Issue 2, Spring 2024, Archived

I had been fishing for about an hour one cool April morning. Casting my Daredevle, a small flat lure, I hit a roiling hole in the lee of a rock and felt the first strike of the day. I half expected it, though, and waited for a second tug on my line before I tugged back, perhaps too forcefully, unable to contain my excitement. The fish leapt, breaking the surface, and I reeled it out of the hole, letting it work against me. I hopped onto a rock in the river, maneuvering the fish to meet me. I stooped and scooped it out of the water, a deep green brook trout with aqua squiggles and red speckles on its side. I could see that I shouldn’t have waited for the second tug. The lure hooked too deeply in its throat. I reached into my vest for hemostats and, with wet, cold hands tried not to squeeze the fish too hard while working to extract the hook. Once I worked it free, I exhaled and looked, though for only a second, into the bulging black eye staring up at me, helplessly.

After cozying the trout back into the stream, I bounded from rock to rock, back to the long grass on the bank. And I had to sit. A weight within my head pressed me down. It felt like fatigue but I kept seeing the fish’s eye. The image wouldn’t flee. I wondered if the fish would survive or if I had damaged it permanently. At the same time, a sickening feeling heated my gut. I looked at my watch and saw that I should be heading home; my wife and I had an appointment that afternoon.

From the day we met eight years earlier, Robbie and I fantasized about Spooner, an imaginary dog we would someday have. We figured her to be a yellow Labrador retriever who would come to our bedside in the morning, wagging her tail and urging us to get out of bed. Sometimes we would even roll to the edge of the mattress and pretend to pet the side of her face and scratch her ears.

But the time had never been right for a dog, too much moving from city to city, unfair living arrangements for the country hound we imagined Spooner would be. After enduring several cities, we moved to the mountains and found an entrance to rural life. Dogs were everywhere, in restaurants and offices and shops, so I began looking for a puppy who would need a home.

That Saturday afternoon, we crossed the bony track to a nearby farm where a litter of puppies had been born. The card on the bulletin board of the local veterinarian directed us to the owners, who guessed that their golden retriever had been visited by a rottweiler, a big black dog they saw trotting across the pasture one morning.

When we arrived at the barn of the King family, we were escorted to a walled off corner, where we were greeted by the golden mother and shown a teeming pool of black puppies. We noticed that three females wiggled among the litter of eight and that one wore a red ribbon. She had already been claimed. Another of the females lunged at us, trying to climb over the barrier. She was smaller than the others and skinny, too. We fished her out and ran her through a battery of behavioral tests, all of which she skittishly failed. Later, we would refer to her as “cocaine sister.” We looked hard for the third female and found her sitting patiently in a corner, wagging her tail against the straw-covered floor. She looked at us, but not directly, out of the corner of one eye—a black eye that drew me into its depth with its singular, imploring stare.

I stretched over the team of yapping pups and lifted her out of the maelstrom. She excelled at the tests, so we took her outside for a better look.

Instead of yellow, Spooner was black and softer than any puppy I had ever touched. We bought her for ten dollars, just enough to cover the shots and her share of food in the previous ten weeks. On the way home in the car, she puked an impressive bellyful of dog chow onto Robbie’s lap.

Her black eyes absorbed my soul while her gaze melted my skin and bones, and, along with them, my instinct to dominate, to establish power over her, to show her who was boss. Clearly, she would be calling the shots. In those first few days with her, a lump often twisted in my throat but I truly could not understand what was happening to me. I had grown up with dogs and litters of puppies.

One litter had been born prematurely while my father was at work, but he had told me what to do over the phone. Eight years old, I pulled open three discharged placentas, and extracted still blind puppies, cleaned them off, since the mother wanted to have nothing to do with them, and fed them warm milk through a nipple made for premature babies. Some of them died but I had seen that before with other litters, and I tended to the survivors while my father wrapped the dead in several sheets of newspaper and unceremoniously placed them in a garbage can.

I remember being unfazed, just as I had been when my father entered the chicken coop one Saturday morning with a hand axe and banged off the heads of a couple of white chickens before the neighbor’s dog ran inside the fence and halted his work. While the dog chased the bleeding, headless chickens around the yard, my siblings and I squealed and laughed and yelled at the dog, trying to shoo him away. But the scene didn’t bring a scintilla of sorrow or remorse. It had been exhilarating.

We were amused by the fun we had with animals and were, it seemed, no less amused by their deaths. We loved our dogs and pet rabbits and birds, especially the birds we found inexplicably flopping around, that we incarcerated and nursed back to health before releasing them. But we were also constantly torturing insects and salamanders and crayfish we found in the woods.

On summer vacations at a lake, we fished in our own way. Taking five- foot lengths of fishing line with a hook tied to the end, we pressed doughballs made of white bread and peanut butter, or even little balls we made from the wad of Bazooka bubble gum we were chewing, and formed the balls around the end of the hook. Then we dropped the hook through the slats of a dock where we had seen small bluegills or sunfish swimming around and tried to get the fish to take our bait. They bit, and we yanked the fish out of the water and kept drawing them up to the underside of the dock, banging their lips and heads against the planks, letting them wriggle and curl their tails. We pulled until they relaxed and we managed to slip the slim fish through the cracks. Then we removed the hooks and scraped the creatures back into the water. The sport amused us for hours at a time. Never once did I think about the cruelty we dished out, never once did an adult reprimand us.

When the brutality of summer gave way to autumn, the smell of burning leaves mixed with the scent of solvent my father used to clean his shotgun. And on a few weekends, he took his three sons to my aunt’s farm in Latrobe, a couple of hours away, in the heart of coal mining country, where he hunted with his brother and a group of friends.

The men assembled and went off just before dawn while we joined cousins for a day of playing and chasing and leaping from the hayloft. Once the shadows lengthened and the steam of chicken stew and dumplings rolled into every room, we could hear car doors slamming and all three dogs barking. In the failing light, the hunters laid out their quarry on a tailgate: majestic ringnecked pheasants, perhaps a few ruffed grouse, and a fluffy row of rabbits. All had been field dressed. That is, gutted and stuffed with grass. We kids looked on admiringly as the men popped open pony bottles of Rolling Rock straight from the icebox (these old-timers lacked a real refrigerator).

Twelve adults and six kids wasted no time getting to the dinner table. And, after dinner, my brothers and I clambered down the basement stairs, into a humus-smelling cellar dominated by the coal furnace. Black duct pipes sprouted out of the top of the massive cast iron orb, a warm glow beaming through slits in the oven’s door. We sat on a bench in the shadow of a single light bulb, leaning against the cool walls of stacked shale. Beside a washtub, my father worked deftly with a razor, first cutting off the cottony tail of a rabbit and reaching toward us with the gift. I had to pick it off his sticky, bloody hand. He used his knife to lop off the back legs at the knee. These, too, we collected, since nothing brought better luck than a rabbit’s foot. Then he peeled away the skin, revealing the muscle and sinew, and inspected the carcass for buckshot, which he flicked out with the tip of his knife.

While he finished skinning all the rabbits, my brothers and I stroked our new feet and blew tails into the air. Then my father draped a skin over each hand and shoved his index fingers up into the still-attached heads. He concocted dialogue, spoken in a small voice, between the two puppets, that gestured and nodded and regarded each other and us with glossy black eyes. We giggled and listened to their story, holding their severed feet, their blood dripping down my father’s forearms.

In this way, we separated ourselves from any act of cruelty; we became inured to the mess, and no ethical questions arose. We always ate the animals my father, and later, we, killed. If my mother complained about preparing the meat—she did not grow up with hunters—she found some joy in the eating.

