judged by naomi huffman

2019first chapters contest

About CRAFT & the First Chapters Contest

Guest Judge Naomi Huffman & Special Thanks

2019 Results

Note from the Editor

Art of the Opening: The Nature of Fire by Lorinda Toledo

Empire of Dirt — Third Place Winner by Jonathan Bohr Heinen

Craft Essay Excerpt: If You Can Name It, You Can Fix It: A Craft Glossary by Jody Hobbs Hesler

Little Squirrel — Second Place Winner by Timothy Hickey

Craft Essay Excerpt: Interiority Complex by Rebecca Makkai

Paradise Pawn — First Place Winner by Meg Richardson

Interview Excerpt: The Artful Editor

Excerpts from the Finalists

Finalist Bios

table of contents

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Established in 2017, CRAFT is a literary mag-azine for fiction. We explore how fiction works, reading short stories and flash fiction with a focus on the elements of craft, on the art of fiction. We feature previously unpub-lished short fiction weekly, with occasional reprints, as well as weekly critical pieces in-cluding essays on narrative craft, interviews, book annotations and reviews, and more. Each published work of fiction includes an author’s note that discusses craft and stylis-tics in the story.

We do not charge fees for our short and flash fiction submissions, or for our craft catego-ry, and we are a paying market. Our general submissions are open year-round with no ca-pacity limits. We value accessibility—keep-ing CRAFT free to read and free to submit to is our priority. We work with all writers, es-tablished as well as emerging. All fiction pub-lished in CRAFT comes through submission; we do not solicit fiction.

about

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Established in 2019 as an occassional contest, The CRAFT First Chapters Contest is open to the first chapter(s) of a novel or novella in progress and/or unpublished, up to 6,000 words. Guest judged in 2019 by Naomi Huffman, we awarded to the three win-ners a total of $3,300 and agent review of their openings and query letters by Heather Schroder of Compass Talent. The first-prize winner also earned a full manuscript critique of their unpublished novel from The Artful Editor. Winners’ excerpts were published in CRAFT in February, 2020, alongside their craft essays and written introductions by Huffman.

First Chapters ContestCRAFT

Naomi Huffman is an editor and digital director at MCDxFSG and FSG Originals. Formerly, she ran the small press Curbside Splendor. In 2014, she established Book Fort, an organization that advocates for public literary spaces and collaborates with the annual Pitchfork Music Festival. Her work has appeared in BookForum, SSENSE, The Creative Independent, Chicago Tribune, Bookslut, Newcity, and elsewhere.

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naomi huffman

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with thanks toCompass Talent represents authors of literary and commercial fiction; upmarket non-fiction, including memoir, journalism, his-tory, science, and cookbooks; and a select list of middle grade and YA. The agency has represented numerous bestsellers, including Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, Methland by Nick Reding, and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by Bryan Mealer and William Kamkwamba, among others.

Founded in 2010, The Artful Editor is an editorial agency that helps writers elevate their prose and prepare their manuscripts for agent submission and publication. We offer honest manuscript re-views, developmental editing, copyediting, and one-on-one coach-ing. Our team is comprised of seasoned book editors, published au-thors, and former in-house editors, many of whom also edit for major publishing houses and independent presses.

First Place: Meg Richardson, Paradise Pawn Second Place: Timothy Hickey, Little Squirrel Third Place: Jonathan Bohr Heinen, Empire of Dirt

Dylan Brown, Oracle Rae Bryant, Darling Clementine Daniel M. Cooke, Show Offs Ross Feeler, Tarsh Ashlie Kauffman, Isamu Dreams of Flying Ellen Schecter, Crazy Things I Did for Love Peter Selgin, Duplicity Maureen Traverse, This Is What Always Happens Rachael Warecki, The Split Decision Kellie Wells, The Magnetic Girl Kyle Winkler, The Branch Will Not Break Virginia Lee Wood, Tigers Born in the Same Year

Felicia Berliner, Shmutz Phil Berroll, Frank; Or, A Creature’s Tale Alyssa Cami, Edge of the World Sean Conway, Land’s End Sarah Cypher, The Story Thief Roxanne Lynn Doty, Out Stealing Water Kate Finegan, Ancient Miraculous Cure-All Nancy Foley, La Rana Marisa Handler, They Dreamed of Water Mary Kuryla, I, Poltergeist Lisa Locascio, My Father the Dictator Marsha McSpadden, bloodlet & borrow Janika Oza, Your Country Is Your Family Jacob Silverman, West LA David Allen Sullivan, Nightjars Lorinda Toledo, The Nature of Fire Tim Weed, The Havana Standard Anne Whittaker, Cora, Darling

results

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Winners

Finalists

Honorable Mention

On behalf of the readers and editors of CRAFT, I’d like to thank each writer who entered their opening chapter(s) into the 2019 CRAFT First Chapters Contest. Thank you for giving us the chance to read and consider your words. And thanks to The Artful Editor for providing the winner with manuscript critique, and to Compass Talent, whose agents gave feedback on the three winners’ opening chapters and query letters.

We’re delighted to share this digital compilation with you now, com-plete with the three winning chapters, accompanied by author’s notes and judge’s introductions; excerpts from a few of our favorite craft essays and from our interview with Naomi Kim Eagleson of The Artful Editor; an annotated excerpt of Lorinda Toledo’s The Nature of Fire, an entry that earned honorable mention and which exemplifies the power of a strong opening; and excerpts from finalist pieces—we chose the opening page of each entry, to share the very lines and paragraphs that first captured our attention.

Thank you for your support!—KATELYN KEATING

The 2019 CRAFT First Chapters Contest Team

Readers: Andrea Auten, Jakob Bailey, Amy Barnes, L. Shapley Bassen, Cameron Baumgartner, Hannah Christopher, Alyson

Moquera Dutemple, Catherine Findorak, Mike Goodwin, Rose Heredia, Mike Keeper, Janice Leagra, Albert Liau, MJ McGinn, Jesse Motte, Kathy Ngoc Nguyen, Ashley Paul, Tom Shute, David K. Slay, Kristin Tenor,

Mary Vensel White, Kori Wood, Cynthia Zhang

Editors: Alex Berge, Suzanne Grove, Katelyn Keating

note from the editor

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The first chapter of Lorinda Toledo’s The Nature of Fire earned an honorable mention. This opening scene is a strong example of the art of the opening: beginning in action, setting a hook, and grounding the reader in character and place while keeping us eager to turn the page through control of tension and pace. We’re grateful Toledo agreed to our excerpting this opening scene and annotating it here.

x x x

We were eight years old the first time Maria tried to set herself on fire.

When we got home from mass that day—once Viviana, our mother, had gone to her room to change out of her church clothes—Maria swiped a lighter from Grandma’s purse. Grabbing my hand, she tugged me down the hall to our bed-room.

There, the bedroom curtains were drawn against the afternoon sun, but the darkness they created only intensified the energy emanating from Maria’s eyes. She handed me the pearl rosary Viviana had gifted me for our first communion and told me to kneel on the floor beside her. “Help me pray for the Holy Spirit to come to us.”

She took her matching rosary and wove it through the fingers of her hand. She held the lighter in the other. It was silent in the house. The sounds of a bird chattering amplified, oblivious to the peace that overcame us in that moment. Obediently, I began, “Glory be to the Father and to the Son, and to the Holy

—This strong opening line hooks and propels us into scene.

—Breadcrumbs of setting and character before we turn the page: warm climate, Catholic family, shared bedroom, the silent house.

the nature of fire

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Ghost…” Soon Maria’s voice joined mine, and we whispered the incantation again and again.

I shut my eyes tightly, to pray hard, but I could not stop them from opening, watching my Maria from beyond the veil of my bangs as they fell over my bowed head. Her lips moved feverishly, her figure glowing in the dusky light of the room. Perspiration dampened my skin.

Still kneeling, Maria leaned forward and flipped her long black hair over her head. Slowly, she extended her brown arm outward. A sweet and sickly scent like anise seed burning filled the room. My twin’s voice, still praying, grew louder in my ears. I watched awestruck as the lighter licked at the tips of her hair-sprayed Sunday curls.

Viviana burst into the room. It must have taken a moment for her to realize what she was witnessing, but then the laundry basket she was carrying fell to the floor, spilling clean clothes onto the carpet. “What the hell are you doing, pendeja?! Oh my God—”

In one quick movement, she grabbed Maria by the arm and dragged her down the hall, my sister screaming the whole time. I dropped my rosary and followed them to the bathroom, arriving just in time to see Viviana shoving Maria’s head under the shower, her own black curls sticking to her neck as she turned away from the spray.

Drawn by the commotion, Grandma rushed into the room, “¿Que pasó? ¿Que pasó?”

But she couldn’t get a straight answer in all the chaos, her questions fell on

—Lovely, visceral details build char-acter but don’t slow the brisk pace.

——Grounding readers in charac-terization through distinct actions for each sister: one awestruck, the other defiant.

—Viviana intro-duced through action and in her similarities to Ma-ria, in contrast to the narrator.

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deaf ears. Maria howled and Viviana spat curses, finally yanking Maria from the shower by her ear. She stripped off her wet clothes and spanked her until her rear was red. Each smack made me flinch as though I, too, were being pun-ished. Maria writhed in an effort to escape, going so far as to even hit back, but to no avail. I had never seen Viviana so angry. Grandma followed her, trying to intervene but found herself caught in the crossfire, her attempts useless. Finally, Viviana collapsed into tears, pulling Maria tight against her body. Grandma wrapped her arms around them but I cowered in the doorway.

Wrapping Maria in a towel, Viviana sat her on the stool in her own bathroom with the pretty vanity. In it, I caught a glimpse of my own reflection. I was the opposite of my twin, with my light skin and pale eyes. To avoid looking at my-self, I slunk down inside Viviana’s empty bathtub, pressing my cheek to the hard, cool edge as I watched our mother trim away the burned hair. She shook so badly her hands couldn’t cut a straight line. Something seemed to claw its way up from my stomach to my throat as I watched clumps of Maria’s black locks falling to the floor.

Finally Grandma took over. The steady movement of her broad hands and solid forearms reminded me of cottonwoods, strong against the wind so that only the leaves moved.

I tugged at the ends of my own hair, which was light brown in a room, but looked almost blond in the sunshine that fell through the window. Viviana paced the room, talking endlessly as though in shock. “What were you thinking?” she kept asking in a tone that said there could be no real answer.

By now, though, Maria had stopped yelling and was not talking at all. I couldn’t stand her silence. I said, “Mama! We just wanted the Holy Spirit.”

—With Grandma, we gain further understand-ing of place: a multi-generational household with the interpersonal ten-sion that conjures.

—Rich conflict (micro and macro)in oppositions, through questions raised about iden-tity and family, helping to drive pace.

—The juxtaposi-tion of the sisters’ actions and phys-icality urges the tension forward; we wonder where Reynita’s loyalty will land.

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She spun, snarling at me, “You! You wanted—you should know better, Reynita!” Turning her attention back to Maria: “Keep this up and you’ll be seeing Jesus, and the Virgin Mary too. I’ll see to it myself before I let you burn this whole house down. So think about that next time you decide to play with fire!” Then she stalked out of the room.

With one last snip, Grandma set the scissors down and patted Maria’s shoulders. “Alright, mi’jita. Go get dressed.”

Maria just sat there, her hair now blunt and chin length. Eyes dry, she was glar-ing fiercely at her own reflection.

x x x

LORINDA TOLEDO’s novel-in-progress was first-runner up for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and an honorable mention in CRAFT’s First Chapters Con-test. Her work has been published in the Mississippi Review and is forthcoming in The Normal School. She earned a PhD from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

—As this opening section draws to completion at a white space break, so much has been established, all against the urgent backdrop of fire: conflict between generations; ten-sion between sis-ters; setting; char-acter; place; pace. We are compelled to turn the page.

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Fifteen-year-old Sarah Billard has spent her entire life on the scorched plains of Oklahoma, the setting of Jonathan Bohr Heinen’s Empire of Dirt. It’s the onset of the Dust Bowl era, and Sarah has spent the last few years toiling alongside her father to extract anything from the “hardpan” earth. Their efforts have largely proved futile, and in their struggle, they’ve transferred their faith elsewhere. Her father pleas for mercies from God and obeys other superstitions, and Sarah, like any typical teen, thinks only of possible lives in other places. She looks across the expanse of land between herself and the horizon, dust in ev-ery direction, and feels her body changing, her sense of self expanding.

Heinen’s writing is richly detailed and closely observed; I could nearly feel the dust between my teeth. The image of the closing paragraphs is still so clear in my mind: Sarah and her father sit opposite one anoth-er, playing cards as they wait out a dust storm. Sarah pushes her chair back, impatient with a game they’ve dealt too many times. “Just one more hand,” her father says. Sarah agrees, for now.

—Naomi Huffman

empire of dirt

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That morning, when they set out to follow the fence line that sur-rounded their property, Sarah Billard didn’t expect her daddy to stop at the southern section. She could hardly recall the last time seed had taken root there—all those acres had been blown down to hardpan—but her daddy pulled the pickup beside the barbed wire anyway.

Stretching to the horizon and spreading as far as she could see was their land, hundreds of acres sunbaked to the dull, brown shade of pecan shells and so thoroughly wizened that the cracks running through the surface reminded her of a broken porcelain plate. She followed her daddy when he got out of the pickup and watched as he rummaged around in the bed, but it wasn’t until he’d withdrawn the hoe, run his thumb across the pitted blade, and started toward the fence line where a snake lay loosely coiled that she knew why he had pulled over.

She leaned against the pickup, arms knotted across her chest. He stopped a couple yards short of where the snake lay and nudged it with the hoe. It unfurled and lazily slinked across the hardpan. From where Sarah stood, she could see the pattern of brown and yellow scales, the unembellished tail. It wasn’t a rattler, just a simple bull snake. It posed them no danger and meant them no harm.

Her daddy lifted the hoe anyhow.

The blade clinked when it hit hardpan. The body thrashed—a blur of brown and yellow—and whipped up a small cloud of dust that was soon swept away by a light wind. When the thrashing waned, he called her over and held out the hoe for her to take.

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That close, she could see the snake more clearly. Its head lay severed beside a thin spray of blood, and she was startled by its eye, a small round dot ringed in gold, how it seemed to be looking toward its own disjoined body, jaw open, a sliver of black tongue lolling over its lip.

The body slithered aimlessly nearby. Then the tail grazed the head, and the snake’s jaws snapped shut. The tail whipped back and forth but the severed head held fast. She couldn’t imagine the poor thing would have attacked itself if it knew any better, and she wondered if it felt at once both the sensations of biting and being bit.

Her daddy stepped forward and secured the body beneath his boot. Go on, he said.

She pried the snake’s head loose with the blade of the hoe, and the body slid away in retreat. She placed the flat edge of the blade on the head and pressed down. The skull cracked, and she was unsettled by the faintness of the sound, the easy violence of the moment, as ir-revocable as breaking an egg. When she lifted the hoe, the head was flat, dispossessed of all instinct and thought. Should have brained it to begin with, she muttered and flicked the crushed head into a patch of scorched, yellow scrub near a fencepost.

Her daddy knelt and picked up what was left. The body coiled mis-erably around his forearm. He stood and nodded toward the pickup. They made their way to it.

While he peeled the snake from his arm, she laid the hoe in the bed and got back in the pickup. She was looking ahead, admiring the sun, bright and orange, sitting right on the rim of the horizon like a penny that had been flipped into the air and fallen perfectly on its

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edge. She squinted, held her thumb and pointer in front of her, and pinched them around the sun in the distance, amused by the thought of plucking it from the sky and putting it in her pocket, but she was brought out of her reverie by the hard, flat thump of the snake being thrown in the bed. Her daddy climbed in beside her and started the engine.

They drove the remaining length of the southern section in silence. It wasn’t until they’d taken a turn and headed down the dirt road that led to the southwestern quarter that her daddy said, Look, girl…

Girl? She gave him a hard stare. She was almost fifteen years old and already mature. When something on the farm needed doing, she skipped school to help, caught up on her learning in the evening, and kept her complaints to herself. Not to mention that her body was beginning to take shape. She was changing, had changed enough al-ready that she’d close to outgrown her clothes, had changed enough it was awkward for her daddy to show her the casual affection he had when she was a child. She wasn’t a girl; she was practically grown. He took that tone with her only on certain occasions: when she’d done something childish and stupid, or when he had.

