VERB: An Audioquarterly. Work has appeared or is forthcoming in RE:AL — Regarding Arts and Letters, Backwards City Review, Southern Gothic, Surreal South, and other publications. She is currently writing a novel set in Beartown, WV.

Survivalism: Not Just For the Right-Winged Anymore

2009-07-22T15:00:00.005-04:00

Original fiction, essays,and poetry coming tomorrow or the next day; it's been a bit of a wreck around here last week and this. Had to make a quick trip back to my parents to visit my 95-year-old grandma, who is sadly living her last days in this world. Fifteen hours in the car in 48 hours. Not fun, but had to be done. This woman made me sugar cookies special every Christmas for years and years, until her hands couldn't do it. Anyway. Don't get me started. I'll blubber.

It was nice to see my family, if only for a day, really. Breakfast with my sister's family, bonfire at my niece's, lightning bugs and coyote howls and s'mores, and best of all, a long trip down dirt roads late at night, deer in the headlights and possums in the road. It wasn't all bad.

Now for the topic at hand. I have been a survivalist of sorts in mind since about 1980. I never leave home without a knife and a means of making fire even now. My first aborted novel was a post-apocalyptic kind of thing. If I could build a bunker here in Revere to save my family from the end of civilization, I would. I'm as prepped as I can be. I have the skills to survive it. If it comes. So I laugh a little bit at the surburban folks panicking now. Like, have you paid attention for the last forty years?

Thank god the rednecks will all probably survive. :-)

SAN DIEGO — Six months ago, Jim Wiseman didn't even have a spare nutrition bar in his kitchen cabinet.
Now, the 54-year-old businessman and father of five has a backup generator, a water filter, a grain mill and a 4-foot-tall pile of emergency food tucked in his home in the expensive San Diego suburb of La Jolla.
Wiseman isn't alone. Emergency supply retailers and military surplus stores nationwide have seen business boom in the past few months as an increasing number of Americans spooked by the economy rush to stock up on gear that was once the domain of hardcore survivalists.
These people snapping up everything from water purification tablets to thermal blankets shatter the survivalist stereotype: they are mostly urban professionals with mortgages, SUVs, solid jobs and a twinge of embarrassment about their newfound hobby.
More here.

Or you can see lots of horrifyingly unnecessary survival crap all over the internets. Here's a sample:

Batten your hatches and watch Red Dawn and the Postman again, people. Or read one of my favorite books, Wolf & Iron, by Gordon Dickson. It may come to this, folks. The good thing is, if it does, I'm likely to stop obsessing over editing this fucking novel. :-)

Boner Jones, fiction by Antonios Maltezos

2009-07-17T12:27:00.002-04:00

Boner Jones would see about getting a pair of moulded insoles made for his feet like the cripples wear, so the bottoms of his shoes would hit the ground properly. He would have his pants tailor made, stitched special so the creases could run good and straight down the front. He’d stop farting, at least in her presence. He would learn to pee like she told him he should. . . sitting down unless he was in a back alley. He would call her Sweetness and give her pecks on the cheek, his face freshly shaven and splashed with the Old Spice, teeth scrubbed so he could finally go by his real name and not feel the shame, Robert Jones, his grandfather’s name, a good name from the time when most men had the bowed legs from too much of the hard life. Boner was the name he’d acquired on account of the big empty space between his knees, from since the age of about six, that first after school thrashing. Bow Jones! Bow Jones! His best friends called him Bones or Boner for short. He’d do all that, he thought, a neat stack of baseball hats in the cradle of his arm, if it was still a couple years ago, and if she’d never left before he could get to changing, a squeeze bottle of burning fuel in his pants pocket.

***

He had bad feet, not bad to his mind, just peculiar to him, but she always said they were bad, so they were bad feet and that’s why his shoes wore out so quick, his feet and knees and hips hurting less once the soles of his Hush Puppies thinned along the outside edge, his bowed legs pronouncing more and more as the rubber took on a shape very natural and comfortable for him. Besides, as long as he had on a pair of baggy pants, the outward arcs of his legs, the gap between them, was pretty much concealed, but she’d hated his baggy pants, too, tried to force a fancy pair of slacks on him once, the creases so crisp they looked penciled in, fake, and bowed just like his legs, the gap like a giant wood biscuit or a giant football.