Fish entered her kitchen pretty much the way they did when they came from the market. We had already finished the fatal tasks: reeling them in, slamming them in the back of the head against a rock, slitting them open to clean them and inspect their bellies for a quick study of their favorite foods. Their death never struck me as any more tragic than opening a can of tuna. I never thought of having dragged those fish by their lips, against all the resistance their muscles could muster, to my hands.

I know that a brook trout flashing me a pitiable look is an invention of my mind. What resides in my conscience that is triggered by that look? After all the animals I had cared for and killed, had the stare of a single fish and the beseeching gaze of a black puppy, to whom I immediately committed myself, planted a stake in my murderous heart? I don’t think so. But I have gone soft, I’m afraid. And in a few moments, when I walk to the edge of the lake beside my house, I’ll watch the mergansers swim across the surface and dive and I won’t resent them for taking my fish. I’ve gone soft toward mergansers, soft toward killing; if this keeps up, I’ll never again hear that satisfying snap of a mousetrap in the middle of the night.

Compassion has thrown a ray of light on suffering and on my casual savagery. I am not proud of myself for all the dying eyes I ignored, and I am not satisfied by suddenly noticing them.

Parting with cruelty means parting with power. To willingly surrender that power, to act with tenderness and mercy, can suggest a weakness and delicacy counter to manly forging of solid principles and convictions.

But as I grow older, I have come to admire supple minds, secure in their strength, always stretching for grace and flexibility. And, in the face of cruelty, I have begun to recognize my own face—my eyes now old enough to relinquish the conventions of masculinity and embrace compassion. To do otherwise would be cowardly.

A Haunting Humidity

by Paul Hertneky

On this humid morning, the air sticks to my face, gathers between my fingers, and collects in the folds of my eyelids. Outside, haze shrouds optimism. The future hides behind a film better suited for reflection. But the images diffuse like those on a mirror after a shower. In it I see only an impression of the past, of the steamy days I survived, and relief.

After all, I’m not driving spikes into railroad ties with guys who slept in their clothes last night. I’m not stepping into greasy work pants, found in my locker at the steel mill, inhaling embedded solvents when my cheek brushes my thigh as I bend to tie my bootlaces.

I remember the mill and the desperation of the labor gang. My co-workers stacked up the days, counting their pay on their way to extended vacations, their bass boats, their next EKG, their retirement.

With every shift, my future plans and dreams wore thin. Before long, I brushed them aside or winced when I’d find them smoking skinny menthols at the end of a bar. Like sleeping in two-hour stints, the scenes ran shallow. I knew the faces in the dreams; I had been to all the places, heard it all before. One night I hope something funny will happen, something thrilling, something horrible, something shocking. Falling off the boat, coming up with a fish in my pocket, coming up with a gun used in a murder, coming up with a winning lottery ticket, coming up with a way out.

Dreams hedged with self‑doubt and crushed by responsibility will shrink to the size of nightmares. How can I trust them? And why bother? Just keep working. Keep parking in long rows, walking through the gates, waving to my second cousin. He’s running the overhead crane and I hope he didn’t drink too much last night.

My mind wanders as I walk, picturing the rising price of gas at the string of stations I passed this morning and separating it from yesterday morning and the one before. Sensing a trend, a political opinion roils inside me. I unconsciously find the locker room, my locker, my cool greasy pants. And, hoisting them to my waist, I feel a comfort in their grime, pasted thick after three days of hard work. Today must be Wednesday. I’ll get fresh pants tomorrow and the weekend is only two days away. I won’t feel this shitty again for another week.

Tomorrow the gang’s stupid jokes that swirl and melt like snowflakes on a car hood will begin to stick. I’ll make plans to drink beer with my buddies, hoping one will say something profound, something bold, something odd, something I haven’t heard before. I look forward to spooning into the curve of my girlfriend’s back on Saturday morning, smelling her hair, and drifting off when the rattle and roar of my jackhammer explodes and wakes me in a start; I see its bit shining at the same angle I saw before my right leg punched through the corrugated roof two hundred feet above the furnaces on that sweltering summer day.

I will wear no socks today, no steel‑toed boots. I will return calls and edit a draft. I will walk my dog before the heat of the day. After that stretch in the mill, I vowed I would never return. Yet, here I am, sticky and clinging to the memory.

Paul Hertneky has enjoyed a long career as a professional cook, freelance writer, photographer, and editor, publishing hundreds of stories, reviews, and essays covering culture, history, health, the environment, cooking, food, the restaurant industry, and travel. He is the author of RUST BELT BOY: Stories of an American Childhood, a memoir of braided essays, for which Poets & Writers Magazine named him one of “5 Over 50 Notable Authors” in 2016. His work has appeared in a media, including The Boston Globe, Athens News, NBC News, The Comedy Channel, Eating Well, and Gourmet magazines. He is a two-time James Beard Award nominee and a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He has served on the graduate faculty of Antioch University and Chatham University.

Creative Nonfiction

Nora Lynn’s PhD

by Alana Anton

Someone asked me, “Why do you say you wouldn’t have a PhD without her?” I don’t know how to answer that without telling a hundred stories. A thousand moments of love, encouragement, and telling me what I would and would not accept in my life. I was born on her birthday, and after my mother, she was the most important and influential person in my world.

Hand in hand we walked to the library. Today was gonna be the best day. Because it was the summer I was five. And five meant my library card. I couldn’t wait to touch it. Manilla card stock with a little metal square that told the library ladies all the books I had ever checked out. It would have my name on it, not my grandmama’s name. My very own. I could now check out more than five books at a time, and since five would barely get me through a day, I was giddy. I felt so important. I could take a look, in a book…I could go anywhere.

I can only guess that it was from the moment I was born because my earliest memories of her are reading and telling me stories. When it was bathtime, she would act out Little Red Riding Hood and scare me as the Big Bad Wolf. I loved it so much, she used her incredible tailoring skills to make me a Little Red Riding Hood costume. My mama has it. Maybe one day I will be able to pass it on.

Once I was able, we walked to the library. Almost every day in the summer. I always, always, always stayed with her in the summer. When I was sick, every holiday, once on a weekend when I ran away from 1st grade, and sometimes…very rarely, I got to spend the night during a school week. Those were a little gift to us. She would stay up late reading to me or letting me read myself to sleep. And in the morning, she would make me my own lunch from her kitchen. Ham with Kraft cheese and mayonnaise because Papa drove an 18-wheeler for Kraft, so it was never any other brand.

It was cool to bring your lunch, most of us ate the cafeteria food, but some kids had lunch boxes with popular cartoons, or Barbies, or Matchbox cars. I didn’t have one of those. She kept brown bags for me, and every time she made my lunch she drew on them. Forest scenes of fairies, she loved fairies, with trees and vines and flowers. She would swipe my Papa’s sermon writing pens in blue, black, red, and green and create a little world for me on my lunch bag. I would give my rent money to have one back.

My favorite book was Eloise at the Plaza. Like Eloise, I was precocious, talkative, into trouble, and, I hope, quite cute and loveable. That time I ran away from school? I got bored, found a hole in the playground fence, convinced another girl to come with me, and took off. Headed to Grandmama’s house. I got about halfway there, too. As punishment, I was not allowed to head deeper into the mountains of Murphy, NC where we had a one-room cabin, for the weekend. I had to stay with her. My Mama sat us both down and, literally wagging her finger, she demanded I not be allowed any fun.