When they reached the southwestern quarter, he pulled the pickup to a stop, sighed, and said, I’m sorry, Sugar. I know you don’t like the killing. He pointed out the window and asked, You see what we’ve got here? We have to do what we can to keep it going. He pushed open the door and said, Come on, now. This won’t take too long.

While he retrieved the snake from the bed of the pickup, she looked to the southwestern quarter. There was more fence, more land, but these fields were dull green, filled with ripening wheat plants that had grown steadily since winter thawed, and this fence was strung

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with dozens of dead snakes. There were a couple of prairie rattlers in the mix, a single copperhead, but most of them were harmless—night snakes, milk snakes, and bull snakes. He’d even hung the tiny coachwhip he’d spotted in a dry creek bed and stomped dead. After he’d killed it, Sarah mentioned how pretty it was and pointed to the shimmering brown scales patterned like woven leather. He didn’t want to kill it, he told her. He had to.

Awhile back, he’d got in his head an old wives’ tale that hanging dead snakes during a drought would cause rain. Where he’d heard it, she couldn’t say for sure, though she suspected it had come from Larry Cobb, Arn Martin, or one of the other hand-wringing sod-busters who hung around the co-op when things weren’t too bad and bellied up to the bar at the Yellow Torch when they were.

He wasn’t always such a superstitious man. She could recall sim-ple gestures—the horseshoe he’d hung in the barn for good luck, the way he knocked his knuckles against the kitchen table to avoid tempting fate, and the pinches of spilled salt he threw over his shoul-der to blind the devil—but it wasn’t until recently that he seemed certain what he was doing would work.

When his fortunes first turned, he’d gone to God. After a few sea-sons of crop failure, dust storms that swept seed from the ground, and month after month with no rain, he was frustrated, angry, and unsure of what to do. At night, he would carry the kerosene lamp into his bedroom and set it on the nightstand beside the framed pic-ture of her mother. He would kneel beside the bed, fold his hands, and by the dull, orange light of the lamp, he would pray. But the dust storms didn’t stop, the rain returned only on the rarest occa-sions, and eventually he knelt bedside, hands clasped so tightly that

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it seemed as if one were trying to wrest the other into capitulation. He prayed begrudgingly, asking questions to which he would never receive answers, until finally he felt he wasn’t speaking to anyone but himself. Then he would carry the lamp into his room, smother the flame, and lie down quietly in the dark.

But he hadn’t given up.

God sent him no signs, so he searched for them himself. He sought out harbingers of rain—a red sky in the morning, the loud chirping of crickets, a halo circling the moon—and though they appeared from time to time, the sky never broke. After another failed crop, he saw no point in placing his stock in signs and started killing snakes.

She supposed he wanted to feel like he had a hand in what happened, like he could do something more than pray or scout, and though it rained the day after he killed the coachwhip—just a sprinkling, not even a quarter inch—it didn’t for the ones he’d killed before that, and it hadn’t for the ones he’d killed since.

The snakes hung from the fence in different stages of decay: knotted like thick lengths of rope; gut-torn by birds, shreds sagging from the wires; the tiny coachwhip so long gone that there was nothing left of it but a slumping hull of fragile scales that had lost their shine. Her daddy walked down the line until he found a place for the bull snake. He strung it among the rest and dusted his hands on the front of his pants. Then he parted the wires, slid between them, and head-ed into the field.

A few lengths down, a pair of blackbirds perched on the wire and pecked the carrion. She plucked the wire and waited, counting the time it took for the vibration to reach the birds in the way she used

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to count the time between a flash of lightning and the thunder that followed. The birds lit off the wire. They rose and fell, beating their wings against rough air. She watched them fly away, shadowy forms against an endless panel of powder blue. They banked toward the rising sun, growing smaller and smaller until they were nothing but a pair of indistinguishable smudges in the sky that eventually van-ished from sight.

Earlier that spring, when the shoots first emerged, she expect-ed them to shrivel and die from thirst, but the leaves tillered and joined, and now she wove between the wires and set out across the field, brushing her hand through the tangle of flag leaves fluttering like linen on the line.

x x x

Half a year ago, that same quarter was nothing but a few stalks of volunteer wheat that’d turned bone white under the sun. Her dad-dy was usually optimistic, but she knew he couldn’t picture a good future for them then. It may just be a matter of time, he said. Their nearest neighbor, Roman Hull, had lost his farm, and she knew they might soon lose theirs, too. One more year, he told her. If nothing comes up, we’re through. The idea wasn’t unwelcome to Sarah. She often imagined them in different places, like the cities she’d seen in the movies, doing something other than overseeing spent dirt.

With the quarter bare, no crops to see to, her daddy suggested they pay Mr. Hull a visit. He’d been working at the Done Right, a repair shop and filling station on the edge of town, since he lost his farm. Her daddy said, We should take him a batch of molasses cookies. Something to lift his spirits. What’s got him down? she asked.

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Her daddy grabbed the ingredients from the pantry, set them on the kitchen counter, and said, He’s working at the Done Right.

Sarah measured out the ingredients and asked, What’s he have to do there?

He’ll be pumping gas and filling tires, I guess. The man’s handy un-der the hood, but he won’t get to do much more than change a fan belt or replace some spark plugs. He might drive the wrecker if something breaks down, but that’s it.

That’s not so bad. She mixed the dough and said, It’s a step up from farming things that don’t grow no more.

You think so? he asked.

She nodded.

You only think that because you don’t know what nothing is. Imag-ine what it’s like to have a place that’s yours only and lose it. It may not be too long before you know just how that feels. He grabbed the wooden spoon from the mixing bowl and took a bite of the dough. Then he set the spoon on the counter and said, The oven is ready when you are.

Once the cookies had baked and cooled, they packed them in a tin and drove to the Done Right. When they arrived, Mr. Hull’s old, speckled bird dog, Princess, came running. She circled Sarah a few times and then led the way to Mr. Hull.

The wrecker was parked in the service bay out back, a couple of gas pumps were posted in the front, and between them was a small wooden building with a slanted roof. The wood was dry, shedding

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splinters as rough and unruly as the hair on a hog, and the door lead-ing inside was so desiccated it had shrunk in the frame and no longer hung plumb. A bottle opener was mounted on one side of the door, a pile of bent bottle caps on the ground beneath it, and a chipped, enamel Conoco sign hung on the other.

Mr. Hull sat out front in a folding chair. The radio on the card table beside him played Don Azpiazu’s “The Peanut Vendor.” He drummed his fingers along to the rattle of maracas and squealing trumpet, then he reached for a half-empty bottle of brown liquor and took a drink. Princess barked when they reached Mr. Hull. He set down the bottle, smiled weakly, and wobbled toward them.

I’ll be damned, he said. What brings you here, Joseph?

Her daddy shook his hand and said, Came to see how’re you holding up?

Worse than I was, he said, but better than some, I suppose. He leaned in, gave Sarah a hug, and said, Good to see you, darling.

We brought you some cookies, she said and handed him the tin.

He cracked the lid, raised the tin near his nose, and sniffed. He held out the tin to offer Sarah a cookie, but she shied away. He nodded toward the building and said, At least go get yourself a coke.

The shelves inside were sparsely stocked with rolls of Life Savers, Baby Ruth bars, and Wrigley’s gum. Tins of oil and a few six-volt batteries were lined up against the wall. Near the counter, she found a dry ice box packed with warm bottles of 7UP, Orange Crush, and coke, and on the wall behind it hung a map of Oklahoma, re-plete with little line drawings: an Indian hunted buffalo with a bow

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and arrow in Creek County, jackrabbits ran across the Cherokee Strip, teepees sat beside oil rigs in Anadarko, and longhorns grazed the Osage Nation. Printed in large block letters that filled the pan-handle were the words, No Man’s Land, and right between the rela-tive metropolises of Guymon and Boise City, someone had driven a ten-penny nail halfway into the wall and written below it, Here is where you are.

She didn’t want to spend her whole life there, get hitched after high school and inherit her daddy’s holdings and all the problems that came with them. Besides, her prospects were poor. The only boy who’d taken an interest in her was Bobby Pudder. He was handsome and gentle, and when he asked her to the fall dance, she was flat-tered to have his attention, but that night, after the music stopped and he led her to outside to an open field where they could see the stars and talk, he told her how he hoped to one day run his family’s farm, and she knew he had no ambition to be anywhere else but there. He put his hand on her shoulder and timidly leaned forward, and she imagined how it would be if they got together: her wanting one thing, him another, the two of them dancing out-of-sync until one of them died. When their lips met, she felt nothing.

She pulled a bottle from the icebox and looked once more at that pitiful nail driven into the map. She imagined what all could happen away from it, past the drawn boundaries, and she knew that if there was ever a chance to go someplace else, she would take it.

She popped the cap on the bottle opener by the door. Mr. Hull and her daddy were sitting on opposite sides of the card table. Mr. Hull grabbed a cookie from the tin, took a bite, and washed it down with whiskey. Then he slid the bottle across the table to her daddy. Sarah

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sat on an overturned bucket nearby and sipped her coke while the radio played.

Princess circled her, rolled onto her side, and exposed her belly. She stretched her paws while Sarah scratched her stomach, then she got to her feet and started walking. She made it off the lot and headed down the road. Sarah called her a couple times, but the dog didn’t turn back.

Mr. Hull, she said and pointed to the wandering dog.

He stood, whistled loudly, and yelled, Princess, get on over here! The dog stopped, but it wasn’t until he screamed, Now, goddamn it! that she doubled back. She’s been going off on her own ever since we moved here, he said.

Her daddy asked, Where’s she headed?

Probably trying to find her way back home.

The music stopped and gave way to dead air, the crackle of static like a ragged breath. Then a voice came over the airwaves and said, My friends… I have been on a journey of husbandry. Fifteen hundred miles away, FDR was sitting at a desk in the White House, surrounded by a cluster of microphones.

Mr. Hull twisted the dial one way—nothing but fuzz—then the other—muffled drums, brass, and ivory.

Turn it back, her daddy said. I want to hear what he’s got to say.

FDR hadn’t stopped in the panhandle, but he’d toured the breadbas-ket and seen what they were up against. No cracked earth, he said, no blistering sun, no burning wind, no grasshoppers are a permanent match for

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the indomitable American farmers and stockmen and their wives and chil-dren, who have carried on through desperate days and inspire us with their self-reliance, their tenacity and their courage.

Her daddy listened intently until the voice faded. Then static hummed and popped from the speaker, and before another word or note of music could reach them over the airwaves, Mr. Hull turned the knob and switched off the radio.

Her daddy took a sip of whiskey, pushed the bottle back across the table, and said, You think he’s right?

About what?

About us.

If he was right about me, Mr. Hull said, I’d still have my farm. He got up, stepped off the porch, and stumbled to the side of the Done Right. He sighed deeply and started to piss. Once he was finished, he came back around to the front of the building. He scanned the lot and looked down the road. Then he asked, Where’s the dog?

Sarah wasn’t impressed by what FDR had said either. Years later, de-cades later, she would hear an apocryphal story about FDR, how the voice that had praised their intrepidity on the radio that day was the same voice that, when advised to depopulate the drought-affected regions and move every working hand from the fields, had said, I know they’re trying to make both ends meet on land not fit for farming. But if that’s what they want to do, then I take it it’s their funeral, and for as much good as that man did in his life, for the nation, she struggled to forgive him for what he’d said when it seemed no one was listening.

But her daddy seemed to take heart in what he’d heard. When it was

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time to plant again, he reseeded the southern section with native grass and took out a loan to drill the southwestern quarter with wheat. Sarah thought the grass would take root, but it didn’t; she thought the wheat would die, and it lived.

x x x

Now she and her daddy waded through the great stand of wheat in the southwestern quarter. They checked the plants for signs of in-festation and black rust but found none. The wind picked up, and they brushed aside the swaying stalks and leaves. When they got to the fence, her daddy parted the wires for her, and she slid between them, doing her best to dodge the dead snakes. Once through, she held open the wires. He cleared them, turned to survey the south-western quarter once more, and smiled slightly. Then he looked to bare sky and said, All we need now is some rain.

By the time they returned home, the sun had risen to its zenith, and when Sarah stepped out of the pickup, her shadow pooled around her feet like a hole in the ground that she could fall through. She took the hoe from the bed of the truck, could still see a smear of the bull snake’s blood among the dirt and rust on the blade.

Chickens wandered the lot, pecking phantom feed in the dirt and clucking. She was heading past them, on her way to the garden they kept between their house and the barn, when she caught sight of the collapsed cottonwood in the distance. It was one of the only trees on their property. Claimed by the drought early on, it was now stripped of bark and slouched heavily to one side, almost uprooted.

She pointed to it with the hoe and asked, Do you see that?

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An assembly of birds had settled in the tree. They ruffled their feath-ers and shuffled along the branches. Were the tree not dead and dried out, they might have been mistaken for trembling leaves. She wondered if the blackbirds she chased off the wire in the southwest-ern quarter were among them.

Her daddy said, I’ve seen flocks of meadowlarks and mourning doves in that tree before, but never so many different kinds together.

What are they doing there?

He stood for a moment, like he was trying to unravel the mystery of it. Finally he said, Hell if I know. Then he told her he’d meet her in the garden and headed for the barn.

The carrots, onions, peas, and potatoes they’d planted on St. Patrick’s Day had sprouted well, but as they grew, the leaves withered to yel-low. She hacked around the edges of one of the potato plants with the hoe and pulled it from the ground. The potatoes were small and green skinned. She knew they’d be bitter.

Her daddy said, Don’t give up on them. He’d gotten a watering can from the barn, filled it at the well, and now he tilted it as he walked down the row, sprinkling the plants. There’s nothing here past sav-ing, he said.

While he nursed the plants they had going, he tasked her to hoe rows for the cucumbers, tomatoes, and sweet peppers they would sow. She chopped lines in the ground. The wind blew while they worked, lifting dry dirt into the air. Her daddy came to her, pulled a couple of handkerchiefs from his pocket, and handed one to her. She tied it to cover her nose and mouth, and he did the same.

24

Years back, when drought first hit and the wind filled the air with dust, her daddy had knelt before her in that same garden and tied her handkerchief for her before he tied his, and when he was fin-ished, he said, Look at us. Just like Belle Starr and Jesse James. This is a stick up, he said, and they pointed at one another, their fingers fashioned like guns, and fired.

She was halfway through the fourth row when she swung the hoe and struck a rock. She set the hoe aside and began digging with her hands. The rock was firmly lodged in the ground, and she wiggled it back and forth like a loose tooth. She pulled it from the ground—jagged, no bigger than those puny potatoes—and carried it to the pile of rocks behind the barn.

Walking back to the garden, she felt a gale blowing strong and steady. A veil of dust dimmed the sun, and the sky took on the tint of an old photograph. In the corner of her eye, she saw the birds rise from the cottonwood in a chaotic arrangement, like the spread of birdshot through a sheet of tin. She didn’t notice her daddy was standing with her until he placed his hand on her back.

A great cloud of dust crested the horizon and began to grow. More birds flew ahead of it, crude silhouettes of all shapes and sizes, beat-ing their wings in a frenzied attempt to outrun the storm, but the dust cloud rose and rolled forward. One by one, the birds tumbled from the sky and disappeared in the dust.

Jesus…

Come on, her daddy said. They stowed their tools and started to bring in the chickens.

25

The chickens scrambled around the lot. Her daddy chased after one of the hens; Sarah closed in on the old rooster. No sooner had she put hand to feather, the rooster struck, but she didn’t let go. He pecked a few holes in the back of her hand before she could restrain him and feed him into the coop with the others. Her daddy pushed in the last hen and latched the door. They covered the coop with a tarp to keep out the dust, weighed down the corners with stones, and retreated into the house.