Yesterday, he took all his clothes outside, dumped them in the shed, and then went back inside for the baseball hats, John Deere and the like, Pepsi-Cola, littering the vestibule, her words--littering the vestibule--one for each hook on the wall. He would have trouble deciding which hat he’d feel like wearing, so he’d spend five minutes there every morning, just a couple steps from the outside, his eyes hopping from one hat to the other. She’d tried getting him to wear a hat like the kids wear --at least a hat like the kids wear, were her words, but he told her he couldn’t do it, just couldn’t bring himself to wear a nigger hat down to the tavern, even if it had a golden Bo embroidered across the front, even the one she forced on his head, sure snug and soft, he hardly could tell he was wearing it out the door. He had it next to him all the way to town, riding shotgun just like she would. He even opened the door for it, just like he would for her, and then flung it in the trashcan between his pickup and the tavern.

He never had the muscles for it was all it was, but she persisted in calling him a coward. “You lush,” she’d say like she was accusing him of some criminality. Quit your drinking, quit this, quit that, as if a man could change who he was as easy as changing an undershirt. More she complained, more time he spent down to the tavern. “Fuck her!” he’d say upon entering The Coq de la Place, as if he was the big Coq himself, used to pissing standing up. “Fuck her!”

***

He remembers bending to pick them up, getting halfway through the job before realizing he only needed the one, and then waking up a couple hours later, his face buried in his pile of clothes that smelled of week after week of heartache, stronger, even, than the smell of burning fuel, wishing he hadn’t drunk that last beer, wondering as clearly as the pain shooting through his skull how he was going to get through this, too beer-sick and cowardly to answer the question for himself, his peed pants, creases broken like heavy stitch on a catcher’s glove, gone cold so he wanted to cry, or start all over again.

Bo Jones. . . no, Robert Jones. . .he would see about getting a pair of moulded insoles made for his feet like the cripples wear, so the bottoms of his shoes would hit the ground running. He would have his pants tailor made, stitched special so the crease would run good and straight down the front. He’d stop farting, at least in her presence. He would learn to pee like she told him he should… sitting down unless he was in a back alley (or passed out like he was, a spike driven deep through the side of his skull, his face still buried in a neglect as lonely and hollow as a hunger and an empty fridge). He would call her Sweetness and give her pecks on the cheek, his face freshly shaven and splashed with the Old Spice, teeth scrubbed so he could finally go by his real name and not feel the shame of having let go of his life for nothing. Robert Jones, his grandfather’s name, a good name from the time when most men had the bowed legs from too much of the hard life. But first he had to cry like a baby.

Antonios Maltezos says: "I've always dreamed of building a BBQ pit that resembled a mausoleum from afar, or at least a brick shithouse with wings, for roasting my lamb come every Greek Easter." He's thought of motorizing the spit, but then he wouldn't have those three hours alone with his cooler full of beer, his cassette player connected to the house by a couple extension cords, his dad's music out of doors as if his backyard were a valley and the men had gathered to build a fire and drink and lament and dance and rejoice while the women were busy elsewhere.

Armed America. . .

2009-07-15T10:59:00.005-04:00

This is a placeholder post, kind of, while we trek kids all over MA and while I try to recover from whatever made me sleep for 19 hours yesterday. Feeling like crap, in other words.

My family owned a lot of guns, but not as many as some other people I knew, maybe ten or so, which over a lifetime isn't many. We hunted, every season, my father and brother and I--at least until I was sixteen or so--with most of our attention paid to deer season. Venison is good, you know? If you can it, most flatlanders can't tell it from beef.

Anyway, to my point: maybe this book will scare you, maybe it will make you feel better, but it seems pretty realistic to me, as compared to what the two opposing poles of American politics might tell you.

Visit Armed America for more pix and stories/explanations.

A Visit to the Titty Bar

2009-07-10T07:24:00.005-04:00

The first girl that came out was a lava lamp. As if her arms moved through water. Her warm motion practiced and secure. Shadows gathered under her breasts. Copper light ovaled across her belly, licked down her thigh. Her eyes never focused. Not once. I thought she'd look at someone, perhaps the lawyer with the courtroom voice and glinting watch. Maybe the bouncer with the rough knuckles and thatchwork stubble. But no. She was aloof. Unattainable. Full of the distance tendered by power. The pale head of a scar wriggled out the top of her red g-string and plunged back under with her motions. A quick, scabrous exposure. I sat there and watched the scar, hoping it'd reappear. Those glimpses of the real are precious.