Nora Lynn promptly took me to the circus.

Papa was a circuit preacher. Hellfire and brimstone. Nora? She was a terrible First Lady. I heard she tried to do all the typical First Lady of the church duties at one of his posts, but the mean girls in the congregation bullied her. So, instead of dealing with any of that, she quit entirely. She had complicated views about god and the universe. She rarely discussed it, and when she did, would readily tell you she was agnostic. Her funeral was a Southern Baptist service through and through. Livid doesn’t really encompass how I felt about that.

She did sometimes come to church, Easter, and Christmas, but, the biggest day was Homecoming. We all dressed up in old-timey clothes and had dinner on the grounds. Little House on the Prairie had become one of my many literary obsessions and so, she made me a Laura Ingalls Wilder dress. Pantaloon, underskirt, dress, apron, even the bonnet. My book-driven world come to life.

Nora Lynn Copeland died on October 15, 2019.

I prepared my song to her. She loved George Michael. She was so full of, well, piss and vinegar. Would go wild at a concert like she was a 20 something who had too much to drink. When I got to the funeral home, the pastor seemed surprised that I would sing. That there would be music. For a woman who married and birthed and had grandchildren who are or were all musicians. He said that he had an hour and if I could fit it in, he would let me sing.

I almost took a swing.

I sang George Michael’s One More Try…and I made sure everyone there knew she was full of piss and vinegar, too, straight from the pulpit.

She taught me to read, she taught me what words could do. I wish she could see what she did. Where I am.

So, when I say she is the reason, these are just some of the ways she got me here.

Dr. Alana Anton is a queerbilly from the foothills of Northwest Georgia. Currently living in the mountains of Upstate South Carolina, she teaches sociology at North Carolina A&T University. Since graduating from Georgia State University, she is working on a book based on her dissertation research, uncovering the influence media has on the perception of Appalachia and her people.

First Fish: A Triptych

by Chauna Craig

I am five years old wearing my reddish-brown hair in pigtails, and my face says it all: eyes squinting against the afternoon sun, lips twisted into the facsimile of a smile. I am supposed to be proud, triumphant as I stand on the tiny porch to the cabin, an eight-inch rainbow trout threaded through the gills onto the long stick I’m holding out toward the camera. My first fish.

But my fist grips the very bottom of the stick, arm extended to keep the dead, gaping, staring thing from touching me. I insist it is slimy, and my teenaged aunt, never one for behaviors that seem “girly,” tries to coax me to run my fingers along its smooth side, to prove me wrong. I have already been made to pose for this picture, to document an event that has not turned out as I expected. Someone makes me bend my elbow so the fish is in the frame, and I instinctively suck my stomach back, afraid its swinging fan tail will brush my shirt. I feel its weight in my trembling arms, but I smile as I’m told until I hear the snap and then the whir of advancing film.

Limit reached, bedrock of stubbornness woven into my DNA. I am done. It takes every scrap of child-sized patience not to fling stick and fish into the dry grass. But then someone hands the fish to my little brother to take his picture with my fish, and I feel a stab of righteous fury. My fish.

Tony Anglund, owner of a cabin across the meadow, took us kids to the swimming hole to teach us to fish. I don’t know why my father or grandfather or aunt, all of them avid fishers, didn’t. Maybe they had already tried, or maybe our neighbor had offered and everyone had been glad for the break from our noise and energy in the small space of the cabin. But Tony walked us down to the river with junior-sized fishing poles and live bait, and he took charge of all the grisly worm-stabbing and helped us learn to cock back our arms to catapult the hook and worm as far into the river as we could cast. I loved the gentle kerplunk on the surface and the slow, steady reeling (still do…repetition as meditation). I could have kept casting and reeling, happily, long after my brother gave up to throw rocks, but then the line jerked as I started to wind the reel, and I froze, clutching the pole. Tony’s face lit up as he praised my skill, his arms around mine to help, my brother at my side as all of us watched something cutting through the water, coming closer and taking the shape of a decent-sized fish as I, or more likely Tony, reeled it in.

We landed it on the grassy shore, both of us kids watching in fascination and horror as it flipped in bursts of electric energy, gills flexing until the trout exhausted itself and Tony scooped it up and bashed its skull on a rock so fast I wasn’t sure what had happened. He smiled, congratulated me, held the fish out like an offering.

“Don’t you want to hold it?” As if this yucky, bloody-gilled thing with its terrible, accusing eye were a baby doll or kitten.

I told him he could keep it, and he delighted in repeating this story back at our cabin where I was made to pretend in a photo that I wanted this fish I’d caught.

My brother stands on the porch against our red screen door, grinning, chest puffed out, fish held up like a trophy. I tell everyone who will listen that he did not catch it, that it is my fish. They snap pictures and remind me that I didn’t want it and therefore get no say.

Nothing sets me off, even now, like having “no say.” I don’t remember what happened next. I think my family sent the fish home with Tony Anglund because we were leaving the next day, no time to clean and cook a trout. I only know that I had no say in what happened to the fish that had taken the worm on the end of the line I’d thrown into the river. Given the option, I would have released it, returned to the easy joy of flinging something far away from me on an invisible line that I could bring back over and over. I had no say in taking the fish to the cabin, forced to claim it in a five-second pose that made it mine forever before my brother, only three, owned it better than I did: proud, triumphant.

I imagine even now that he sees that photo in the album collected of his childhood photos and taps it with a false, fond memory. My first fish.

II.

Summers at the cabin stack in my mind like clouds on the horizon: merging into one great bank of memories stretching slowly, drifting. Sometimes spreading to reveal separate, wispy boundaries, one year to the next. Sometimes morphing so one summer is remembered as another.

I had no children of my own that summer Andy caught his first fish. He was maybe nine or ten, still more fascinated with the natural world than with pleasures reliant on batteries. We—he, his father, his younger sister, and I—were all down by the swimming hole where the river widens and slows into a lazy pool, deep enough that brave and foolish teen boys forge the river to the other side to carefully pick their way up the cliff, all toeholds and crumbling limestone shelves, before pausing on a landing halfway up, before making the leap. Joyful plummet to the water below, into the murky depths where the huge and wily browns evade detection.

That day: no one but us.

Andy called to me from just south of the swimming hole, where there was no gradual sloping beach, but a sharply defined bank, weedy and still green. His patient sister, bug-lover and people-pleaser, the born fisher, was casting downstream with her father, and Andy, like me, had a pole and a lure, but was really there to explore and play. Like me.

He pointed into the water to a sucker, what my aunt always called a “trash fish” before throwing it back. I knew something was wrong. The fish was close to the bank, close to the surface, just floating there, unbothered by our shadows, its gills flaring rarely. Sometimes it would tilt, like a damaged submarine, then gradually right itself, drifting a little.

Andy dangled his lure above the fish, dipping it into the water near its mouth. “Leave it alone,” I said. “It’s hurt, probably dying. Besides,” I added. “It’s a trash fish.” Many years later I learned that suckers and mountain whitefish are native to the river, unlike the sought-after rainbow and brown trout. In fact, they were likely valued as food sources for prehistoric peoples in the canyon. Not at all how I’d been taught to think of them.

I couldn’t bear to watch the fish, whatever its relative value, suffering in the shallows, and I wandered back to the beach in search of rocks flat and smooth enough to skip.