Her daddy shut the door and they stood in the kitchen. Sunlight bled through the windows, undulating like a guttering candle flame. He pulled the stopper from the glass water jug that sat on the counter. Sarah took out a basin and filled it with rags. He doused them with water, and once they were wet, he wrung them and passed them to her to stuff along the thresholds and windowsills. It was more a ritual than remedy. Soon the wind would ferry dust through every loose seam. There would be dust on the dishes in the cupboards, dust covering the clothes that hung in the closet, dust on their skin and in the air that they breathed.

When they were finished, her daddy dabbed the blood off her hand with a damp rag, and said, Ill-tempered as that old rooster is, he didn’t get you too bad.

He took two glasses from the cupboard, filled them with water, and hammered the stopper back into the jug with the flat of his hand. If you’re going to eat, he said, you better do it now. Then he carried the water glasses to the table and sat down.

Next to a half-pan of stale cornbread was a leg of salt-cured ham they got from the last hog killing. She smeared the cornbread with butter, carved off a hunk of ham, and sat down at the table with her daddy.

26

He looked out the window while the wind whistled and moaned. Outside, the dust grew thicker, the light dwindled. There was no telling how far back the storm stretched, how long it would last—an hour? a day?—or what damage it would do, but her daddy kept looking out the window, staring into the dust the way a fortune tell-er stares into a cloudy crystal ball, trying to divine the future.

She took a couple of bites of ham and tore off a piece of cornbread. Don’t think about it, she said. There’s nothing we can do. She slid the pan of cornbread across the table.

He pushed it back and said, I’m not hungry.

She was about to take another bite when she heard tapping on their door. No sooner had she asked, Did you hear that? a hard, flat smack rent the air.

It’s just them birds, her daddy said. He got up from the table, opened a drawer in the kitchen, and pulled out a deck of cards. The storm is stirring them up, he said. He sat back down at the table, spilled the cards from their sleeve, and split the deck. They’re hitting the house like hailstones, he said.

He began to shuffle the cards, and Sarah listened. After a few more bangs and bumps, there was silence, broken only by the sound of her daddy riffling the cards.

She imagined that most of the birds had skirted by them, left to tumble in the currents until another obstacle presented itself or the wind finally rested and they fell from the sky. She supposed where they came to a stop didn’t matter all that much. They were already dead.

27

She took a bite of cornbread and washed it down with a gulp of wa-ter.

Her daddy set the deck in front of her to cut.

What are we playing?

He scooped up the cards and said, Gin. Then he dealt them each a hand. He flipped a four of clubs face up and asked, Do you want it?

She arranged the cards in her hand, looking for sets and runs, and shook her head. She’d rather take her chances with the cards in the deck.

They made it through a few hands, but the storm worsened. The wind made a hollow sound like breath in an empty bottle, and though the sun was still out there somewhere, it was obscured by the dust. Shadows the deep purple shade of a fresh bruise washed over the room. Her daddy lit the kerosene lamp, and she watched while the dust rode the air, drifting through the orange light like sparks escaping a fire.

After a few more hands, she’d had enough. Her daddy was an impa-tient card player. He would build his melds, and as soon as he had fewer than ten points in deadwood, he would knock and force her to show her hand. Every time he did it, she undercut him—building her game off his sets and runs—and took the points, but he kept dealing, chasing bad melds to the end of each hand.

A thin layer of dust coated her skin, and a few beads of sweat slid down her arm and cut trails in it. There was no sense in ignoring it. The two of them should have been in their beds, under the covers,

28

trying not to breathe it in. She laid her cards on the table and pushed back her chair.

She knew they couldn’t keep carrying on like they were, waiting for a break that hadn’t come and probably wouldn’t, and though she’d often wished for the farm to fail, for them to pull up stakes and push on, as she imagined the wind ripping wheat from the south-western quarter, blowing the snakes off the barbed wire, and killing birds, she knew that if any part of the southwestern quarter made it through the storm unharmed, her daddy would want to keep going.

He shuffled the deck. Just one more hand, he said. He pulled a card off the top, pushed it toward her, and said, Please.

She pulled her chair back to the table and said, All right. One more.

x x x

JONATHAN BOHR HEINEN’s writing has appeared in the Cimarron Review, Florida Review, The Boiler, Arroyo, and Tusculum Review, among other places, and has received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. He teaches at the College of Charleston, where he serves as managing editor for Crazyhorse, and is a staff member for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

29

Author’s NoteDiscovering story through setting: I’m from Oklahoma. I grew up there and came back for college. I thought I knew the place pretty well, but I’d never given any thought to the panhandle.

I found myself there by chance. I was in the car, for the first of what would be several trips through the region. The landscape was stark, nothing beside the road but fencing and flat land. It was more desolate than any other part of the state I’d seen. I pulled into Boise City and tooled down the main drag. When I reached the town square, I saw the Cimarron County Courthouse standing in the center of a round-about—an imposing brick building, around a hundred years old, I guessed, and far bigger and more ornate than anything else around it. I’d driven through small towns, even ghost towns, but Boise City seemed different, like a mirage in the desert, like a place that had been imagined. I figured there was a story there, but I had no intention to write about it then. I was just curious how this place in the middle of nowhere had become a place at all.

Boise City was founded by fraud. In the early 1900s, a couple of crooked businessmen printed pamphlets and sold lots in what they claimed was a city with paved roads, rail service, thriving shops, and all the other modern trappings. Buyers arrived to discover that what they’d been told wasn’t true, but somehow the town still took shape. I imagined the determination and stubbornness that must’ve taken. I wanted to write about that.

My first efforts failed. I could render the landscape well enough, but setting is more than atmosphere. It’s place, coupled with time, and characters spring from there. I had to learn more.

I read first-hand accounts and flipped through photographs. I learned the history of the region, how prosperous wheat farming had kept peo-ple in a place they’d been tricked into coming to, how overworking the land set the stage for one of the greatest environmental catastrophes in human history. I read magazines from the ’30s to get a sense of the politics and culture. I listened to music and watched movies. Eventually, I felt like I understood the place, the time, and the people, and when I considered the hopes that they’d had, the hardships they suffered, and how so much depended on the weather, a story unfolded from there.

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“It seems like you don’t really care about your main character,” someone once told me in a workshop. Maybe they sensed an under-lying issue with the character’s authenticity? A nebulous not-rightness about the prose? With only a vague notion to go on, it’s easy for writers to leave a workshop discouraged rather than empowered to get back to work. It’s our job as critiquers and workshop facil-itators to articulate feedback precisely and constructively. You can’t find a problem you can’t name.

Naming problems is powerful in every con-text. By the time I graduated high school, MS had rendered my father paraplegic. Though he couldn’t reliably use his arms and legs anymore, muscle spasms thrashed them around for him, often and without warning, knocking his hands into his wheelchair, jos-tling anything in his lap to the floor. From my end of our phone conversations, I could hear his frustration whenever the spasms

struck. “What if you named them?” I asked him once, on a lark. “At least then you’d have something to yell at.” After that, his shouts of “Goddammit, Blanche!” became a phone call litany. Now his voice held the power of his anger and the weird satisfaction of blaming a thing for being itself. Naming his problem didn’t make it go away, but it sapped some of its power over him.

When we can name a problem with our writing, most of the time we can fix it, too. Easiest to name are things that are working. “Great dialogue!” or “I can really picture this!” or “Satisfying ending!” pretty much speak for themselves. Similarly, some writing missteps lend themselves to straightforward descrip-tion, such as problems with plot continuity or inconsistencies in voice or point of view.

Murkier ways that writing misses its mark, such as that fuzzy sense that a writer might dislike their character, are harder to artic-

if you can name it, you can

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fix it: a craft glossary

ulate. These missteps often require careful analysis plus a profusion of words to explain. Think of Tolstoy’s happy families being all alike while unhappy families differ “after their own fashion.” Logic dictates that specifying issues “after their own fashion” will rack up a higher word count. (Exhibit A: Anna Kareni-na’s heft.) The resulting marginalia in a work-shopped piece can overwhelm writers.

After thirty-plus years of being on every side of a workshop—from critiqued, to cri-tiquer, to facilitator/teacher—I’ve observed some recurring craft issues that trigger those murky responses to a piece, and below I’ve named and defined several of them. Naming them cuts down the word count of our cri-tiques and fine tunes their precision. Writ-ers can stomach the extent of the marginalia, and, much more importantly, they can use the feedback to get back to work.

Here, then, is a short glossary to share with students, or to use in self-guided revision. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but we need a name, whichever we choose, to lead us to the right flower.

Accidental Screenwriter: This happens when we move our characters around per-functorily rather than meaningfully, as if they’re following stage directions: She put her hands behind her head and twisted to the right. Beware awkward bodily machinations that sound like Twister instructions. Ask, does this motion embody something important? Is it necessary for the reader’s understanding? Similarly, beware pauses and hesitations. A script might contain a stage direction for an actor to pause, but on stage we would never “see” a pause. We would see the actor stop-ping in their place continuing to hold a thing they’re holding, scanning the room for some-thing, picking a thread off a shirt, petting a dog, washing a dish. Characters in our fiction need to demonstrate pauses in a scene the way actors would. Have them look around the room, try to gauge another character’s response to what’s been said, or check the time on the clock. Or make them stand still while the bustle of things happening around them shows their inaction in relief. In fiction we can demonstrate hesitation with more than physical action, too. Cleverly placed exposition—any meaningful details about the

32

characters’ surroundings, mood, or thoughts—adds to the reader’s understanding of tone, place, and tension, at the same time that it cre-ates the feeling of a pause in the story’s action.

Clichés of the Body: Beware laughs, smiles, and tears. Our characters’ movements and gestures work best when they pull us closer to their reality and into their quite particu-lar personalities. Smiles can mean a thousand things—nervousness, happiness, greed, an-ger. In our stories, they mean nothing if the proper context has not been created. In the same vein, beware rolling eyes, rolling stom-achs, racing hearts. Again, these have too many meanings on their own to speak specif-ically to our characters by themselves. Many times we write these “clichés of the body” into our early drafts as we’re still getting to know our characters and their stories. They hold a place for more deeply imagined de-scriptors. How might our specific character experience sorrow or anxiety? Can we think of something more character-related than weeping or stomach rolling? Maybe our char-acter taps her watch face repetitively or pets her cat too much when she’s nervous. Maybe

another character shows sorrow by refusing to make eye contact. Occasionally, often-cli-chéd gestures do the work they’re meant to do. In order to use them effectively, though, the scene must earn the reader’s full under-standing of whatever emotion the character’s bodily signal intends to send. Often there are richer and better ways to do this than with the gestures we think of first.... (read more in CRAFT)

x x x

JODY HOBBS HESLER’s fiction, articles, essays, and book reviews appear or are forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, The Rumpus, Gargoyle, Raleigh Review, The Georgia Review, [PANK], Valparaiso Fiction Review, Prime Number, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and teaches at Writer House in Charlottesville, Virginia. You can find her on Instagram, Facebook, and @jhhesler on Twitter.

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“But where exactly had it gone wrong this day?” Franks implores in the very first line of Little Squirrel, and with this futile reflection the stakes are set: Franks’s circumstances are already compromised and are only going to get worse. Franks possesses all of the characteristics of the classic fuck-up—he’s an alcoholic, astonishingly selfish, and ruled by his impulses, but he’s also funny, clever, and sincerely trying to prove to his fiancée that he’ll be better, next time. Although it’s clear things aren’t going to change course, it’s some sick thrill to follow along. Part of the fun is in Hickey’s artful skewering of Franks’s fiancée’s wealthy family, the DiBaptistas, who are more concerned with their runaway vanity dog and the perfect Sunday lamb than providing compassion. In fact, they’re trying to boot Franks from the family, and his resilience in the face of their efforts makes him all the more charming.

The selection ends with Franks popping a piece of Big Red gum to cover his boozy breath, stalling in the vehicle he’s sort of just crashed, checking himself in the rearview: “I’d show them,” he says, and I was clinched, wanting to see just how far down he’d go.

—Naomi Huffman

little squirrel

34

But where exactly had it gone wrong this day? Probably when my brother-in-law-to-be, Ward DiBaptista, shouted at me to move the Tahoe so it wouldn’t rut the yard, or maybe just after that, when my fiancée’s entire family made me understand that they preferred my absence at this, their Sunday meal, or yet earlier still, during a brief exchange with Stasia on the drive over about whether bringing a bottle of wine would be inappropriate given my current position in early, untested sobriety, and then for sure the moment when Stasia and I together decided, Yes, sure, why not, it’d be rude otherwise, and before crossing the bridge we pulled into the last possible con-venience store where the only wine was cold and sugary and I could already sense the headache the high-fructose hooch would engender if downed quickly, which is for sure how I would have downed it, in two or three moves, though I wouldn’t, because I’d promised, not today and certainly not that particular bottle. Though it may have gone all wrong when I was first eyeing the six-pack of O’Doul’s there in the double-panel built-in fridge of the DiBaptista kitchen—for here was evidence that my future in-laws had held a discussion about my situation, through which they had come to a few conclu-sions, and someone had gone out and especially purchased a point-less little raft of non-alcoholic beer, a plan executed in deference to my condition. But no, not that, probably the real trouble should be located precisely when I’d left the Roman Oaks facility three weeks ago and hustled back to drinking full-time rather than making a bed-to-bed move, as was the after-care plan, to a halfway house and a sober job and sober life. And if we’re really doing this? The moment of my birth, howling for air, that’s when the trouble began, and it was going to take something just as enormous and transfiguring to reverse it.

35

Say there really had been a need for more meat and for my oblig-ing errand to get it. The DiBaptista family lived to fix and eat lamb cooked assado-style over flames in a limestone pit at the back of their farmhouse. The DiBaptista way was to fuss and prep and cook for hours upon hours, coating the meats with homemade chimich-urri from a repurposed squeeze bottle. The family farm was called Shagbark.

Crowded in the humid, odorous kitchen, everyone held greasy glass-es in their hands. Mrs. DiBaptista was gliding from drink to drink with a cloudy pitcher, freshening drinks, asking if anyone would like to be freshened, who needed freshening? It meant pouring a whole other one before the last one ran dry, making any accurate tabula-tion of consumed drinks impossible.

“Who will go to get more lamb?” Mrs. DiBaptista asked.

They had plenty of meat. The mission was a contrivance. I believe Ward, my future brother-in-law, had suggested to his mother at some point that I should be tasked with running an errand, and ev-eryone else on the farm readily agreed. Their directions were vague in a way that suggested they might be sending me on snipe hunt. I played along. I was glad to help. I hadn’t touched the fake beer.

Stasia’s mother was clad in a floor-length kimono. Lightly, she touched my arm.

“Franks, would you mind? Since you’re not drinking.”

A delicate fact of my sobriety was this: I was in no way sober, though everyone else believed that my not-drinking was the essential fact of my current life after Roman Oaks. Rather, I’d been drinking steadily

36

since the day I left several weeks ago, even stopping in a deserted Sam Adams Brewhouse in the Atlanta airport on the way home, and I’d been not-sober as recently as this very morning before picking up Stasia, when I’d allowed myself measured gulps from a bottle in the freezer.

It was my most private secret. I had reached a point where daily life was a set of mathematical problems involving titration and ratios and balance and my exchanges with anyone, anyone at all, involved mental tapering and lies and calculating rates and percentages. I agreed to the errand.

The tires of my Tahoe flung mud as I pulled away from Shagbark, re-minding me of the confusion and conflict of our arrival earlier that morning.

When we had approached the swinging iron gate of the farm en-trance, Stasia told me, “I’m fine now. It’s okay.”

I had not been paying attention. I would have liked to ask her what we were talking about, but it didn’t seem right, not really accept-able. Were we fighting? Our eyes were not quite willing to meet. Her hand did not seek my hand on the console. My pulse was on the move but otherwise I was in a good mood.

“You seem…” she said.

I swerved to straddle a box turtle, too late, and instead felt it burst directly under my left tire. Stasia made no further comment. We caught sight of her brother and his dogs near the tree line.

I smiled, but when I looked into her face it was clear she’d been crying in the car. To this day I would like to know why, but I would

37

never get a chance to ask.

“I think I want to thank you,” I thought she said.

“For coming today? You don’t have to thank me.”

“No. What I said was, I think I want a thank you. From you. For bringing you here, when you know it’s not easy on me.”