This was years ago. Back when I worked at a technology shop in Dallas, when I commuted three hours a day and read books about UNIX and drove back home wearily, delighted in the dust of the road that weaved to our house. Lunch at the strip joint was T's idea. He'd appeared in my office door around 10am, shirtsleeves rolled up, his hairy forearms thick and purpled with veins.

—Titty bar for lunch?

I hesitated. I always did.

—Don't be a pussy. It's only 8 bucks. All you can eat buffet. Tons of titty to look at. You'll want to go home and bang your wife after. T held up his fingers in a V and slithered his tongue through the gesture. —No better way to spend lunch. Let's go. We're all going.

All was a group of geeks that I worked with. The UNIX team. Terminal users. Command-line kung-fu. Thick, stubby fingers on most of them, made for pounding keyboards and fondling plastic pens with chewed tips. Bellies that had never known flat. Mouths ripe with technical acronym. Our faces glowed in the operose jihad of computer monitor radiation. We were all better than our cubicles, smarter and bigger than our jobs. Right? None of us resembled our walls. None of us were average grey men. This was always the fear in the hive, the mumbled rumor of the farm. We'd look around at the whiteboards, at our drooping plants, at the office dust glinting in the hair on our arms and think that surely there must be a mistake. Surely we have just been overlooked.

The bar was shadowed and loud. Some men were stiff in their seats. Sweating glasses squeaked under their fingers. Others so relaxed they might have been on a couch in their house, their hands moving conversationally in the air, their faces open in a very human, masculine way. Some had a dark, desperate look and huffed their hot breath into the clinking ice of their empty glass. A few women as well, with thin arms draped over broad shoulders in suits. Naked knees at eye level. Clenching tendons, an etching of muscle along a calf. Gooseflesh around a nipple. Bellies wet with light. Music that thumped in the gut. A scar of some sort in everyone.

The UNIX team was quiet. Studious in their eating for the most part. Chicken ripped from bone with bared teeth. Gelatinous sauce quivering on the tines of forks. The reflection of a breast swelled in the cold hollow of my spoon. T wantonly gazed at the women, punched those of us in the shoulder sitting next to him. —Imagine pinning those legs back behind her ears, he said. —God, I'm going to fuck my wife so hard tonight. With his eyes, he gestured down at a bulge in his pants as a dancer moved past. She never focused. —I think it scared her, he said to everyone on the way back.

The boss was waiting for us when we returned to the office, tapping his pen on the desk. —The Kansas City upgrade needs to be reapplied. It was messed up last night. His eyes focused on T. —They're running on half-capacity with no backup. You've got to watch this shit. No more screw-ups!

We retired to our chairs and grey walls, the thrum of the machines around us. A cool hiss of recycled air. The light in the office was unrelenting, harsh in its exposure. T worked his fingers into his dry scalp, scratching. He shrugged his shoulders at the rest of us. —Wasn't that last bitch hot? We should go again. Sometime real soon.

I thought he was going to put up the V sign again, but his hands slid into his pockets and he slid into his cube out of our sight. Monitors flickered on. Gray walls rose around everyone. Our thoughts rendered into strangling wires. We approached our lives and work with the same lack of focus that the stripper offered us. Our fingers thickened and blunted to our tasks the way her body curved into hers. We manipulated that which doesn't exist. At least the stripper worked in the realm of the physical, in the currents of deep need and that which is inescapable. Our toil was contained in a screen. A plastic, humming square, only able to endure as long as the black cord wasn't yanked from the wall.

Brad Green's fiction has appeared or soon will in The Blue Earth Review, Storyglossia, elimae, Word Riot, Thieves Jargon and several other journals. He's currently at work on a novel. Read his blog at http://elevatetheordinary.blogspot.com.

2009-07-08T03:06:00.004-04:00

My friend Ray reminded me of this song on Facebook. I don't really have much to say about it--love John Prine--except that the movie he references, Daddy and Them, might have been really good, but it's sadly not. It's worth watching, though. Laura Dern is pretty good in it, and Billy Bob does his usual thing, which, if you like it like I do, is all good.

If you know the film, is there anything out there that compares in subject matter that's, um, good?