Soon the wandering fishers cast their way back in view, and then I heard a shout and a whoop, Andy’s father calling, “He caught a fish!” I walked the shore to join them and saw, dangling limp and resigned from the end of the line, the same, sad sucker I’d told my stepson to leave alone. Thrill shone in Andy’s eyes, envy in his sister’s. Pride in their father’s. All I felt was anger as I told his father the fish was already dying, unable to swim away, probably starving. “I told him to leave it alone,” I emphasized.

“He caught it,” his dad said. “His first fish.”

It doesn’t count, I thought.

The dying fish had summoned its last reserves of energy to lunge for the meal dangled directly before it. It had finally taken the lure, getting only a mouthful of sharp metal, the hook now winking from its too-small, puckered carp mouth while Andy’s father tried to work it loose.

Andy had caught the fish; I wasn’t denying that. But he’d ignored my instructions, and, more, this catch seemed like cheating, somewhat cruel to persist in offering a wounded creature whatever it wants badly enough that it will lunge for your hook against healthier self-preservation. What sport in that? What possible victory?

“His first fish,” Andy’s father slowly repeated, eyes dark and staring, daring me to say otherwise.

I watched a red flag of blood unfurling down the fish’s white belly. I felt my cheeks burn with shame for trying to spoil a boy’s big moment, for failing (again) in the parenting role I’d been assigned. Finally unhooked, the fish was thrown back in the water. But it didn’t swim; the current carried its pale corpse, backward and upside down, away.

Over the next couple days I urged Andy to go fishing alone with his dad. I wanted him to feel the thrill of the strike and pull from unseen depths. I wanted, too, to redeem myself. But he’d caught his fish, and he’d moved on.

Years later, when I asked Andy what he remembered of his first fish at the cabin, he recalled frustration at never getting anything. Then he added (hedging, saying his memory could be wrong) that he remembered seeing a fish near the riverbank and trying for and getting it, only then he didn’t want to touch it and his dad had to throw it back because it was too small, and he thinks he was mad about that.

I wonder now why I needed him all those years ago to try again, to catch his first fish the “right” way. I asked for his memory partly to confirm mine, to trust I’m telling the right story, when I know we are in fact only ever telling our stories. Andy’s: the story of relief and satisfaction after wanting something then getting it and wanting it no more. Mine: the story of an insecure stepmother struggling to please an impossible man, furious with herself as she grew more and more exhausted but still lunged for the dangling hook again and again. Always left wanting.

Andy remembers the fish near the bank, not that it was already dying and an easy target. I remember my fury and then shame over dampening a child’s memory of his first fish. Except I learned that I didn’t do that after all. Time, I realize, to finally let that fish go.

III.

On the west wall of the cabin’s sleeping porch, on a shelf by the screen door, sits a square of cardboard with a yellow and red Panther Martin lure hooked in and a small note in my ex-husband’s angular, childish print: Wyn’s first fish/ brown trout 10 ½” with the date scrawled up the side, 7/30/2014, and his age, 8 years old.

This is all I know of the event: a lure and a date. Did they kill it and keep it and fry it for dinner? Did they release the brown back to the river? Did my son work the hook out of the gaping jaw or, like me and his older brother, did he recoil from trying to hold that scaled sleeve of powerful muscle at the end of the line? How did he feel? What did he think? What does he remember, his childhood memories divided and assigned to one parent or the other?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. I don’t ask. I wonder what he will think to share. In this way, I practice for the rest of our storied lives.

Chauna Craig is the author of the story collections The Widow’s Guide to Edible Mushrooms, winner of a Next Gen Indies award for short fiction, and Wings and Other Things, both published by Press 53. Her fiction has appeared most recently in the anthologies Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton) and Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene (WVU Press), and her creative work has been recognized in the Pushcart Prize anthology and by Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She lives and teaches in Indiana, Pennsylvania.

Fiction

Watching

by Jolene McIlwain

The eagle won’t let the sunlight hit it in such a way I can capture its tail wings, those evasive black tips on all that white. Never.

High above the trees it soars. Most times its pure white parts blend with sky, a magic trick, its bald white head all gone but for a bit of yellow. And when it flies low to the riverbank hunting, oh, I lose those lovely browns. Rarely does it come in, expose itself, mid-flora, rarely does it hover over the mid-river where I might shoot the ideal—the water mirroring skylight.

It has to remain unseen, unknown, unshot. But I know it’s there. My lens has caught it, shifting, grainy, halfway through the frame. Underexposed. Overexposed. I’ve captured so many things these ways.

I scan for feathers on both sides of the river. I have fifteen. They’re hidden in the closet with my cameras, lenses, old, mottled slides, canisters of undeveloped film, slippery negatives, with all my other finds. Evidence that many unseen things exist.

Each morning, scouting for the raptor, I glimpse the same man arrive across the river at her place twenty minutes after her husband leaves, sometimes twenty-five, twenty-three. Of course, I’d say I’m searching for a slip of muted color, a cut of flight through the fog, but I can’t keep myself from swinging the lens midway between the water’s edge and treetops, straight from my cabin to hers. He almost kissed her outside her door this morning. Again. Inside they’ve made love and they’ve fucked. I’ve zoomed into the blush of it afterward and even three times during it all when she’d forgotten to slide her heavy blinds shut.

They’ve been careless with their wrong, what they’ve gutted there and left exposed, and there will be consequences for what they’ve preyed upon in each other, for that sickened nest they’ve made. If caught, there won’t be flight. She’ll never leave her husband. All that money. But like a lead-infested eagle who’s been eating buckshot from the field-dressings of a kill, she’ll go slack, become guilt-paralyzed. It won’t end well.

I’ve not just watched. I’ve caught them in my frame, captured all they do. I’ve saved it in the closet, too, with those fifteen feathers.

Jolene McIlwain is the author of Sidle Creek, an NPR and Library Journal Best Book of the Year. Her work appears in such publications as Florida Review, Cincinnati Review, New Orleans Review, LITRO, Heavy Feather Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Jolene is a Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net nominee and her work has been included in the Best Small Fictions anthologies. She’s taught literary theory and analysis at Chatham and Duquesne Universities and currently helps her son facilitate a HipCamp eco-campsite, MuddyMyst, in Western Pennsylvania.

Fiction

Minnie at the Mirror

by Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

Akron, Ohio, 1943

“Who is it tonight?” Margaret asked as Minnie futzed with her waves in the vanity mirror. When they’d found the piece in the dump a girl on their shift had told them it’d come clean with some vinegar. It hadn’t. Margaret knew it wouldn’t, but she couldn’t convince Minnie that this mirror wasn’t just dirty, it was busted. Cheap layers separating away from each other making every image hazy. Yet Minnie had convinced herself the vinegar had worked. The wood was just beautiful and there were lovely little boxes built in for her jewelry, her face paints, and her scents. It was perfect, except for the mirror bit. They made good money at the factory, but most of Minnie’s went to clothes and makeup, all the things she needed to whoop it up with the boys on leave. All the Victory Red lipsticks and dresses. All the Radiant Reds and fancy hats. Margaret’s all went back to Scioto County to her mother. There was seldom anything left for furnishings. When they’d agreed to the space the landlady had assured them the rooms came with everything they’d need. Beds, dressers, a comfortable sofa for visiting with their young men. But there’d been no mirrors anywhere, not even in the lavatory.

“I think Dom, but could be Vinnie.” Margaret watched Minnie run the lipstick across her top lip and then press and smack, trying to make the thin layer of color go as far as she could.

“What, don’t you know?” Margaret tried to make her voice light and joshing. It wasn’t her natural way. She was sure Minnie could tell.

“No,” she placed the lipstick to the top of the vanity, “you got a problem with that?”