Before I’d replied or even cut the engine, Stasia was hurrying out to see her mother, abandoning the sad, sweating wine in the backseat, and I considered how I might drink some or most of it before enter-ing the house. It had a screw cap.

I was twisted in the seat, staring the bottle down, but Ward DiBaptista was now twenty yards away, opposite what the DiBaptistas absurdly called the “greensward,” wearing his Welling-tons and Tattersall, striding a purposeful stride. He always had the gear—brush pants, waxed-cotton jacket—though miniaturized for his slight frame. I was sure Ward hated me, with good reason, I felt, and I reflexively disliked him, though I couldn’t remember ever hav-ing had a full conversation with him or really anything at all against him. Here he came, carrying between his eyebrows the deep, fixed crease of disapproval.

“Move your vehicle!” he shouted, hand to mouth.

Ward wore an orange whistle on a lanyard around his neck. It was for his dog training, but now it might as well have been the final touch on his parking-attendant getup. I sprang from the car. We stood face to face.

“No.”

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“Well, you will. Of course you will. So you don’t rut the pasture.”

“The pasture?”

“J.D., come on, move that piece of shit,” he pleaded.

Two dogs, field trial champions, high strung, whining, unlovable in their monomaniacal natures, raced around the brush sniffing and twitching their tails. I should say that though my name is Franks my fiancée’s family called me J.D. because, they claimed, of my need to frequently remind people of the fact that I’d put myself through law school, earning a Juris Doctorate. Plus, I had some ungrammatical Latin phrase pertaining to the law tattooed on my left bicep, which I’ll be the first to admit was a drinking-related mistake. Yet I was accepting of the nickname.

I stepped back and studied the Tahoe.

It was true that I’d messed up the spongy field a little with the gi-gantic tires. The fact that Ward was right made it impossible for me to cede anything.

The other cars were parked in an orderly row. The DiBaptistas had outgrown the need to impress others with the quality of their vehi-cles; in fact, just the opposite: their affluence was measured by the sensibility and modesty of the cars, though the stickers on the back windows conveyed the impression that inside the house a top-tier college fair was taking place.

Ward and I argued some more about whether I was or was not go-ing to be moving the truck, and then he said, “Oh, boy. Do you hear yourself? Let me be the one to say it, J.D. Rehab has failed you. All the anger and defiance shit, it’ll eat you up inside. They told you

39

that, surely? Twenty-eight thousand dollars to dry out, it ought to get you the good information. Let go and let God. That’s the plan, right? Am I right?”

I could see that maybe Ward felt genuinely bad for me, was even per-haps concerned. That I could be the object of his pity didn’t work for me. I said, “I didn’t pay. The insurance paid. Family medical leave.”

“Company insurance. Whose company? My family’s company!”

The argument escalated, Ward claiming I was ruining his sister’s life, and I said that if he was really interested in the roots of his sister’s eating disorder which she’d dealt with for years before I came along, he might want to go inside and take a look around at the people in the kitchen, and he said “Oh, sure, we’re the screwed-up ones in this picture. Sure. My family. Tell you what. Why don’t we both go inside and have a quiet drink and we can talk it out? I’ll pour. Ice-cold fish-bowl martinis. How’s that sound? Oh wait, is that not a good idea for you? No? Like if you have one, are you gonna start crying and then tear off somewhere and wind up smoking crack? Let me save you the time. Just go the eff home.”

There was little I could say here. I felt he had me absolutely.

“Ward,” I said, and thought of something to say.

“What.”

“You may be real small but you’re grown-up enough to say the word fuck. If you say it you’ll sound less like the fat child you resemble.”

“Suck it.”

“You suck it.” This was the best I could do.

40

x x x

It was really a hot day! Something about the graceful clouds against the sharpness of the sky just pissed me off. And what exactly could I do about that?

The GPS was taking me several miles east, the summer kudzu swal-lowing up the roadside landscape, rolling it all with a velvety green cover. As I cruised another two-lane farm road, my thoughts were disrupted by a call. It was her.

“Ward wants to talk to you.”

“I don’t want—”

“Here’s Ward.”

Ward came on.

“Where are you?”

“Ward! I moved the truck after all!”

“Where are you?”

“On the lamb. Ha, ha.”

“How far?”

“I just left, as you know.”

“Goddammit, how far?”

I squinted at the screen. “Phone says I’m just about one point four miles from the turn-in. How’s that for helpful?”

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“Bro got loose. We can’t find her.”

“Bro?”

“Bro! My dog! The Chesapeake! She doesn’t have her GPS collar on her so she could be anywhere! Plus, she’s in heat.”

I stopped myself from making a comment.

“Got any idea what that dog’s worth?”

“Eight grand?”

“Well, yes. Probably about right.”

In one version of reality, Ward was not a clownish officious blow-hard but instead just some small-statured guy with a successful fam-ily business for which I worked. He had a nice piece of property he respected. He loved his big sister and was concerned about her involvement with a gestalt fuckup soon to be enjoined to his family by the force of law, and now he was panicking with reason about his beloved and valuable dog. I can see that now.

“Listen,” I said, “take it easy. I’ll find her.”

At this Ward suddenly changed gears. “Oh, dude, please. You have no idea.” He sounded like he was welling up.

Roman Oaks had been a paradisiacal twenty-eight-day in-patient fa-cility in the mountain highlands of West Virginia, and the reason my stay there had been particularly sensitive with the DiBaptistas was because, first of all, Stasia and I had been with each other only a few months before I matriculated to the treatment program in the sor-riest shape of my life. White film had collected around my mouth

42

compliments of a Librium detox. My gown was, as all tend to be, inadequately tied up the back. My left arm was pale and patchily shaved from the intravenous insertion. Someone told me I’d been suffering from malnutrition. I’d eaten nothing but Oreo–flavored Kit Kats for a couple of weeks, which I didn’t think would kill me and still, this was America, and I was an attorney. I was somewhere short of surrender. This meant nothing to my new roommate, an oxy-loving elevator mechanic named Kyle, who shouted, upon see-ing me shuffle into the room in my slippers and tissue: “Tore up from the floor up!”

Second, I worked for Stasia’s father and his sons, and one of my first actions as an employee of DiBaptista Property Development was to immediately request family medical leave for alcohol and drug treatment. But! Only after first putting a ring on Stasia’s finger and pledging love because in my alcoholic fugue state I would rather have died than lose her.

Roman Oaks had cost twenty-eight thousand dollars—“A K a day keeps the demons at bay” was a popular saying in the dining hall—and though the insurance covered one-hundred percent of treat-ment, I sensed the DiBaptista family regarded the shifting of funds as though I’d picked up a length of rubber hose and siphoned mon-ey directly from their coffers, from each of them personally, just opened up some non-existent private family account and sucked it right out. This was my career, my trouble, my fiancée. Why would I bother framing it from their point of view? I was the boss of me. And yet really, no, they were boss of me, because they signed my checks. When I first came back to work, the DiBaptistas put me out-side the offices, in the developments doing construction cleanup, power washing the new driveways, laying poly sheeting underneath

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spec houses—dirty, unskilled labor—ostensibly to teach me the business from the bottom up, but it felt like ritual humiliation. The best I could offer myself, by way of getting my point across about my sovereignty, was to do things like not move the Tahoe.

The GPS on the phone failed in this backcountry. Getting lost was a matter of luck, and today luck felt monolithic, good and bad carved from the same stone.

I couldn’t tell which variety of luck it was that around here the stores sold liquor not only on Sundays, but Sunday in the a.m., which it was, 11:53, according to my phone, and all seven days of the week until late into the night, those perfectly solicitous little numbers handwritten upon a STORE HOURS sign. For what kind of local need for liquor, for ABC on/off, Keno, and discount smokes must there be here to necessitate such demanding store hours? Signifi-cant, clearly.

Certainly there were other places where I could have stopped for directions, but Red Porch Liquors was on this side of the road and had gas pumps.

Around me on all sides were similar establishments as well as a few seedy, comfortable-looking motels. One was called Mason-Dixon, one Bel Alton, another Fountaine Bleue. It had an old-fashioned blue neon sign in the shape of a cresting wave. The Fountaine Bleue also involved an aquamarine pool behind its protective chain-link, and there were families using it this Sunday, several of them with little kids wearing floaties. The parking spaces were filled with trucks and panel vans, no doubt owned by guys with weekly rates for the dura-tion of their job.

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Keep the Fountaine Bleue in mind, I told myself. You never know.

I had voice-recorded the clerk’s directions to the lamb farm on my phone. I bumped along some back roads on the soft suspension of the car listening to the directions and thoroughly enjoying a sudden and expanding feeling of total freedom.

At this point on the recording the directions ended but the conver-sation continued. The clerk asks me if I need anything else and I say, “I think I’m good.” Then, I had to admit, it was my own strong, un-ambiguous voice saying, “Well, why don’t I go ahead and get a pint of Velicoff,” and further hear myself direct the man’s hand—“Farther right. No, next one over”—to the place beneath the counter where this cut-rate garbage was hidden from view, and then the beeping of the register, the young man’s voice declaring a total (unbelievably) under six dollars, my brass money clip clicking open. Six single bills being peeled.

I shouted, in the car, “Red Porch!”

I scanned the interior for a bottle, but there was nothing, nothing at all on the floorboards, the passenger seat, and my hand bumped into nothing under my seat, or behind, and the side pocket was empty. I spoke the brand as though incanting it, conjuring domestic vodka from another realm: “Oh, Velicoff. Oh Velicoff.”

And here it was, not imaginary, and not hidden at all, but right be-tween my beslacked thighs where it had waited all along, a distinctly pint-shaped pint bottle. It was hard to deny when I lifted it to the sunlight pouring in through the windshield, and saw it was partly gone, that I needed another to deal with the fact that I already had this one. Great almighty God, was it ever baking inside the car.

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Had they known? Had the DiBaptistas foredoomed me with this errand, knowing about the Sunday liquor sales, the multitude of stores and motels? No person concerned about my welfare would send me out. The fact that I’d never stopped drinking to begin with was beside the point. I, everyone knew—especially me—was not to be trusted.

I ran my tongue around my gums, tasted my flesh. Bad news for big bad Franks: it seemed I had in fact drunk the vodka already, and diminished the ghastly plastic bottle by half, the total effects not yet emergent, not yet intensifying the days-long stretch of drinking I’d just constructed as a foundation. I had maybe one hundred and eighty seconds before detonation. I began to spontaneously sweat from my forehead and scalp. I mopped my face with a handkerchief. The sensation was like a glorious vertigo.

I used to enjoy thinking of a phrase I was going to say that would bridge my life before and after ingestion of a substance, a contin-uation of a single thought, though I myself would be of a different mind and a different person in five, four, three, two, one: “Actually, I did very well…”—and then came the flint of the lighter, the crackle and sip off the pipe, and the knowledge that the next words would be spoken by a different man, in a lower register—“when I took the LSAT.”

I have a law degree. I would sometimes tell myself this fact in mo-ments when it hardly seemed likely. If my college years had taught me to drink like a gentlemen at the university famous for that style of education, then the years in law school at the same university taught me to smoke crack like a gentleman. My roommate in re-hab, the elevator tech, identified my particular pattern as one called

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“Yale to jail,” or “Park Avenue to park bench.” I took a certain amount of pride in this, though technically I had never set foot in the state of Connecticut or a Park Avenue apartment. Yale had been a reach school that remained ungraspable. Maybe predictably, the rest of my recovering colleagues at Roman Oaks named me Counselor, even though I’d suggested they call me Atticus, which didn’t take.

Air conditioning cooled my sweat into a comfortable sheet. I plugged my phone into the USB outlet, checked that it was charging, settled into the country drive, and looked for the next turn I was supposed to take called Whitehaven. I was responsibly searching the country-side. I wiped my face more, checked the fuel gauge, looked at my watch, then the phone again. I had the busyness of a man perform-ing himself, the role of himself. Nothing really had happened, from this standpoint.

I’d been freeze-dried, a desiccated form now reconstituted to soak-ing fulsomeness with merely a slight liquid application. I’d been wrapped tight, but was now split open and spilling myself around everywhere.

What did Stasia’s family care about? This was my drive-time thought. Yes, they had their concerns. And yes, they knew I was a bad ac-tor who, rehab or no rehab, would go on making bad decisions. But I felt righteous in this knowledge. I would show the family by short-circuiting their expectations that I needed, revered, or envied any one of them in the slightest. Couldn’t I force the DiBaptistas to reconsider whether there might be anything more to life than hu-manely raised lamb, BPA-free water bottles, bitter Scotch, Carolina golfing destinations, shorthaired pointers, kickass espresso makers, and the near-certainty that just about everything would work out to

47

their advantage?

The bottle was getting close to empty. I felt I could eat it. When the phone rang, I cleared my throat: Stasia.

“Everything okay?”

“Well, I got a little turned around.”

“Listen,” she said.

“Hold on. I see the dog. I’ll call you back.”

“Wait—!”

If only the day were less glaringly, brutally clear. The intensity of the variously colored leaves on the maples, the filaments of unspooling cloud, everything felt simulated and conspiring. While it should have humbled me with its natural beauty, it did not. I felt instead rebuked for selfishly not acknowledging its beauty, and therefore I rebuked it back—nature!—by ignoring its beauty out of spite. I, the world said, am obviously lovely, and a gift, while you, you moron, can’t even appreciate it. Well then, I won’t, I said. I hooted on my plastic rectangle, having finished my passive-aggressive exchange with na-ture, which I remembered at Roman Oaks they called self-talk.

I happened upon an amazing fact that stupefies me still and which I searched for the meaning in then: when I’d told Stasia that I’d seen Ward’s dog, I’d been lying in order to get off the phone. Now that I had ended the call, here was the overheated baby, lapping from a mosquito ditch across the road and dangerously close to passing traffic.

This slight, pointy-snouted retriever finished, sighed, and loped

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down the road with an idiotic look of pure happiness on her face.

I veered off-road in the U-turn, overcorrected, and nearly put the Tahoe in the opposing ditch before bringing it to a stop. I hit a but-ton on the fob that automatically opened the tailgate.

“Bro!” I shouted, stepping out of the car. “Bro, come!”

The sun forced its light through a resistant cloud. Nothing would stop its radiance.

A blackout is actually more translucent than it is black. You bob above and beneath the surface. The notion that I could be in the world going about worldly business with no recollection of it, and no agency whatsoever, having handed over my will entirely to the force, I could think of nothing more exciting than this direct chal-lenge to the integrity and coherence of life.

I was narrating my achievements. I have a law degree and a Tahoe. The truth was, it helped.

Bro’s tongue was the shape and color of a thermometer’s mercury, with a red bulbous terminating end. God love her. She’d come back to me. I had summoned and yielded a rescue. The door ajar bell was politely chiming. Bro had marvelous green eyes. I put my face down to the dog’s face, breathed in her hot cereal breath.

In the car, Bro sprawled, comfortable in the cool streams of air con-ditioning. I called her name and she lifted her delicate head. The par-able of the wolf printed in a Roman Oaks first-step workbook was often quoted and talked about. In it, a grandfather is talking with his grandson and he says there are two wolves inside of us that are always in conflict with each other. One of them is the good wolf of

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kindness, health, serenity, peace, bravery and love. The other wolf is bad with greed, hatred and fear. The grandson asks, “Grandfather, which one wins?” The grandfather replies, “The one you feed.”

It’s possible to read this as the kind of garbage rehab shit that makes the whole recovery enterprise seem as predatory and futile as any dumb human effort. And yet in my version, the parable is all the more powerful for being one-hundred percent true and as close a metaphor for human struggle as we’re likely to get. What I mean is, I fed the bad wolf just a little more here and I knew it. Like a nurs-ing wolf pup, I darted my tongue inside the plastic pint rim. A sore spot on my mouth organ got touched with the astringent and stung in a salubrious way. A little private game with myself, plugging the mouth, letting the drops dribble, hurting the hurt, a harmless bit of fun.

I looked back at the Bro safely loaded up. There were tears suddenly, nothing but pure overblown alcoholic sentimentality, knowledge of which doesn’t stop it from being real. I stared at the dog and when she looked me in the eye I seized the moment to howl at her, “I want to be be upstanding!” I was so happy I wanted to smoke crack.

Part of my mind, I presume the healthy part, had forgotten how glorious such a moment was.

At the very thought that this day, of all days, could possibly be my bottom, the authentic last, the rock-bottom, the tale of trapdoors notwithstanding, I developed a completely gratuitous erection. I maintained it all the way through the directions to the farm where I had been originally sent to buy lamb. But then I was crashing at the memory of the words of a Russian woman whom I never really knew that well back at Roman Oaks, who taught all of us that withdrawal

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was “the little squirrel,” belotchka, this name being a tremendous comfort to me. A whole country with a history as forsaken as Russia was so unified in their understanding of booze withdrawal that they invented a name for it, a cute little rodent term for an occurrence so privately awful, as solitary as one’s own death. Little squirrel, the sight of the thing that wasn’t there, picking at your flesh and drain-ing off your soul, turning you into a filthy, shuddering, red, excret-ing bundle of sparking, electrified meat cloaked in a clump of wet fur. The Russian had said, “Tell me you would not do what it takes to kill this squirrel.”

I hopped out of the truck at my destination. I put my hands in my pockets and wandered into a converted barn that smelled of silage. There was a chalkboard sign that listed prices. The salesgirl made sense of what I asked for and assured me that the creature itself had been walking around at dawn this morning. The lamb was that fresh. It cost eighty-nine dollars.

I weighed the vacuum-sealed mass of maroon and white flesh in my hands and guessed no more than three pounds. There were chrome racks of freshly baked breads and I thought I should eat something, me with my history of malnourishment. I’d had a few crudités or canapés or whatever they called them at the DiBaptisas’, but noth-ing beyond that, no breakfast, even, no dinner the night before. I appraised the girl more carefully at the counter. Everything about her suggested I would not be out of line asking for drugs. Her pierc-ing-to-tattoo ratio was right. She appeared artificially enthusiastic about her job.

In the right condition, you almost don’t need words or frontal-lobe functioning to navigate this world. It just comes, there for you to

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slip into like a river and be carried away. I had once seen a woman crossing an ordinary street in the middle of the ordinary day. “What-chu doing?” I’d said to her through my window when she was caught in the crosswalk. She got whatever message I’d transmitted, stopped and stared. “Nothin,” she said, imitating my accent. “Whatchu do-ing?”

Like lost geese, we found one another.

I asked the salesgirl if she had anything else for sale that wasn’t out for display. Like for instance? she said. Like drugs. Seriously? I as-sured her I was serious. She said that if I wasn’t a cop then she was calling the cops. I told her I was only joking, ostentatiously pushed a twenty into a decorated tip jar, and told her to have an awesome day. Locating my truck took longer than you’d expect in a tiny parking lot that I’d left only minutes earlier. Pinkish, scented, cold water dripped onto my hand from the nesting bags containing ice and lamb. Apparently I’d nosed the Tahoe into a bordering fencepost with just enough pressure to crack the right front headlamp and crinkle the fender around it. News to me.

I turned in guilt to see if this minor one-car accident had been ob-served. There stood the lamb clerk at the shop’s plate-glass window holding her phone horizontally aloft and clearly taking a picture of the Tahoe’s license tag and of me in front of it. I waved.

Before hitting the main road, I shouldered the car on the edge of a pasture so I could hop out and take a leak, which I did, somewhat incompletely, inadvertently leaving the last few spurts for my pant leg after I’d already zipped up. I sat back down. Definitely more than a few drops. There was a stain. The filth of the day had really caught up with me.

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I obsessively repeated the phrase, “Leave the windows down,” think-ing that if I lost the thread of it, if the gap in my mind yawned, I would forget and thereby sizzle Bro’s brain in the kiln of the Tahoe’s interior while I swam. I was here at the Fountaine Bleue.

I didn’t trust the heat even with the open windows and so resolved to tether Bro under the canopy of a pecan tree within sight of the pool. I pulled a polystyrene fast-food clamshell from a wire mesh trashcan, tore it in half, and poured water into it. I let myself onto the pool deck like I owned the place.

“Honey, you’re swimmin’ in your underpants,” a large woman on the chaise next to mine observed without judgment when I heaved myself out of the pool. I’d changed in the bathroom and had folded my day’s ensemble on a plastic table next to where she’d then set up.

“I didn’t bring a suit,” I said.

“They kind of look like trunks, though.”

“The truth is, I’m not staying here. I just needed a dip.”

“I won’t tell management.”

I was cool and clean and already beginning to bake dry. Before I swigged straight from the bottle I had folded in among my clothes, I thought to ask my new friend if she wanted some of the wine.

“It’s not cold anymore, I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s been sitting in the car.”

“Reach it over here.” She extended a plastic cup toward me, and I tipped the bottle. They were her children splashing on the steps leading into the deep blue. I felt I knew her, her life, poolside at the Fountaine Bleue, accepting the offer of car-baked Moscato from a

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midday stranger wearing soaked boxer shorts with little palm trees on them. It was my life, too, because I was here living it.

“Oooh, that’s nice,” she said, sipping and shuddering. “All he ever brings is beer and about three wine coolers for me.” She motioned toward two shirtless guys in wraparound shades by a gas grill in the corner just off the concrete. One man carefully arranged burgers with fingers, moving them around the grate like it was a board game.

The two guys were talking.

“Thank you for including me,” one said.

“No, man, thank you,” said the cook.

“I barely did anything.”

“Whatever you did, the truck wouldn’t move and now it goes. I’d have been screwed without it tomorrow. Job’s all the way in Webster.”

“Glad,” he said. “Damn that’s a good hamburger.” They had a little plastic table set up with bottles of ketchup and mustard, mayonnaise packets, and some sliced tomatoes.

I was listening so intently because I wanted to be part of an exchange exactly like this one, reciprocated expressions of gratitude. It was so obvious I was eavesdropping that they were forced to acknowledge me. One guy pivoted to open up the angle to include me in the con-versation. “What’s going on, man? You want a burger?”

Before I answered, Bro’s wailing pierced the pool noise, a long, high whimper that snapped silent.

“Is that your dog?” said the cook.

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I looked over to the shade tree where I’d tethered Bro. She was caught in what I’d heard Ward call a “copulatory tie,” butt-to-butt with an orange hound-mix about Bro’s size. They were conjoined, ears pinned back and panting. No doubt the hound had caught wind of the ripe scent of Bro’s heat cycle and come running. They no lon-ger wanted to do what they were doing, but now they were stuck in the aftermath of their desire. It was horrible, really.

The woman craned over to where she could see. “Leave those poor creatures alone.”

“Cock lock,” the mechanic added. “That really your dog?”

I stared.

“Nature knows no indecencies,” the cook said serenely. “They’re not even aware of what they’re doing.”

“Nothing to do but wait for the old boy to deflate,” said the mechan-ic.

“Well, dad.” The cook was laughing as he simultaneously pumped my hand and offered me a beer. “Congratulations.”

x x x

The trip back to the DiBaptistas’ seemed to take very little time at all when compared with the odyssey of the first half of the errand. Everything had happened within a five-mile radius.

I was respectful now of Ward’s parking rules, humbled, chastened, cooperative, no longer defiant or mysteriously angry. I pulled the car up at an angle that I felt would conceal the front-end damage if we could delay leaving until after dark.

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In the Tahoe I was the lone soul in a universe, no one to tell me I was drunk or deluded. No control to the experiment. No one to bounce my ideas off of. Therefore: I drank the last of the final, the necessary, the emergency half-pint purchased on the return trip, drank it all at once and looked with something like curiosity in the sun-visor mirror to see what would happen next.

Here I sat.

Perhaps it was less that my eyes had receded into my skull than that the chemically bloated flesh quickly piled forward, creating lit-tle caves sheltering my eyeballs, turning me blunt and somewhat Cro-Magnon. It was like in the last couple of hours I’d put on a lot of weight, but only in my face, which was shining with sweat and sunburn. My saliva ran thin and clear. My eyes felt well-lubricated. My ears stopped ringing. In a moment of unverbalized self-talk, I said, Boy. I said, This is great. I have a law degree and a Tahoe. I am in terrific health.

The DiBaptistas were assembled on the front porch. I realized I was taking an inordinately long time to exit the car. I hit the tailgate re-lease and Bro leaped out and into the pasture. If only Bro could talk! Ward began a stride toward his dog. Stasia’s mother rested her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. I think they had been in the process of taking a family photo.

Anyone in his right mind could guess that I would soon be winding up the mile-long cedar-flanked drive of Roman Oaks in an Uber for another round of certified rehabilitation, and that this time I would arrive without a job or a fiancée or the prospect of either. But I would have the encouragement, even insistence of the DiBaptista family. They would pay the premiums on the COBRA continuation

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of my group health coverage in the upcoming months. That’s how grossly I’d misjudged them.

I don’t think anyone could have predicted, though, the car chase lat-er that afternoon—Ward and his brother were on foot; they pulled and chained the gate closed—during which I badly turfed the green-sward while attempting a getaway, before I bogged the Tahoe in the floodplain, got out, and fell on my knees.

No, in my un-right mind I was simply returning from my consider-ate errand, believing I was plausibly sober. I possessed a feeling of optimism and satisfaction, a vision of my future life with Stasia and her family. Maybe I would get Stasia pregnant, maybe even tonight, like Bro had gotten pregnant, and through blood I would claim an inalienable right to this life.

My clothes were somewhat rumpled and the whole top half of my slacks was dark from my damp shorts. How long had I been gone? Less than three hours, which seemed impossible. I was packing a lot into my life!

I popped in a piece of Big Red chewing gum and checked myself a last time in the mirror. I wasn’t fooled, but hellbent. I’d show them.

x x x

TIM HICKEY is a founder and manager of Tangier Island Oyster Com-pany and lives in Washington, D.C.

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Author’s NoteI once read Janet Malcolm on the difficulty of starting a piece of writing (so I’ve just now gone and pulled down the book, The Silent Woman, and found the passage on pages 204–205 of my 1995 Papermac edition): “Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own vastly overfilled mind.” This seems like the right way to present the dilemma: how to overcome the infinitude of language and phenomena and possibility in order to actually put something down. This condition leads to what Malcolm calls “the fear felt by the writer who cannot risk beginning to write,” the fear that she might exclude the good and important stuff.

She advises the writer to “fill huge plastic garbage bags with a con-fused jumble of things that have accreted there over the days, months, years of being alive and taking things in through the eyes and ears and heart. The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that the reader will want to linger a while among them, rather than to flee.”

Linger; don’t flee—a writer’s wish for the reader.

This purge, Malcolm believes, must take place at the start, when the temptation is to cram in all that the author knows and wants the reader to know.

Malcolm’s prescription makes me think of a transcript I read of a Q&A session with William Faulkner at University of Virginia in the late ’50s in which he said that the germ of The Sound and the Fury was the image of Caddy’s muddy drawers (I just immediately found it and opened it in another tab). That he, Faulkner—the king of accretion—could spin out the whole of The Sound and the Fury from a pair of dirty under-wear suggests that sometimes a single guiding image might be useful in avoiding early overabundance.

There was one image for Little Squirrel, that of Franks’s truck’s tires rutting the field.

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Franks parks the truck where his future brother-in-law doesn’t want him to. Everything else in the chapter flows from this situation: Franks’s de-fiance, insecurity, posturing, overreaction, misreading, even the rutting of the dogs and the rutting of Franks.

This image, for me and for the chapter, has enough significance that I could use it thematically. Someone like Franks would fixate on such a moment, divine meaning from it, work it over and over in his mind, continuing to believe that everything could have gone differently if only he’d moved the car. The image contains the chapter and winds through it, and the action ends up with Franks stuck and the tires bogged in the field.

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It’s hard enough to make our characters act, make them do and say interesting things. You know what’s harder? Well, lots of stuff. Coal mining, for one. Come on, writing is a pretty cushy job. But here’s what’s harder than ac-tion: reaction. All that internal stuff, all those emotions.

Your characters get devastating news. This happens fairly regularly, it being fiction. Or they’re hugely nervous, or they’re in love. And remembering the first piece of writ-ing advice you ever received (rhymes with “throw, don’t smell”) you know you can’t just come out and say “She felt very nervous, and also lovesick and sad.” Actually, technically, you could. There isn’t a law. But you know that often feels clunky.

So instead you set out to demonstrate this news. How are we going to show that our gal is nervous and lovesick and sad at the same time?

I see many students assuming that “show don’t tell” means we shouldn’t give any in-

formation whatsoever; that we should write fiction like a screenplay. Well, that’s what screenplays are for. And moreover: movies aren’t just screenplays. In a movie, your char-acter’s interiority is brought to life not just by words and actions but by the face of an incredibly gifted actor, one who is trained in using facial muscles to convey emotion. Un-less Jodie Foster is going to come over to my house and read your book to me, you don’t have that going for you. Giving your char-acter zero interiority is simply not going to work. And look: Fiction is more capable of deep interiority than any other art form. Ne-glect this tool at your peril.

Faced with the challenge of not ignoring our characters’ internal lives, but also not com-ing right out and naming the emotion, many of us gravitate to the same move: the old car-diopulmonary check-in, the report on either the heart or the respiratory system or both. In other words, we make the interior literally internal.

interiority complex

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She felt her breath catch.

Her heart skipped a beat.

Her heart sped up.

She tried to remember to breathe.

Her heart pounded so loudly she was sure every-one else could hear it.

Her heart felt like it was about to beat its way out of her chest.

She let out a breath she hadn’t even known she’d been holding.

Granted, there might be some throat busi-ness too. Something caught in the throat, a lump in the throat, a twinge in the throat. Perhaps some stinging eyes, some burning cheeks. There’s a problem here, of course. The cardiopulmonary descriptions have been played out, and have become writerly cli-chés. (My sincere apologies here to everyone who has ever used let out a breath she didn’t even know she’d been holding, which I firmly believe to be every writer ever.) Add to this the fact that we don’t really think that much, honestly, about our hearts and lungs in the

moments when we feel emotion. Of course anyone who’s ever had a panic attack can tell you lots of stuff about overthinking it all, but really: If your wife tells you she’s leaving you for the man it turns out is really the father of the child you thought was yours, are you seriously going to stop and think about the catch in your throat?... (read more in CRAFT)

x x x

REBECCA MAKKAI is the Chicago-based au-thor of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for War-time. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize, among other honors. Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Neva-da College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

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Meg Richardson’s Paradise Pawn deals deftly with human desire, explor-ing the delusions that inform our fantasies and how we try, and fail, to afford things that are difficult to obtain—intimacy, compassion, actual wealth. Teenaged Jackie is learning the skills of the perfect pawn be-neath the supervision of her father, who manages the titular shop. She’s hyper-observant, frank, and funny, capable of predicting the patterns of desperate behavior. Still, her impressionability remains intact, and it is through her eyes that the customers of the titular shop are fully realized: down on their luck, bitter, and beseeching. She watches as they exchange belongings both treasured and tawdry for quick, cold cash, alleviating the sufferings of their impoverishment—but only temporarily. Charged with supervising the front counter during a “Christmas in July” layaway promotion, Jackie and her best friend Rubina encounter a customer with a high-end sex doll. Their curiosity piqued, they accept the doll and plan to hide it from Jackie’s father.

Thrumming with the anxiety of people pushed to the edge and the cu-riosities of an impressionable protagonist, Paradise Pawn is funny and emotional and propulsive—the perfect conditions for a finely crafted and entertaining novel.

—Naomi Huffman

paradise pawn

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We make a ton of money off Christmas in July, because customers have too much hope. It’s not their fault. Me and Rubina feed it to them. We decorate Paradise Pawn with tinsel and lights. We smile and hold up the chains they want for their babies, the hubcaps they want for their husbands, the iPads they want for their mothers, and we say:

“Just ten dollars for layaway, mami.”

“Just ten dollars, man.”

“Just ten dollars, my friend.”