No matter how hard Margaret tried, she couldn’t figure Minnie out, so therefore could never figure out if she was safe or not. Oh, she knew the name of her hometown, or at least the county down in West Virginia, but that only told you so much. They’d lived together six months, worked together at Goodyear nearly two years, Margaret still had no sense of who Minnie was. She hoped someday to be as good at this game herself.

It was only in these small cracks she started to get a sense. There was some Minnie she’d see that gave her hope. If Minnie could hide so well, perhaps someday, with practice, so could she.

“Just funning,” Margaret said.

Minnie relaxed, “Well, ya’ know Margaret, the world is our oyster.” She shrugged and shook her hair just a little, trying to get her curls to do right. “I look a right fright, an absolute right fright.” Margaret began to relax a little too, the old Minnie, which she suspected was actually a fairly new Minnie, was back. Minnie sounded like Cary Grant might be on his way over to pick her up and all her phrases were straight out of the pictures. Margaret knew the danger had passed.

Jennifer Schomburg Kanke, originally from Ohio, currently lives in Florida. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah and Salamander. She is the winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Editor’s Choice Award for Fiction. Her zine about her experiences undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, Fine, Considering, is available from Rinky Dink Press (2019). She serves as a reader for The Dodge and as a Meter Mentor in Annie Finch’s Poetry Witch Community. Her website is www.jenniferschomburgkanke.com

Fiction

Acts of God Down at the Wal-Mart

by Larry Thacker

Bobby Greer claims he heard it first.

Hell.

Some God-awful tormented sounds out of the sinkhole that opened up on a Thursday night in the middle of the Wal-Mart parking lot.

Now, as most around here know, Saturday night is peak shopping and social time at the Fetch, Tennessee, Wal-Mart. The parking lot is packed all weekend. When that hole opened up, it took two and half cars with it, not to mention all the shopping buggies. Two cars all the way down, as in vanished, gone, nothing, leaving a single truck teetering on the edge just enough to be pulled to safety once the authorities had determined the hole wasn’t going to swallow up all the emergency crew. And yes, an entire buggy coral was missing as well, though folks in Fetch aren’t known for their buggy coral usage.

Sinkholes are bad around Fetch. This one was so deep, sunlight couldn’t hit the bottom, even at noon. It was a good thirty feet across at the widest. They figured it was caused by an underground river eroding limestone and soil until the overburden got too heavy and collapsed. That’s what usually happens.

The police cordoned off the area for a good three parking places all around with yellow crime scene tape and red cones and put out the word for everyone to steer clear until further notice. With all the yellow tape it looked like an early Halloween was on the way.

There’s a problem with sinkholes, though. They can keep getting bigger for a while. You can jump in and start fixing one way too soon and they’ll keep falling in. For months. For years. You should have seen them pulling the half-lost truck out. The owner tipped the tow truck driver an extra hundred for backing into the danger zone just to hook the winch cable to the truck’s bumper. He was announced as Wal-Mart hero for a day inside the store. Two days later, that spot he’d sprinted across was long gone. The hole was forty feet across now. This was dangerous stuff.

It’s not like the police would post an officer to keep the curious from getting too close. They figured people had sense enough to steer clear of certain death. Wouldn’t the yellow tape work good enough? But people still hung out at the very limit, standing on their toes getting a better look, taking pictures, holding children up, as if it was a pullover at Lookout Mountain or the Pinnacle. Look, kids! A dark mysterious death hole in the middle of town! Let’s not cross this caution tape whatever we do! Hey, let’s go get a Mountain Dew Icee at the Wal-Mart deli!

The Greer boy never let on as to who dared him to cross the line. It was probably one of the Simpson boys he ran with. They knew when no one else would take a chance on something dangerous, Bobby was the one to call out. Climb that sketchy tree, Bobby! Jump off that cliff at the lake, Bobby! Go get a close-up picture down that deadly sinkhole, Bobby! Put it on your Instagram!

They went out to the hole late on that Sunday night. Not a lot of traffic. No one hanging around the site. It was Bobby and the two Simpson brothers, Rodney and Cole. One of the brothers recorded Bobby. The footage shows Bobby standing at the yellow tape talking low, psyching himself up for the stunt, the parking lot lights just bright enough to show his face, then him ducking down and sneaking across the dark asphalt toward the hole. He slowed up short and got on all fours and crawled to the edge. He had his phone. The parking lot wasn’t bright enough to really show what was happening in detail. This was before the city set up portable lights all around once everything got weird. All anyone had from the stunt was what Bobby claimed to have experienced and what little he’d gotten on his phone, which, in the end, was plenty enough for the faithful.

Instagram and Facebook were blowing up come Monday morning. You’d think Bobby would have been all full of himself, but he wasn’t. As he recorded himself, he seemed serious, even worried. He started with the still shots, explaining: “Y’all know I like a challenge…I like a good dare, but this one’s got me thinking. I went and got up close to that sinkhole at the Wal-Mart. I took a few shots and some video. I used my phone flash and increased the contrast. Do you see what I see?”

Down, way down in the hole, where even the flash from the phone had a hard time reaching, were faces. Yes, faces. Strained, pained, grimacing, faces, as if caught mid-scream, dark-eyed, skeletal and deathly. Dozens of faces. Three of the four shots showed them. It was freaky. They’d vanished by the fourth. Gone. Some of the eyes flashed back from the light, like frozen animals. It was obvious that the faces moved between shots. The comments were getting out of control by noon:

Argoprince12: “Nice photo-editing! This a school project? LOL!”

Amy35_XX: “I think I saw this on a movie.”

SIMdoom: “WTF.”

EarlytoRise_2: “That from the family reunion?”

Amy35_XX: “Halloween yet??”

PreacherMan78: “This is obviously a glimpse into Hell. Be careful what you go looking for people!”

Fifteentwenty: “Now that’s a good one!”

420somewhere: “Well, we knew Fetch was a lot like Hell already!”

PreacherMan78: “No. Really. That hole is a gate to Hell that’s opened up. Messing with

that is bad news, boys. Get right with the Lord.”

Apocalypse23: “That PreacherMan78s a real preacher. He’d know.”

BettySuU_Lawyer: “An expert in east Tennessee sinkholes, too, I reckon?”

PreacherMan78: “Salvation, maybe. And I know a glimpse of Hell when I see it.”

The conversation was taking a bizarre turn. It only got better from there.

Come to find out, “PreacherMan78,” was Amos Stout, a Man of God about town. More than anything, he was pastor without a church building to preach within. Hungry and clever, Amos knew a golden clad opportunity when it magically appeared, or, better yet, fell through the parking lot at your feet. Speed was of the essence, wasn’t it? Before someone else beat him to the idea. Time was money. Money meant souls.

Wal-Mart parking lots are renowned for their community availability. Girl Scout cookie sales. Shiner circus ticket sales. Strangely talented drifter saxophonists playing solo to taped backup music from a portable speaker. Sometimes you’d think the parking lot in Fetch was a city park. Carnivals and circuses set up. Semi-tracker trailers park overnight at their leisure. Women of the night stroll freely. They generally won’t run people off sleeping in their cars overnight if they break down or have a bad streak of luck. One family lived in their broke down car for half a year once. People would drive up and hand them money all the time. Their handmade cardboard “Need help – God Bless” sign got so old it fell apart. Campers hang out for days like they’re at the lake. Here in Fetch, they’ve even allowed tent revivals. That’s where Amos Stout figured he had a foot in the door for his idea.