Then they follow us to the counter. We keep talking to them in low, cheerful voices. We scan their passports. We take their ten-dollar bills and stack them in the cash drawer with Queen Elizabeth’s head face down. Then we print out their contracts. They real-smile as they sign their names and we fake-smile. Later, they will miss pay-ments. They will yell at us over the phone and lean on our counter with tears in their eyes. We will fake-frown and blame head office in Miami. In December, right before real Christmas, we will sell their chains and hubcaps and iPads to rich people, but until the end of Christmas in July, they will be happy.

x x x

The first day of Christmas in July is also me and Rubina’s last day of year eight. We have to leave the school party early to get to Paradise Pawn. Rubina is sad to leave. Tianna and Soleil and Narissa kiss her cheeks and cling to her jumper. Boys who like her stand on the pic-nic table and throw pretzels at her. I wait by the bike rack.

Everyone else will be back here for year nine, except for me and

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Rubina. We are going to St. Bridget’s, the best private school in Grand Cayman. We will wear mint-green pleated skirts and tiny silk scarves. We’ll go on field trips to places off-island with malls. Our friends will have yachts and English accents and dads who work in the glistening banks downtown.

I catch Rubina’s eye and tap on my watch. She nods. Then she peels Narissa’s fingers off her jumper, blows kisses to the boys, and runs to me.

“We’re done!” I yell.

“I guess we are,” Rubina says, still waving to Narissa. I climb on the handlebars of my bike and Rubina pedals. Her legs are longer than mine, so she bikes the uphill until the Hard Rock Cafe and I bike the rest of the way to Paradise Pawn.

Even though we’re late, we have to make our usual stops one more time. We will never bike this route again. Next year, we will ride to and from school in a green and white bus with air conditioning.

We feed our sandwich crusts to the baby chicks who live under the helicopter pad, then we get guineps from Rubina’s uncle who plays dominos by the pier. Then we bike past the Marriot. We laugh loud-ly, like little girls in a movie, and the Marriot people scuttle up from their towels and take pictures of us. We smile and pose for them. Then we tell them to pay us. They pull on the strings of their bath-ing suits and look at the ground and hand us bills smeared with their sunscreen. We have made CI$450 off of them since year six.

We bike past the beach and slide into the Paradise Pawn car park. Remy is outside wearing a Santa hat. Remy is our favorite guard.

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We think he’s cute. He has a bullet stuck in his arm, but it doesn’t hurt anymore, and it’s useful, because when we need to test metal detectors in the store, we don’t have to bury stuff on the beach, we just use Remy’s arm. His girlfriend, Sherra, works at a bakery in a hotel and sometimes she brings us cupcakes that are too old to sell to tourists.

“Merry Christmas in July!” Remy says. He gives us each a fist bump. “Last day of school, huh?”

“Yes sir,” Rubina says.

“Congrats, man. Now get in there and do some layaways. Yeah?” Remy says.

“Yes sir,” we say, and he buzzes open the door.

The store is swarming. My dad is fingerprinting a lady with a glass eye. Rubina’s dad, Clovis, is showing a power drill to a man jiggling a baby. Our dads are best friends, just like Rubina and me. My dad has more money than Clovis, but Clovis is twice the size of my dad. They look like Pooh and Piglet when they walk around together. My dad is the store manager and Clovis is a sales associate. Clovis wears a ten-karat Gucci link chain and my dad wears a fourteen-karat Cuban link. I wait until Dad is done with the customer, then I give him a hug.

“Hi baby. Hi Rubina,” he says. Then he kisses my hair. “Done with year eight. Jesus. How’s it feel?” Before we can answer, a man dumps a bag of PlayStation controllers on the counter. Dad turns to him and fake-smiles. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” he says. Then to us he says, “Hurry and get dressed. We need you out here.” We run to the

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storeroom, lock the door, and peel off our tights and jumpers.

“Goodbye forever!” I say, and kick my jumper across the floor. Rubi-na folds hers and puts it in her locker. We pull on our Paradise Pawn shirts and lean over the broken jewelry mirror. Our shirts are size extra small, but mine is still too big for me. I hate the way it sticks to my chest. Rubina has been wearing a bra since year seven. She says I’m lucky I don’t wear one yet. She says they’re uncomfortable, but I think she’s lying to make me feel better. Even if bras were uncom-fortable—even if they were made of broken glass—I would wear one to make my shirt fall over my chest like Rubina’s shirt does.

My shirt has two little bumps poking out of it like I’m a tree with a disease. I’m waiting for Dad to notice that I need a bra, but I’m worried he never will. He just tells me not to cross my arms when I’m talking to customers, but I can’t help it. I can’t calculate layaway payments or make someone buy a dishwasher when I can tell they’re looking at the bumps under my shirt and not at my eyes. Rubina sprays us with her body mist that smells like cucumbers. I twist my hair into a bun. Rubina pats her braids.

I used to wear my hair in braids too sometimes. When we were five, a few days before starting primary school, Rubina came over to my house with star-shaped beads at the ends of her braids. They clacked together when she turned her head. I cried when I saw them, and didn’t stop crying until Rubina’s mom gave me braids with stars in them too. I watched two and a half movies while she did them. For years after that, Rubina’s mom braided Rubina’s hair and my hair for the first day of school, until this year. White girls in year eight don’t wear braids unless they’re from the States and on cruise ships. Dad knocks on the storeroom door.

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“Let’s move it!” he yells. We tuck in our shirts, yank on our Santa hats, and run out of the storeroom and behind the counter. “Took you long enough,” Dad says.

“Sorry,” we say.

“Don’t say sorry. Just don’t be slow next time. Now go get some stuff on layaway. Hustle,” Dad says, and we hustle. I sell topaz ear-rings for a customer’s sister in the Philippines, an amplifier for a wife in Cuba, an Xbox for a boyfriend in Honduras, a bracelet for a baby in Trinidad.

“Just ten dollars today. Don’t worry about next month. Think of how happy they’ll be on Christmas,” I say, over and over, like a talking Burger King toy. My Santa hat gets heavy with sweat and I squeeze it out into the trashcan.

Then the rain starts—thick, sloppy, hurricane season rain. We hold Paradise Pawn umbrellas over customers and run with them to their cars. Then the store is quiet. We flop in our chairs. The dads and Remy go in the storeroom to do tool inventory and we are in charge of the counter.

“Holler if you need anything,” Dad says. We take off our hats and rub hand sanitizer into our foreheads so we won’t get pimples. We stack rings on our fingers. We Windex the jewelry cases. I fold a fortune teller out of an old pawn ticket. Then we hear a tap on the window and I buzz the door open. A man stumbles in carrying a wet cardboard box. He drops it on the floor and grunts. He is soaked. White, wet hair sprouts out the sides of his pink neck. He’s wearing a tank top and swim trunks that are almost the same pink as his skin. His eyes dart around the store. Rubina swings open the counter and

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puts on her customer-smile.

“Good afternoon, sir. Welcome to Paradise Pawn. How can I help?” she says.

“You? No, no thanks,” he says. He looks from his sandals to his box. He’s breathing fast. “Is the manager here?”

“The manager had to step out for a moment, but we would be glad to assist you,” Rubina says.

“There’s nobody else here? Nobody older?”

“We’re in charge, sir. Here, let me help you with that,” Rubina says. I open the counter and run to help her lift the box. It’s heavy. There’s something rolling around in it—maybe a metal detector. The man looks like the papery-skinned British guys who walk up and down the beach with metal detectors.

“Look, there’s no need,” the man says, wiping his face with his shirt. We keep walking and set the box on the counter.

Customers often get nervous and sad while they walk from the door to the counter. You can see it in their bodies. They slouch. They hold necklaces from old boyfriends or trumpets they never learned to play close to their chests like kids hold their blankets. Then me and Rubina smile at them and make them do whatever we want them to do.

“I really don’t think you girls should be helping me with this,” the man says. I pretend not to hear him.

“Rainy out there, isn’t it?” I say, just like Dad does. Rubina peels a piece of tape off the box and I lift up the flaps. Inside is a giant

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Barbie doll. She’s beautiful. She has wavy blond hair down to her waist. She’s wearing a shiny red dress. I touch her arm. Her skin is squishy like real skin.

“We love dolls!” Rubina says to the man, even though less than a week ago she told me we’re too old to play with dolls. The man’s face relaxes. He smiles.

“Yep. She’s just a very fancy doll. I paid a load of money for her—£1,500 when she was new. I’d expect to get a substantial loan on her. She’s hardly been used.”

“We’ll do an evaluation and come up with an arrangement in just a few moments. Have you heard about our Christmas in July layaway promotion?” Rubina says.

“Just ten dollars to put any item in the store on layaway,” I say.

“Not today, thanks,” the man says, blowing his nose on a soggy Kleen-ex.

We lift the doll out of her box and set her down behind the counter. She’s as heavy as a real girl. I slip my hand under her head. She looks so real that I don’t want to make her lie on the cold tiles. Her long eyelashes fall closed. Her breasts bounce up and down. I’ve never seen a real person with breasts that big. I touch one of them. It feels like a water balloon. I wonder if mine will feel like that someday. I reach into her box again. There’s an instruction manual and a tube that looks like part of a pool noodle. We kneel beside her and I open the instructions.

“Meet the love of your life, Cherí,” I read in a whisper. “Cherí’s body should be thoroughly cleaned every thirty days by bath or shower

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using a mild, antimicrobial soap. Feel free to shower with her, but do not let her head or neck submerge under the water.”

“Wait, ew. Don’t read the next part. Ew.” Rubina says. She grabs the manual.

“Hey!” I say, forgetting to whisper, “give it back!” Rubina looks like she’s bitten into a lemon. “What?” I say. “Are you okay?”

“Look,” she says, pointing to the next paragraph.

“Always use a water-based lubricant when entering the vaginal, anal, and oral canals to prevent tearing of the skin,” I read in a whisper. “Vaginal as in vagina?”

“I think so,” says Rubina, chewing on her sleeve.

“What’s anal and oral canals?” I say. Rubina sucks a deep breath in through her teeth.

“I don’t know.”

“Geez,” I say. There’s a diagram of Cherí’s vagina on the next page, and a chart with pictures of guys wrapping themselves around her in eleven different ways. We lift up her skirt. Her vagina has flaps and an opening, like a real vagina, but there’s no hair on it. Then I pull her dress down as far as it will go, which isn’t very far. I reach for her hand. It’s cold and rubbery. Her fingernails are pink and smooth. I wish my fingernails looked like that. Some corner of my brain still believes dolls have feelings, so I squeeze her hand and whisper, “Don’t be scared,” as softly as I can. Rubina doesn’t hear me. She reaches for a highlighter on the desk and starts highlighting the manual.

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“We should do a loan on her,” Rubina says.

“But would someone buy her secondhand?” I say.

“For the right price,” Rubina says, combing her fingers through Cherí’s hair. I nod. “Plus we need to know this stuff,” Rubina says, tapping her highlighter on the manual.

“We do?” I say. Rubina looks at me like I’m stupid.

“Yes,” she says.

Before we loan on an item we’re supposed to type the model num-ber into eBay and look at the prices. I find Cherí’s model number stamped into her neck and I read it out loud to Rubina. We click through pictures of other Cherís, then pictures of dolls named An-gel and Lolo and Cherry—pictures of their plastic faces and vaginas and breasts. The guy wasn’t lying. They are expensive. Rubina scrib-bles numbers in her notebook. She’s in Advanced Maths.

“Maybe we shouldn’t tell the dads about this,” I say.

“But they’ll see that the money is missing,” Rubina says.

“Not if they let us count the cash at the end of the day,” I say.

“That won’t work,” Rubina says. She loves to tell me my ideas won’t work. “I’ll think of something else.” She goes back to her notebook and I am quiet. Then Rubina says, “Okay, let’s give him CI$500 and put in the system that she’s a really nice chainsaw. We can leave her in the box. We’ll just make sure the dads are distracted when he comes to redeem her.”

“Wow,” I say. Sometimes I get annoyed by how smart Rubina is.

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“How do you know he’ll come back?” I say.

“It’s just N.E.H.A.” she says. N.E.H.A. is how you decide how much money to loan to somebody. It stands for Need for cash, Emotional attachment to the item, History of paying loans back, and Ability to pay. “Right?” Rubina says. “He’s rich, clearly, and I’m sure he has an emotional attachment to Cherí, because he, you know, he does it with her.”

“True,” I say. “Okay.” We lift Cherí back up onto the counter. The guy is looking at phones. Rubina swings open the counter and he jumps. I count the phones to make sure he hasn’t stuck one in his swim trunks. He hasn’t.

“We’d be pleased to offer you a loan of CI$500 for this item,” Rubi-na says, smiling a perfect customer-smile. The man wipes his mouth on his shirt.

“That’s all?” he says.

“You won’t find a better deal anywhere on the island,” Rubina says.

“Shit, whatever. Alright,” he says. “Pardon my French.”

Rubina signs into MasterPawn and types up a loan for a chainsaw. I scan the guy’s passport. His name is Ian Burger. His face is thinner in the passport picture and his hair is brown instead of white. We press each of his fat fingers into the fingerprint reader. He’s wearing a wedding ring, which means we’re supposed to ask when his anni-versary is, so we can send him reminders to buy jewelry for his wife every year, but we don’t ask.

Rubina prints a contract for him to sign. His writing looks like a

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little kid’s. Rubina counts out CI$500 from the drawer and hands it to him.

“It’ll be CI$650 to pick her up next month, sir,” Rubina says. We stick out our hands for him to shake, but he doesn’t shake them.

“Sorry about that,” he mutters.

“Nothing to be sorry for, Mr. Burger,” Rubina says. “Thank you for coming in.” We buzz the door and he runs away through the rain. Rubina prints out a barcode sticker for Cherí’s box. I feel bad put-ting her away on the floor of the storeroom where she’ll get cold.

“I’m going to put my sweater on Cherí,” Rubina says. It’s like she can read my mind.

“Good idea,” I say. “I’ll make her a little pillow.” I fold a rag from the jewelry cleaning room into a rectangle and slide it under Cherí’s head. Only one button on Rubina’s sweater will close around Cherí’s chest, but it’s better than nothing. We slide Cherí’s box into the storeroom as quietly as we can.

“Everything good?” Dad says, and we jump.

“Yes sir,” we say. Then we sit under the counter and study Cherí’s manual.

“Would you want to look like Cherí if you could?” I ask Rubina.

“You mean do I want to be white? No,” Rubina says.

“No, like her body. Her fingernails and her boobs and stuff,” I say.

“Yeah, probably. I could make guys buy me stuff.”

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“Why?”

“Cause they would all want to do it with me.”

“Oh,” I say.

“What do you think it feels like?” Rubina says, flipping through the diagrams in the manual.

“What, doing it?” I say.

“Yeah.”

“Ew. I don’t know,” I say. “Don’t be gross.”

“You know we’re going to do it someday.”

“Ew, Rubina.”

“What? It’s a part of life! How do you think you got to be born?” she says. I slap her arm. I hate thinking about my parents doing it. It’s basically all they ever did together. They met at a bar in Orlando. Mom was in Law School. Dad was in the Navy. There was a fish pond in the bar and they sat by it and fed Oreos to the fish. They talked about the Iraq War and mothers, because it was Mother’s Day. Then they did it at a Hampton Inn and they made me.

A few weeks later, Mom realized I was inside her. She called Dad and he said he would quit the Navy and take care of me. Mom want-ed to name me “Grace,” but Dad wanted to name me “Jacqueline” and call me “Jackie,” and since Dad was going to be saying my name a lot more than Mom, he got to pick. Sometimes, when I go to the tourist smoothie places and they ask for my name, I tell them it’s Grace and they believe me.

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Mom didn’t want Dad in the hospital room while I was being born, so while Mom was pushing me out of her, Dad was getting a tattoo on his chest. It says “Jackie” in swirly blue letters. They gave him 20% off when he told them his daughter was being born at that very moment.

Dad’s great-uncle who had no toes and no kids died the same week I was born, and he left Dad his condo on Grand Cayman. Dad and I moved here when I was three weeks old. Dad got a job at Paradise Pawn, where he met Clovis and I met Rubina. The dads used to put us in baby backpacks and take us jet skiing.

Mom has come to visit me in Cayman twice—once when I was three, which was a waste, because I barely remember it, and once for my tenth birthday. Both times she stayed at the Comfort Suites on Seven Mile Beach, which is where medium-rich people stay. She said I could sleep in her hotel room for the week if I wanted to, but I get scared of sleeping anywhere besides my house or Rubina’s apart-ment. She gave me the tiny shampoos and lotions from her room, because she uses special shampoo from her hairstylist. I still haven’t used them. I just smell them sometimes.

Mom moved from Orlando to Naperville, Illinois a year ago because of her boyfriend, Maxwell. Maxwell is a lawyer, just like Mom. He wears gel in his hair and a necktie, but he doesn’t wear a chain. All the houses in Naperville are beige with lots of bedrooms and carpet. Sometimes I look at pictures of Naperville on the Internet before I fall asleep. Rubina reaches for my hand.

“Hey,” she says. “Sorry. I wasn’t trying to be mean.”

“You weren’t,” I say, and I squeeze her fingers.

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We read Cherí’s manual twice and then quiz each other. It’s like studying for an exam, tucking information into our brains like rings into a ring pad. The exam will come when we have boyfriends.

At 5:30, the rain stops and waves of colored polo shirts and nametags come crashing through the door—Ritz Carlton blue, Häagen-Dazs red, Margaritaville pink, Kirk’s green. Me and Rubina hide the man-ual in the printer and run to the people in shirts. They have just fin-ished a day of fake-smiling at people and they are hungry for some-one to fake-smile at them.

I show a pearl ring to a lady in a Westin shirt.

“My ring size changed since coming here. Too much scrubbing,” she says. Her friend in a Margaritaville shirt whispers in Tagalog and they laugh. “Too small for me. Maybe for my daughter,” the Westin lady says. She opens her phone and shows me a picture of a girl about my age, holding up two fingers and grinning. “She’s in the Philippines,” she says. I nod. “Show me earrings,” she orders, and I do. “Clip them on,” she says. Her earlobe is fat with tiny hairs on it. I lean over the counter and push a gold hoop into it.

“Tell me if it hurts,” I say. Her hair smells like ironing and tea. I fasten the earring but I don’t move. For a few more seconds I stay there, with my fingers on her hair and my face close to hers, smelling her. I wonder if her daughter remembers how she smells. I want to whis-per to her, “What does sex feel like? Can you move while a guy does it to you, or are you supposed to stay still like a doll?” but instead I lean back and say, “You can put these on layaway for just ten dollars.”

She clicks her tongue and says, “Not today. Maybe when I get paid.” I shake her hand. It is hard and warm.

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I want to keep talking to her, but Dad needs me to test a gold brace-let. I spill a drop of eighteen-karat acid on my palm as I watch the Westin lady leave. My hand will be yellow and flakey soon. The bracelet is plated. I whisper to Dad and make him break the news to the lady with a little boy on her shoulders.

x x x

At 7:00 we pull the grates down over the windows. We pile the jew-elry and phones and laptops in the safe in case we get robbed. We wheel the bikes inside. The broken ones make a soft ticking noise, like the sound of the moms at Rubina’s church when their babies cry. Dad counts the cash and whistles “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” Then he clicks through the computer.

“Y’all did a pawn on a chainsaw?” he says. My hands shake. I crawl behind a TV and pretend to be looking for something.

“Yes,” I say, the word like Styrofoam in my mouth. A part of my brain wants me to stand up, run to him, and tell him that we lied, but my knees stay stuck to the ground. If Dad can’t trust me, he will have almost no one left to trust. Customers lie to Dad for ten hours a day, every day but Sunday—they tell him a chain is eighteen-karat when they know it’s ten-karat. They say a violin belonged to their grandfa-ther when they took it from a tourist’s hotel room. Head office lies to Dad too. They say they’ll send new diamond testers and uniforms and pens. They say they will promote Dad to Regional Manager, but they never do. Dad’s friends lie to him too. His friends are other people’s moms. He finds them at the cruise ship bars. They have sunburns, windbreakers around their waists, bright toenails, and wrinkles on the sides of their eyes. Sometimes they sleep with Dad. Sometimes, after that, they eat breakfast with me. They ask me what

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I want to be when I grow up and what my favorite color is, as if it matters to them. They don’t look at my eyes. They say they’ll come back to Cayman as soon as they can. They say they sure wouldn’t miss the snow in Denver or Boston or Toronto or wherever they’re from, but we know they are lying. I would never want Dad to love anybody more than me, but sometimes I wish he could trust some-body more than he trusts me.

I turn off the Cash for Gold sign. I watch the tiny bulbs fade from red and blue to clear. Then Remy sets the alarm and we all walk out to the parking lot together. Dad’s truck and Clovis’s car are parked side by side. They were pawned by the same guy a few years ago and they have the same weird smell—like horses and rice. I hug Rubina.

“I’ll miss you,” I say. I really will miss her, even though I’ll see her tomorrow.

“I’ll miss you too,” she says. There is so much we need to say that we can’t say in front of the dads and Remy.

“Happy last day of year eight,” I say. Then I climb into Dad’s truck and wave to Rubina out the window until we turn the corner. Dad turns on the soca station and drums his fingers on the steering wheel. I think of Cherí, alone in the storeroom. I wonder if she misses Ian Burger and if he misses her.

The puddles on the road glow like watch faces. The sky turns star fruit–orange and melts into the ocean. The cruise ship families are out, dressed in all blue or all white, grinning at photographers. Even if they have spent their cruise yelling at each other, like they do in the store, they’ll have pictures of themselves looking happy to hang in their houses—like certificates that they were nice to each other

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on a boat for a whole week. We drive past the golf course. Dad turns down the music.

“Anything on your mind, baby?” he says.

“No,” I say. I roll down my window and make my hand dive in and out of the wind like a dolphin. Then I feel Dad raking his fingers through my hair the way he does when I can’t fall asleep. I lean my head on his shoulder and watch the truck swallow the yellow lines on the road until we are home.

x x x

MEG RICHARDSON is a writer living in New York City. She is a Cre-ative Writing Teaching Fellow at Columbia University, where she is earning her MFA in writing and translation. Her work has been pub-lished in The Rumpus, Lit Hub, Chaleur Magazine, and elsewhere. Her translation from French to English of Marie Robert’s book When You Kant Figure It Out, Ask a Philosopher was published by Little, Brown and Company in November of 2019. More of her work can be seen at meg-richardson.com.

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Author’s NoteMy family owns a pawnshop in the Cayman Islands. I have worked behind the counter selling everything from wedding rings to chainsaws. When I decided to tell the story of this place and the people who bring it to life, I chose to show it through the lens of a thirteen-year-old girl. Margaret Atwood once wrote, “Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.” Jackie and Rubina, the novel’s two thirteen-year-old protagonists who help their fathers run Paradise Pawn, see themselves as anything but cute. They are ruthless negotiators who will stop at nothing to make a sale. They recognize their own value, power, and dignity, as well as the val-ue, power, and dignity of their customers.

I have written much of the book’s opening chapters in the first- person plural to illustrate the intensity and power of Jackie and Rubina’s connection to each other. This choice was inspired by Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Karen Shepard’s “Popular Girls.” In the world of a pawnshop and the world of teenage girlhood, trust is at a premium. Jackie and Rubina spend their days lying and being lied to, both at the pawnshop and at school. They do not see their friendship as “cute,” they see it as a means to survive. As the book progresses, the girls learn that Rubina’s family cannot pay her private school tuition, so they hatch a plan to embezzle money from Paradise Pawn. Over the course of a semester, they steal thousands of dollars as the world chips away at their innocence and their connection to each other—their sense of “we.”

I also chose to write the book in the present tense to help readers see the world of Paradise Pawn as Jackie does. Much like young girls, the people who spend time in pawnshops are not often portrayed as “life-sized” in literature and the media. While I can’t pretend to understand the life story of every customer I’ve met at my family’s store, and it would not be my place to tell those stories, I want to make readers of Paradise Pawn aware that these stories exist—that each person who passes through a pawn shop is a “life-sized” human being. Jackie me-ticulously analyzes her customers, but doesn’t look down on them the way an adult might. Working at Paradise Pawn has rocketed Jackie into

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the adult world in some ways, but in other ways she is still a child. Her interactions with people are not fueled by racism, sexism, or classism, as many adult interactions around her are. I have written the book in the present tense to allow readers to press their faces against Jackie’s lens on the world. I have tried to leave little to no space between Jack-ie’s first-person perspective and my authorial presence so that readers will see Jackie, Rubina, and their Paradise Pawn customers as Jackie does—not as cute or small, but as life-sized and powerful.

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We met Naomi Kim Eagleson and learned about The Artful Editor in Portland at AWP in 2019, then paired with The Artful Editor to provide a full manuscript critique to the first-place winner of the 2019 CRAFT First Chapters Contest. This winter we got the chance to talk with Naomi over email and learn more about what happens behind the scenes at an editorial agency, how she bal-ances her writing and editorial lives, and more. —CRAFT

x x x

CRAFT: What was your motivation to open The Artful Editor in 2010? Did you specifi-cally see a need to be filled, or were you pur-suing your passion, or was it something in between or completely different?

Naomi Kim Eagleson: I started The Art-ful Editor out of chance and necessity. It was the summer of 2009, and I had just moved to Los Angeles, where I was soon recruited to edit for a biotech company. However, ed-iting drug warning labels, despite the rather entertaining lists of side effects, was hellishly

dull. It didn’t take long before I was fired and forced to consider other options: an editorial position at a publisher (if I was lucky enough to get hired during a recession) or teaching, which is what I did before moving to LA. At the time, I was facilitating a writers’ group in Santa Monica and one of the members who worked as a freelance editor suggested I try freelance editing. It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone could work with authors directly and actually make enough to pay the bills. I was thrilled by the idea! And within a week The Artful Editor was born. I had a website up, and after a few days I had my first client, a fiction writer. Later, I started editing for several publishers, including Getty Publica-tions. By 2013, I grew The Artful Editor into a small agency with three editors and have since expanded it with a team of over twen-ty. The editors live in different parts of the country, with one in Canada and another in Australia.

interview: naomi kim eagleson

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C: What’s your editorial philosophy? How do you approach material?

NKE: I believe that everyone can become a better writer, and working with an editor (or a teacher, mentor, or fellow writer) is an in-dispensable part of that process. Writers of-ten get too close to their writing and can lose sight of the problems that hinder their work’s success. An editor is a sensitive reader who will read your work and provide you with an objective and intelligent review, unclouded by personal attachments and delivered in a thoughtful, caring manner. The editor’s goal is to help you write the best book you can in this moment.

C: You’ve worked in literary magazine and book publishing. What advice do you have for the writer who may be coming from outside the academy and trying to gain those first publication credits...?

NKE: Part of my job at the literary journal was to review submissions and forward the best submissions to the chief and managing editors. The ones I did not forward (put in

the slush pile) usually made one or more of the following mistakes: they wrote an over-ly long cover letter; their work was not a good fit, either thematically or stylistically, or both; it seemed obvious that they hadn’t read any past issues of the journal or done their research; their submission material was rife with errors.

My advice to writers is to do some research about the publication (or agent), personalize your letter a bit, and keep your letter simple and on point. If you have to include a descrip-tion of your submission, write it like book jacket copy.... (read more in CRAFT)

x x x

NAOMI KIM EAGLESON is a writer and book editor in Los Angeles. She is the author of Radiant Field published by Tinfish Press. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA in English from the University of Hawai‘i. She owns and di-rects The Artful Editor, an editorial agency that provides developmental editing, copyediting, and coaching services to writers. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Words without Borders, Asian Review of Books, and MANOA, and in the anthology Ms. Aligned: Women Writing About Men. You can find her at artfule-ditor.com and naomikimeagleson.com.

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Nothing good ever came from a long drive through the desert. Whenever Lyle’s leg fell asleep, or he had to pull over to piss in the dust, he focused on the money. Back on the road, he occupied himself with the abstract calculus of how much it was worth having to sit there while past lives and childhood memories seeped in through the air vents, whispered in the static between radio stations.

In the rearview mirror the hills cloistering Los Angeles were greener than they’d been in years. They’d turned lush from arctic storms that came down in waves that winter. Yuccas stretched out their lithe blooms and most of the plants were two shades of green: patch-es of young neon set throughout the darker, older leaves. The air felt younger, too, and it seemed as if maybe the world had returned to an earlier stage, regressed millennia to when the only sources of ash were campfires and volcanoes. But he couldn’t look at it without picturing it engulfed in flames, a giant funeral pyre as the land cracked and drifted out into the ocean, the hills turned into islands, houses into boats.

It was early morning when he stopped for gas outside Palm Springs and bought three bot-tles of water, packets of vitamin powder, two packs of cigarettes, a black coffee, a glazed donut, and two quarts of oil. The crunch of a cockroach under his shoe startled him as he stepped out of the station. He tried to drag his foot on the new pavement as he cleaned the bugs off the windshield of his Volvo, which was older than he was and drooled engine oil and washer fluid whenever the engine cooled off and the seals weren’t as tight. Once he got going though and the sun came up, it’d be all right.

Driving forced Lyle to assess his surroundings to death, sit with whatever random mem-ories his brain put in the gallery for the day: the camping trip where Dad capsized in the green canoe, Mom and Amelia baking snickerdoodles, each one a little patch of desert land, in the summer heat, last-minute flights to relatives in distant cities. On the highway the road stretched out into the sun peaking up over the horizon....

—DYLAN BROWN

oracle

84

0.0 Brian is quantum

At some moment prior to the publication of the February 26 1998 issue of Nature, Vol. 391, somewhere inside the Condensed Matter Physics Department, somewhere deep within the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Center for Submicron Research, at the Weizmann Institute of Science, on Herzl Street 234, Rehovot, Israel, last author Prof. Mordehai Heiblum, Ph.D. stu-dent Eyal Buks, Dr Ralph Schuster, Dr Diana Mahalu and Dr Vladimir Umansky confirmed an unsavoury human truth: that we’re made of things we cannot possibly comprehend.

In a highly controlled experiment, Heiblum’s team built on the effectively pre-affirmed theory of wave-particle duality to demonstrate how a beam of electrons (our base ingredi-ent, as far as we know) is affected by the very act of being observed. They were able to show that when observed quantum particles hold to their particle nature (existing in one place at one time) and appear to act in accordance with it. Yet when unobserved, they may forgo their particle nature and behave, instead, (as it seems they may) as waves (appearing to exist in numerous places at once). Understood or misunderstood, this is a startlingly unsettling conclusion. For you, me, everyone. But especially for Brian.

0.1 Brian is representative data

Their conclusions (which, like all momentous scientific conclusions, are staggeringly com-plex) lead many to suppose that a conscious mind, perhaps their conscious mind, could directly affect the core fabric of reality. Foolishly unaware that Heiblum’s observer was a machine, they were wrong: yet the fabric of their realities changed anyway. Today the hu-man/machine distinction is diluted: the fools vindicated, their realities affirmed, our Brian abandoned....

—DANIEL COOKE

show offs

85

In his parked Ford Ranger, Carl Timmons pressed the hot metal tongue of his seatbelt into the back of his wrist like a brand. The sear felt oddly satisfying. He increased the pressure as he watched brittle-boned, blue-haired do-gooders, who’d outlived most of their bodies and all of their minds, stagger arm-in-arm away from the graveside, toward Pastor Irvine’s shiny Toyota Prius. A few hangers-on lingered beneath the green lawn-tent while workers moved in to fold up the chairs. The sting on Carl’s skin faded, and the pain, so precise and contained just a moment ago, spread. Grief like nausea rolled up his gut, into his throat. He grunted, bowed his head, and dug his teeth into the steering wheel, which tasted of salt, dirt, blood: fingers. To battle back the all-over ache, he chomped down until his gums crackled. Then he mouthed the hand-worn foam like a suckling working over a dry teat.

He didn’t so much close his eyes as stop resisting the tug of gravity.

Didn’t so much slip into a reverie as loosen his grasp on the present.

In the hospital, he’d speculated that there was no fundamental difference between a wife who was dying and a wife who was dead. Wrong. Getting old together, they’d treated their bodies as shared property, one flesh. Hilda had fed him meds, detected subtle changes in his skin and gait and mood, taken nightly reports on his bowel movements. And while he hadn’t been quite the same quality of nurse, he had massaged away what shouldered tension he could before his arthritis made an Olympic-level challenge out of even shaking a man’s hand. Those last days, he’d watched her vital signs, envisioning her fist-shaped heart punching in time to the beeps.