Feinman’s Funeral Home lent him two adjoining extra-large tents provided they could advertise. He and some buddies were already setting up for the coming weekend when both the store assistant manager, Amy Lender, and the assistant Chief of Police, Lennie Schafer, showed up with What the hell? looks on their faces.

“What are you doing?” Lennie asked, really wondering what the hell was happening.

“Yeah!” Amy chimed in, just as confused. Neither knew of anything that was supposed to be happening like this near the hole. It already looked dangerous and that meant both of them might get in deep trouble over something bad that was bound to happen.

Amos thought he had things figured out. He’d already spoken to John Betterman, the man who leased all the land to Wal-Mart in the first place. He’d gone straight to the landlord to ask permission, and figured he could ask forgiveness of everyone else lining up to question the Lord’s work when the time came. Besides, who wanted to be the one to turn down a harmless church activity in freedom-of-religion-loving Fetch?

Amy knew nothing about any leasing of land for the store. It’d never come up. She radioed for the head store manager, Ralph Summit. Ralph told her it was a fact, that this store did lease the land from Mr. Betterman. The way he said “Mister” gave her the feeling he wasn’t someone to mess with, which gave her a bad feeling about messing with this fella that was introducing himself authoritatively as “Preacher Stout.” Anyone who introduced themselves by their suffix, she’d learned, was usually a true big shot or wanted to be one. Either way, they could make trouble.

Lennie saw through the layers of created BS and chimed in with some confidence. “Even if you do have an agreement with the landowner, I’m thiking some kind of conversation with this store is in order before you can just set up…what is it you’re doing, anyway…?”

“Tent revival,” Amos answered matter-of-factly.

Lennie repeated it back, inspecting the tent’s fair proximity to the ever-widening sinkhole.

“Look, preacher, I ain’t got a problem with no revival, but of all the spots to set up, why right here within a stone’s throw of that sinkhole, huh?”

Something about the word stone gave Amos pause. His eyes widened and his mouth went slack. He was overtaken by true epiphany, right on the spot, as if God himself had come down to this Wal-Mart parking lot and whispered in his left ear. His brain ran off with the possibilities. Stones. That was the answer.

Lennie was frustrated. “You hearing me, preacher? Hey!”

Amos snapped out of his inspired spiritual fog. “Yes. Yes! I am. I’ve just had the best idea, though!” He yelled over to his workers. “Hurry up, brothers! We’ve got a lot of work to do! Praise, God!”

Lennie was really getting aggravated now. “Why so close to the hole, man? What’s the idea?”

Amy backed him up. “Yeah!”

Preacher Amos became serious, almost grim, pointing over to the hole.

“Officer, you may not believe it, but that right there is an opened portal to Hell.”

“Hell,” Amy repeated, staring over at the hole she’d been walking by for three days already. “Hell?” she asked, now a little amused by the man.

“Yes, ma’am. That’s a gateway to the Devil’s Hell, opened up right here in Fetch to swallow up poor lost souls. If we let it,” Amos answered, his expressions turning even more serious. “And don’t worry, I’ve already cleared the distance with the city engineers. They said as long as I was a hundred feet from the hole, we were okay. Heck, they’re letting people park closer than that, see?”

“A hundred foot from Hell?” Lennie said, almost giggling at his own cleverness.

“You serious?” Amy asked, wondering how much she’d offend him if she laughed as hard as he wanted.

The preacher huffed, anticipating the long road ahead. What if everyone reacted this way?

“We’re closing that thing down, I promise you. Literally, praise God,” Amos told them. “Y’all are invited. Bring a guest.”

The preacher walked off, leaving the Assistant Chief of Police and the Assistant store manager standing a little confused as to what they’d just experienced.

Amos and his helpers had their tents up by that evening, ready for what may come the next Sunday morning. He’d been inviting everyone who stopped by, curious, as they made their way through the lot. They positioned the tents right up as near the yellow caution tape as they could. They put out the metal folding chairs, the portable, battery-operated podium with the internal speaker, the American and Christan flags. The set a couple of potted fake ferns around the bases of the tent polls. Everything looked nice and ready. Ready to take on Hell.

Now Preacher Amos Stout didn’t yet have a church house within which to gather up his flock and preach. They were more of a migratory tent congregation. In fact, they had so little money they hadn’t even bought permanent tents yet. He’d set up, like a few do, once or twice a year, as often as he could, for big roadside revivals and visit other churches when lucky enough to get invited. That kept enough food on the table along with the electronics repair business he’d inherited from his uncle Rich. His followers kept up with his “Stout Ministries” doings by way of his Facebook page, “What’s Up with Preacher Amos?”

Brothers and Sisters, are you ready for real revival? You’ve all probably heard by now, or seen for yourselves, the big hole that fell in out at the Fetch Wal-Mart. Ain’t it something? We’re setting up for revival right beside that hole, which I suspect is a dangerous and evil portal straight to Hell given evidence acquired by a church member’s son, Bobby Greer, when he took a chance and acquired footage from down in the murky abyss (without permission, of course – but remember, Our Lord managed a lot without permission too!). I’ve seen the evidence, like many of you, and I’m convinced. Invite your family and friends and let’s have “Revival A Hundred Feet from Hell!”

He sent a separate email out to the kids, and, of course, their parents. The kids were like mobile Sunday School students. About twenty, last he counted. The idea Lennie had given him was taking shape.

“Hey, young’uns! Here’s your Sunday School assignment for tomorrow morning! Gather up as many fist-sized rocks as you can and bring them to the backside of the tent. No bigger than your fist. It doesn’t matter what kind of rocks they are, just bring what you can, and I’ll explain later. Remember – Jesus Loves You!”

One of the kid’s fathers, Wayne Barthell, owned a gravel company. You can guess what was going to happen when his boy Calvin told his daddy what the Sunday School assignment was. Wayne rolled in there early Sunday morning with one of his dump trucks full up with four tons of limestone rock crushed to just the right size, no questions asked, “In God We Crush” plastered all over the side of his truck.

“Where you want your rock, Preacher,” he asked, sipping his Hardee’s coffee.

Amos couldn’t believe his eyes and said a little prayer of thanks.

“Right there looks good to me, brother!” Amos yelled, smiling as big as his face could handle, hoping the ground under that part of the asphalt wasn’t thin from any additional unknown eroding. He pushed such a possibility to the back of his imagination, blaming such vision on the Dark One himself.

Wayne tilted the load and let the rocks slide and scrape out and down with a metallic racket even people across the highway having brunch at the Pizza Pizzaz noticed.

Already instructed by the preacher as to what was happening, some of the kids waited for the rockpile to come to a rest, then ran over with a large homemade cardboard sign that read: Stone the Devil! Only $1 per rock! Let’s fill up the Gate to Hell! Proceeds go to Vacation Bible School Fund, the Choir Trip fund, and Tent Fund.

It was finally becoming clear what the preacher’s epiphany had been – he planned to fill up that hell-of-a-hole with rocks and make money doing it.

The hand-painted wooden sign out on the road pointed the curious into the parking lot, inviting people to “Come Worship a Hundred Foot from Hell!” If that didn’t cause an appropriate amount of nosiness, what would? If nothing else, there’d be a constant traffic jam along parking aisles seven and nine during the whole service, Amos figured. Any attention was good attention, he’d once heard said.

Come ten-thirty Sunday morning, it was time to get started. Everyone joined in an acapella version of Amazing Grace (verses one, three, and four) and had a seat. Amos was anxious to get started. They could get shut down at any moment.

“It’s pretty simple, people. Sometimes it’s hard to believe in places we’ve never seen, even when we’ve been given the gift of proof,” the preacher started, holding up the Bible. “I’ve never been to Texas, but I believe it’s a real place, because I trust people who’ve been there and I’ve seen some pictures.”

He let that sink in.

“As for faith, I hold in my hand all the evidence of God’s Heaven and the Devil’s Hell we need. Yet, given how so many people are living their lives these days, you’d think those places were fairy tales.”

A bunch of amens followed.

“Then one day a miracle up and happens,” he continued, pointing a finger up and out toward the hole only a hundred feet from those sitting along the left of the crowd. Everyone turned and looked. Murmured to themselves.

“That there’s a miracle, people. A simple hole in a simple parking lot in a simple town, plain and simple.”

He went quiet. Tilted his head, shushed the crowd. Listened hard.

“Hear that? Behind the traffic. The parking lot noise. The people going shopping when they ought to be in church! Hear it? If you listen, it’s there. Can’t you? Just like little Bobby Greer did!”

He waited a whole thirty seconds for effect.

“Oh, the damnation! The cries for mercy! The belching fires of eternal removal from God’s presence!” he screamed. “I hear them!”

A woman yelled from the back row, half crazed in the bliss of spirit, frightened to death. She was about the only one, though, Amos noticed, but she was a start.

Amos grabbed a big gravel stone he’d stored down in his portable podium. “I say…” he began again, lifting the fist-sized thing well above his head and walking out from behind the podium and approaching the front row of the audience, “I say…we stone the Devil!”

A few people reacted, but not how he needed. A sign here and there hadn’t done the job.

“We could wait on the state to come in with their know-it-all engineers to fill that thing, but what if…what if it opens back up? We know what it is! They don’t. They just think it’s a regular old hole in the ground! I know better! You know better!”

A few more responded. “Yes! We do!” This might take drastic measures, Amos thought.

Amos stood at the edge of the tent, still pointing toward the hole with the rock.

“I defy the gates of Hell!”

Multiple amens rose from the crowd. A few stood and shouted now.

“I condemn the Gates of Hell!” He stepped out from under the tent and into the morning sun.

“I rebuke the Gates of Hell!” he continued, louder, lifting a leg over the yellow caution tape. More amens. A gasp of wonder, fright, and delight. The other leg went over, and he was standing in the prohibited zone. Amens went up and more worry. Then, with one last challenge at the top of his lungs, Amos took off sprinting across the forbidden zone right up to the crumbling edge of the Hell pit, looking back to his flock one last time to see if he had their attention finally, and flung the stone down into the darkness with a smug smile.

The flock were quick to their feet now, clapping, yelling, praising the Lord, headed over to line up on the other side of the tent where the Sunday School children were ready to take a dollar per stone from as many as could contribute. Amos came back from the hole, out of breath, more than a little surprised at what he’d done in the Spirit, glad the edge of the asphalt hadn’t just crumbled under his stupid feet. Yet it had worked, and he was back watching his flock line up to buy rocks to fling into the hole of damnation. People were already walking away with armfuls, whole families, a father, mother, and two children with as many rocks as they could carry in their arms, were on their way to the designated tossing spot.

It felt like a carnival game as the action cranked up. Amos had taken chalk and drawn a box along a portion of the yellow tape, writing: Throw from here! Praise God!

People bunched up with their ladened armfuls and started casting rocks like they were killing the whore of Babylon, yelling and celebrating. Amos could almost hear a cha-ching sound ring out every time one left a hand.

“Hey, preacher!” a father yelled out in the middle of the action. “Half my kids’ rocks aren’t making it to the hole. It’s too far to throw. I want my money’s worth.”

Amos looked at the area between the rock tossers and the hole. It was strewn with disappointing stones from the caution tape all the way up to the lip of the hole. He hadn’t thought about this, about little weak arms.

“No worries!” Amos shouted, “we’ll push them in when the day’s through!” He then whispered to one of his deacons to run into the Wal-Mart to get a couple of steel rakes and an extra handle. “We’ll take care of them later!”

Over the taped organ music Amos played from his boombox, it was a mix of laughter at the fun of flinging rocks – since who doesn’t like doing that – and jeers as people booed and damned the Devil the best they could without using any seriously bad words. Over that was the continuous hollow thump of the stones on asphalt as they’d strike and slide and stop or skid into the hole, or splat when hitting the exposed red clay high in the hole. If someone got it dead center no sound echoed back. The stones would fall, soundlessly, into the dark mystery.

The stone throwers were at it a good hour when the siren of a sheriff’s squad vehicle barked out a few warning squawks as it pulled up. Everyone quit but the youngest kids with their sorry, half-tosses. There must have been a hundred rocks strewn across no man’s land by then. Deputy Lennie parked behind the tossing area and took his time getting out of the squad car with an air of authority, his right hand resting on his piece for no reason other than a bad habit.

Amos ran up close, hoping his flock wouldn’t hear whatever conversation was about to take place. It probably wasn’t good. “What’s the matter, Lennie. Why all the racket on the Lord’s day?”

The Assistant Chief pulled a clipboard from the vehicle and handed it to Amos with a fine grin of success.

“Preacher Man, you’re officially shut down from this gravel slingin unless you’ve got an amusement license from the city.”

The preacher gave the document a look. It said as much and was signed by the Chief of Police, Luther Bennett. Amos figured Luther would have been more on his side.

“You wouldn’t have happened to have been very Christianly and brung one of these licenses with ya?” he asked Lennie.

“Nope, it’s down at the courthouse like the rest. They open first thing tomorrow morning. Eight sharp. And keeping everyone to the same rules is pretty Christian, if you ask me,” Lennie said with a smile.

“Don’t reckon I could call the Chief about this?” Amos asked, hoping for a strike of favoritism.

“Not unless you know where abouts he’s fishing on Norris right about now. Reception ain’t too good out there, as you probably know. He don’t even tell me where’s he at.” Lennie looked at the crowd, and the rocks out on the asphalt that hadn’t made it all the way, and the load of large stone that was piled behind the tents, and the kids still taking money from people standing in line.

“Looks like you’ve made a pretty good lick at it for the day, though, preacher. Won’t be a total loss.”

“Only the Lord knows what we mighta done, my friend.”

And with that the preacher yelled out for everyone to bring the service to a close.

“Folks, it’s time to wrap it up for the day! Time to quit kids. Thank y’all, thank you. Let’s close with a prayer.”

Kids and adults alike let out disappointed groans.

“I know, I know,” he answered back to everyone, “we’ll pick things back up during Wednesday evening service, don’t you worry none!”

There were more grumbles, but everyone dispersed, anxious to come back in a few evenings. A cute little girl with an rock she could barely carry approached the preacher.

“Preacher! Can we bring our own rocks to throw? So we don’t have to buy them?” Amos barely caught himself from pressing his big hand over her tiny mouth. “Um, no, little girl,” he said quietly. “The rocks have to be blessed and special before we throw them at the Devil.” She was a smart little girl. “But your email said for us to…” she tried saying. “Yes, but Jesus changed his mind, okay? Move along.”

The preacher was waiting on the porch with Velma, Bobby’s mother, when Bobby got home from school Monday afternoon. Amos and Velma were drinking coffee and sitting in rockers, looking a little too chummy for Bobby’s liking.

Bobby tried to get into the house before it was too late, but his mother stopped him.

“Honey, you ever met Preacher Stout before?”

“So, here’s the young man what’s helped make all the noise about the sinkhole? Bless his heart,” Amos said, standing to shake Bobby’s hand. Bobby just stood there looking the man up and down with an attitude.