After Carl had surrendered Hilda to the funeral home, he’d mentally tortured himself with dreamed-up pictures of rubber-gloved hands undressing and then field-dressing his wife, chemical-coating her empty insides. Now the organs he’d worried over had been sent to a landfill or an oven and the body he’d lain beside lay beneath freshly turned dirt....

—ROSS FEELER

tarsh

86

The vessel he and his mother are riding in across the sea tosses the child as he sleeps. He is snugly nestled into his carriage with its worn rattan cover, outgrowing the shape of it even in this month’s passage. His small body senses the ship’s forward movements, shallow across the sea’s bedcovers. His breathing echoes its paces.

In his dream, his mother tells him their fortune from the pattern of the green leaves that skim the surface of the tea in her cup—not allowed for a child as small as he—the tea em-anating a scent of sticks and weeds. Their fortunes are linked, their futures.

The dream-leaves begin making shapes in the steaming water, which replicates the pitching and falling of the turbulent sea and sends the leaves spinning. They become a fish that stirs deep inside a pond: a fish with long, translucent wings, suddenly rising from the bed of the cup and growing large enough to swallow him, carry him inside its stomach.

He points and gestures toward it, yet his mother does not see. He wants to fly alongside this fish that is like a bird, which gathers momentum and then speeds farther ahead of him until it diminishes slowly and disappears—its wings glinting sunlight at him and flapping rhythmically, with great pain—with screeching—until the whole animal dissipates into a trail of cloud and steam.

His mother, beside him, is surprised he sleeps soundly. They have traveled from California, across the Pacific, and have mere days left before they will arrive at the port in Yokohama, where the child’s father will meet them. She does not know what he will think of the two-year-old son he has not seen—the son whose eyes, unlike hers, are heavy-lidded, whose face is round and tanned—half-blooded, yet distinctly Japanese—and yet she does not care, as long as she may raise her son, with his father, in Japan....

—ASHLIE KAUFFMAN

isamu dreams of flying

87

I’m sitting in the back seat behind Caroline, who rides shotgun while Dean drives. It’s a wild autumn midnight, wind slamming rain against the foggy windshield, making the car shim-my on the road. The weather didn’t dull our spirits earlier at our thirtieth Frankford High School reunion, where we giggled like teenagers and danced that same old rock and roll, Black Philly doo-wop-twist-strollin’-mashed-potato we did back then. Part of me is still on that dance floor, pulling Thelma with her dark angel-eyes to her feet, and Cherie with her laugh like bells. We let loose and hollered the songs that still made us crazy—“Louie Louie,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” and Caroline’s favorite—“Joy to the World.” We all danced around her in a circle, yelling Joy to the world, joy to you and me. She was glowing. My only sad note was hearing Teddy-and-me songs without Teddy, my neon-smile boyfriend with the Chiclet-white teeth, my umm-kisser who gave me orange chills, then never made it back from Vietnam.

Caro wants to show Dean where she and I were best friends and next-door neighbors twice, in two different pairs of houses. We just showed him the houses on Winding Lane, and are heading for the second set. We’re waiting at the end of Winding Lane to cross County Line Road—a two-lane road when we lived here, but now a four-lane highway. It’s hard to see anything through these gusts of rain.

I turn all the way around, straining against my seatbelt to peer through the silvery rear car window. I want to see the house, once my family’s, where my mother died alone of an unheralded heart attack. Has it changed in the last eight, or is it ten, years? Same black shutters. Same yellow post light on the front walk. Same blue spruce tree on—

“So this is where you two grew up next door when you were little girls?” asks Dean, Caro’s new, very serious, maybe-talking-marriage boyfriend.

“No, we were teenagers when we lived here,” she says....

—ELLEN SCHECTER

crazy things i did for love

88

How would you feel if you found yourself dead?

How would you feel, seeing yourself hanging naked from an oak ceiling beam, held there by a length of blue nylon rigging rope looped around your neck? How would you feel, seeing the same brown eyes, the same thinning hair, the same almost hairless legs with the same knobby knees, the same size-10 feet with the same widely-spaced toes with the same ingrown toenails, the same long arms and bony wrists, the same small hands with identical stubby fingers and duplicate pale palms held out at the hips as if answer-ing a question (“Why???”) with a shrug. I might have been looking in a mirror save for

—that blue rope around my neck —the red-purple blotches at the body’s lower extremities —the fact that, unlike me, my doppelganger was thoroughly, utterly, categorically dead.

That’s the vision that greeted me when I arrived here five or six weeks ago on a day as windswept and stormy as the one that finds me here now, scribbling these words to you in a black marbled composition notebook, dear reader, whoever you are.

That’s one beginning. Beginning A, let’s call it. As beginnings go, you can do worse than start with a dead body, in medias res, in the middle of things—as I teach, or taught, my Metropolitan Writing Institute students.

At their extremes all opposites meet. Travel as far East as you can and you end up in the West. In their theoretical absoluteness, black and white are identical, since they both have us seeing nothing, and practically blind. Love and hate are inseparable. Being born is the first step toward dying. Beginnings and endings depend on each other.

All stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This one has two beginnings. It had two endings, too. It begins where it ends and ends where it begins...

—PETER SELGIN

duplicity

89

Saturday, August 22, 1998, 7:18:47 a.m.

Whenever Erica reaches the moment she stood on the other side of her brother’s bedroom door, about to discover him half dead from an overdose, time rewinds and she moves as though sucked backward by a force, flung by an explosion. Except she isn’t flailing, she’s fleeing, retreating into the early hours of the morning, the yard already lit by pale light, the first few bars of sun reaching from between houses. Erica falls into her car, speeds back-ward into the past as sunlight fades and darkness sifts down from the sky, until she finds herself once again on Tink’s couch where, in an impressive bit of magic, they create a joint out of fire, blow it into existence bit by bit. Then it’s back into the night, threading across the Hope-Memorial Bridge, Cleveland’s sorry skyline pinpricked by light, forgotten indus-try buried in the dark below. They park on the street, converge with the crowd streaming inside Smart Bar, guided by the bouncers who have changed their minds, who have thrown open the doors in a gesture of welcome. Strange how the thump and spit of music sounds the same in reverse, how limbs and bodies weave without direction. Strange how the only way to measure the backward momentum is the climbing level of liquid in the plastic cups, the revelers retreating to the bar and the bathroom and the corners where, pressing against each other, their need is not satisfied but worked down into nonexistence.

Light throbs red, drenching her until she feels sure it is a force, the antithesis of time, a sanguine gel binding her to Tink and Bruce and Hannah, merging them into the same per-son, until time no longer exists in forward or reverse, all of it, the entire expanse of space sucked into this one point, smaller than a pebble, a fleck of charcoal, mass relative to time, infinitesimal because there is no time, she’s sure, until her certainty dries up, sealing itself into the pink pill on her tongue, which she pulls out and hands back to Bruce....

—MAUREEN TRAVERSE

this is what always happens

90

It was after nine o’clock in the evening, one of those mid-September Los Angeles nights when fall tickled my war wounds and reminded me that Mother Nature turns the air con-ditioner on like the rest of us. I’d paid good money for a ringside table at the Olympic to watch Billy Montgomery and Jack Fairchild whale on each other until one of them cried mercy. They were top of the card and deserved it. They had wild red hair and strong jaws and were sharper, crueler versions of their barfly relatives whose fights I’d kiboshed in my patrol days. Not as good as a women’s match, but they’d do. I was prettied up and mostly sober and trying to ignore the lonely feeling prickling the edge of my skin, so when my lieutenant slid into the chair across from me, I was grateful for the company, even though I knew it meant that there was another body and it likely hadn’t been improved any by its trip to the hereafter.

“Nice night for it, if you like grunting,” Marty said.

She was red-haired and freckled, built solid, and wore shapeless men’s clothes that would’ve looked loose on Fatty Arbuckle. The arena lights gave her a pinched expression, but Marty O’Neal was the type of woman who’d scrooge at a sky full of rainbows. My grandmother would’ve called her an enojona. Marty had a right to it, though. All women become eno-jonas if we live long enough.

“Better than watching amateurs slug it out at Bergin’s,” I said. “And I won’t even have to arrest anyone afterward.”

“Don’t be too sure about that.”

I sipped my tequila and waited for her to volunteer the facts. Usually this kind of roundup would’ve been left to my sergeant, but my sergeant had taken a bullet to the shoulder and come down with the yips. I wasn’t the type to suffer from nervous afflictions, myself, but it seemed as good a time as any to take some rest...

—RACHAEL WARECKI

the split decision

91

I’m Oona Mulrooney and nestled inside my name are four full moons that forever tug at the tide of me. The moon, as any ocean knows, beckons the world to its breast, but don’t be fooled: it does not long to be embraced. This is the story of how I came to magnetize men and then send them sailing, by the power of my green stare and a stiff umbrella.

First I must speak of my neighbor Bridget Cleary, who walked like the wind gathering into storm. The people of Ballyvadlea were just as likely to burn a bridge as build one, especially if that bridge were handsome and sturdily made, and in this fact was Bridget Cleary’s fate foretold. Children now sing of the bad cess she suffered—maybe you’ve heard tell of her. On a March day still mantled in winter, Bridget Cleary took to her bed. Beads of fever dotted her brow, and her cheeks reddened so, her husband threatened to look for a lancet. At this, Bridget’s eyes grew small and dark, and I pressed her hand, cool as cabbage, to my own face.

Someone fetched a pailful of beasting, the first milk after calving, redolent of birth. It is said to be curative and is the refreshment favored by wee folk. Sometimes you might find them bobbing in the drink, the milk clotted with their besotted bodies, fairy-curdled. I sat with Bridget until that swarm of men held her down by the ears, sat across her legs, and forced new milk gone green with herbs down her gullet. She choked on the potion, “bitter as gall!” she growled and spat. Her husband paced about the house, signing the cross in ev-ery corner, and every now and again someone would bring over a kettle full of the devil’s own brew. Foul as a forgotten carcass, stinking like the perfume I reckon the End of the World will dab behind her ears when the time comes, it was a mixture of chicken drop-pings and urine—why is it men believe the fluids and flotsam that flow through their every canal are holy and can cure a woman of being herself? And what possible salvation could be found in the malodorous soul poultice made from the dung of chickens?...

—KELLIE WELLS

the magnetic girl

92

“Everything wrong in the world is wrong with books,” Sylvia Hix said.

No one heard her say this, alone, in the back of the library, surrounded by incoming items. She beeped each item with a corded laser gun. Children’s abecedaries beeped. Exercise videos beeped. Chopin’s nocturnes beeped. Political thrillers, Georgian romances, con-temporary pastorals, simmering Amish steamers. All beeped. All brought home. All care-fully examined as a jeweler the jewel.

It was unseasonably October.

Everything wrong in the world was wrong with books.

Their spines were broken and needed to be taped or glued or restitched or altogether re-bound.

Their pages crimped and curled. They were, ostensibly, just plants repackaged into another form, books, and so it made sense to say that what was wrong with the world was wrong with books.

The Assistant Head Librarian, Albert, edged his nose over the cubicle wall and asked if Syl-via would care for a diet soda.

Albert’s glasses belonged, spiritually so, on an older, deceased laboratory director. His nose, to a long-dead face of a duke of Habsburg. In any case, Sylvia could only perceive portraiture when she saw him. A long, thick, black hair poked from a deep nose pore.

“Tell me something about Aristotle,” she said. “Checking-in materials is murdering my soul.”

Dead-faced, he stepped aside the wall and cleared his throat. Albert fit in the library the way skis fit into a garden shed.

Asking Albert about Aristotle embarrassed his knowledge. He overflowed with info. But he kindly paused before setting upon friends and patrons with stray facts like bullets. Even when prompted, he blushed....

—KYLE WINKLER

the branch will not break

93

Prologue: Providence, Rhode Island 1999

The rain begins at two o’clock, just as Minyoung steps off the bus. Light and dewy rain, misting. Her thick hair is wrapped up tightly on the back of her head. The flyaways collect water and stick down, and she keeps her chin tucked in. There had not been any time to grab an umbrella today. She would have forgotten it along the way, anyhow, somewhere. Always losing things.

Lately, there is a lot to think about.

The road slicks up quickly, and before long, the mist thickens into a gentle rainfall, and then a shower. Rain in the early fall can be like this.

The way home is short, and she has prepared for this. She carries plastic bags to cover her books. It is important to always be conscientious; to let nothing creep up, and keep control of what she can. Coming off the bus, she keeps her eyes three feet ahead on the ground, letting her sister alone. Wonyoung is used to following. She has liked the rain ever since ba-byhood. Always quiet beside a pattering window. Eyes always clear at the sound of running gutters. She is so quiet, anyhow. Her coat is yellow, and Min’s is pink. Without speaking, Min takes Won’s arm.

They are tigers born in the same year. For two weeks in a year, they are the same age. Not yet. Min is still thirteen, not yet fourteen. Apart.

On the bus, Min quietly covered Won’s books in a plastic bag while Won watched.

Somehow, in the past, Min started to feel sorry for Won, some way.

Somehow, it always feels like Won is falling behind, is smaller, though she is so smart, and so capable. Won wears her shoes laced so tight, ready to run. She is deer-like....

—VIRGINIA LEE WOOD

tigers born in the same year

94

DYLAN BROWN was born in Düsseldorf, Germany and graduated from the MFA program at Oregon State. His short stories and book reviews have appeared in places like Gulf Coast, Hobart, Tin House, FSG Work in Progress, LA Review of Books, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

DANIEL COOKE is a young, experimental writer from Huddersfield, England. His first play Thlides—a dark comedy about a veteran living inside a waterslide—toured UK theatre festivals to five-star reviews. Among work for clients including Apple and Marvel, he’s now devel-oping his first novel from his London studio.

ROSS FEELER’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Electric Lit-erature’s Recommended Reading, The Potomac Review, Story|Houston, Hypertext, New South, The Common, and others. His novel-in-progress won the 2019 Marianne Russo Award from the Key West Literary Semi-nar. He reads slush and writes the occasional blog post for The Masters Review.

ASHLIE KAUFFMAN holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Maryland. Recognitions include a 2018 Rubys Grant in Literary Arts from the Deutsch Foundation and residen-cies from the Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and Wellstone Center in the Redwoods.

ELLEN SCHECTER has published more than twenty books for children, many featuring strong girls from other cultures. Her first novel for young readers, The Big Idea [Hyperion, 1996], won the Américas Award for Children’s/Young Adult Literature for its authentic portrait of a Puerto Rican Family. Her Family Haggadah [Viking Penguin, 1999] was a Book of the Month/Jewish Book Club selection, now a classic. Her work in television, which won multiple awards, includes Reading Rainbow—for which she was Head Writer and Associate Producer. Her memoir, Fierce Joy [Greenpoint Press, 2012] was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award.

finalist bios

95

PETER SELGIN is the author of Drowning Lessons, winner of the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. He has published a nov-el, an essay collection, three books on the writer’s craft, and several children’s books. His memoir, The Inventors, won the 2017 Housatonic Book Award.

MAUREEN TRAVERSE graduated from the MFA program at Ohio State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in CutBank, StoryQuarterly, Prime Number, and elsewhere. An excerpt from the novel featured here earned her a Vermont Studio Center fellowship. She lives in Columbus, Ohio with her husband and son.

RACHAEL WARECKI’s work has won the Tiferet Prize and appeared in HOOT, The Masters Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Antioch University Los Angeles.

KELLIE WELLS is the author of four books: God, the Moon, and Other Megafauna, recipient of the Sullivan Prize for Fiction; Skin; Fat Girl, Terrestrial; and Compression Scars, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize. She teaches in the MFA programs at the University of Alabama and Pacific University.

KYLE WINKLER has published work in Conjunctions, The Millions, and The Rupture. He lives in Ohio. Twitter: @bleakhousing.

VIRGINIA LEE WOOD is a Korean American writer. She recently com-pleted her Doctorate in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of North Texas. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming with The Minnesota Review, CutBank, LIT Magazine, Pleiades, and elsewhere.

finalist bios

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