“I only know him from Facebook,” Bobby answered, standing his ground.

“I want to thank you, Bobby. You’ve given us a great gift by taking a chance and getting those pictures. It ain’t everyday people get a view of Hell up close and personal.”

“I think they’re ghosts,” Bobby said. “A lot of us do.”

That threw Amos. “Ghosts?” he finally laughed. “You said they were in there sounding tortured and the like. I saw the photos. Looked like Hell to me.”

“You’d be screaming too if you were a ghost and trapped down in a sinkhole,” Bobby said, near laughing at the man.

“Ain’t no ghosts but the Holy Ghost, son.”

Bobby frowned. “Says you. And I ain’t your son,” he quipped, turning and walking into the house.

“I guess the chances of getting little Bobby to come talk at the tent service Wednesday evening might be out of the question right now, huh?”

Velma apologized. “Let’s give him some time. He’s been a little mad since his daddy left. You don’t think he’s making this whole thing up, just for attention do you, Preacher Stout?”

Lord, I hope to God not, he thought to himself. That would ruin everything.

Tuesday morning was a different scene. It was men in suits arguing as close to the hole as they could manage without making the front page of the paper.

Dan Masters was one of the two and half people who’d lost cars down the initial cave in. He’d fully lost his pride and joy, “Kitty,” a sky blue 2007 Mazda Miata. He’d contacted his insurance company immediately, who’d contacted Wal-Mart, who’d contacted the landowner, John Betterman. Dan figured it would be a quick resolution since it was so obvious what had happened. Ground opened up. Car fell in. Car vanished. Insurance claim.

But by now they were all arguing as to whose insurance would be primarily responsible for a total vehicle loss down a sinkhole, if anyone. This was no common occurrence, some argued. All three insurance companies were claiming it was an “Act of God,” and trying to pass the buck to the next carrier, or to the man upstairs, literally.

Dan was told by his own insurance company, who he’d had coverage with for fifteen years, that sinkholes were an “Act of God,” and weren’t covered, unless, of course, you had it specifically added to the policy. Just like earthquakes. Floods. Rockslides. Meteorite strikes. Lava flows. Lighting strikes. A sinkhole was about as close to an earthquake without being an earthquake as you could get.

Dan was steaming. “You mean a man can pay in years and years of insurance on a house and one day God can just say screw that house and wash it away with a flood and y’all just ignore all those monthly payments? The thousands of dollars?”

Basically yes, his agent said, though he wouldn’t say anything about God playing favorites.

“Well, guess what?” he told them, pointing a finger in his agent’s face, “I’m agnostic, so I don’t see where God’s got a dog in this fight I’m in!”

“That don’t matter none!” his agent yelled back.

“By God, we’ll see about that!” Dan screamed back.

The Wal-Mart agent and Betterman’s agent, were more than happy to stand and watch Dan and his agent argue over how it was all in God’s hands, figuring nothing more than a little arguing was all that might come from the crazy ordeal.

Dan heard Preacher Amos on the radio Tuesday.

The DJ was asking an age-old question that struck a chord with Dan: Why does God allow bad things to go on? Especially to good and faithful followers? God’s all powerful and knowing, right?

“I love answering this question,” Amos said, getting excited. “God can’t do no evil, can’t do wrong, injustice, can’t cause pain and suffering, can’t be the source of all that’s wrong in the world. It’s Satan at the helm of evil deeds and events, not our Lord and Savior. That’s been the deal since the Garden of Paradise went all to hell.”

“So bad things aren’t allowed by God, so to speak?”

“You might try to say that if you want to be angry at God for something, but it’s not like that. If you want to blame something, someone, for constantly leading us off the straight and narrow, the ‘Freewill Road” as I call it, that’s the Devil himself. And that hole out there in the parking lot is a good glimpse at what the unsaved have coming if they don’t get their affairs in order.”

Dan wasn’t necessarily convinced, but he sort of got what the preacher was getting at.

By Wednesday morning, the hole was larger, another third bigger. Dan rode up on his bicycle as Amos was overseeing having his tents moved another fifty feet out to safety.

“I lost my Miata in that hole,” Dan told Amos, shaking his hand. “I’m Dan Masters.”

“What a shame,” Amos replied. “I liked them newer Miatas. What year?”

“Oh-Seven.”

“Dang, brother, what a waste,” Amos said, shaking his head staring out at the hole as if the man’s car was just over the lip of the crater within easy reach. “Four wheels down to two, huh?”

“Riding a bike’s all I can do with the insurance people fighting it out, if anything comes of it,” Dan said, sounding about as down and out as Amos had heard anyone in a while.

Amos asked what he meant by that.

“Get this. They say I lost my car on account of an ‘Act of God’ and they’re trying to say it’s not covered,” Dan said, maybe on the verge of tears.

Amos thought that over, a little dumbfounded.

“Brother, I ain’t never heard such a thing in all my life,” Amos said, looking at the man and back to the hole in the ground.

“I know,” Dan said. “It’s crazy!”

“I’ve seen acts of God all my life, Brother, and that right there ain’t nothin but an

‘Act of Satan’!” Amos nearly yelled, not a little upset at the situation. “‘Act of God’ my behind!” he whispered.

“That’s what they told me,” Dan replied, surprised by the preacher’s reaction.

Amos asked who carried Dan’s insurance.

“Capital Insurance. Ralph Campbell.”

“Sounds to me like Mr. Campbell’s trying to save himself some money.”

Amos asked if he could call the man. Dan said it’d be fine, though he wondered what good it’d do.

The phone conversation that Wednesday afternoon went something like:

Capital Insurance, we’ve got you covered, how can I help you?

This Ralph Campbell?

It is, what can I do for ya?

I’m calling on behalf of Dan Masters. He’s got his Mazda covered by y’all, I believe?

Well, he did, but…I really can’t go into Mr. Masters’s business without his permission, sir, unless you’re his attorney or something like that. Who’s this?

Reverend Amos Stout. I am representing Brother Dan, but not in the official way you’d need, so I’ll do all the talking, how’s that?

I don’t know what you could…

You told him that his vehicle being lost down the sinkhole was a “Act of God.”

I can confirm that, unless specifically covered, some accidents are not covered and considered that, yes, Acts of God.

Like sinkholes.

Yes.

And earthquakes.

Correct.

Floods.

True. Unless specifically covered with additional plans, yes.

Which God?

What?

Which God?

Excuse me?

I didn’t stutter, sir. Which God – and there are so many to choose from, as you know – does this Act of God clause specify?

I don’t think…

How about this. What’s the Lord God Almighty – Jesus, our Lord and Savior – got to do with such bad fortune, sir?

Um.

How in the world are such devastations from the hand of God?

Well, I’m no preacher, so…

Well, I am, and I’m telling you the sinkhole in question is no Act of God, but an Act of Satan.

Silence.

In fact, we’re having a tent revival down by that hole now. My congregation believes it’s a portal to Hell itself. Now if that’s true, and a lot of people think it is, then your coverage – or lack of coverage – doesn’t make any sense and you owe Mr. Masters another Mazda.

Click.

Amos noticed some kids, or at least what he perceived as a gaggle of kids, gathered up at the yellow tape on the opposite side of the sinkhole from the revival tent area as he pulled up to make an early check of things Wednesday afternoon. There were five of them, three girls and two guys, easily noticed from a distance because they were more or less dressed all in black from head to toe. Black boots, loose black cargo pants, dresses with straps, vests, black leather trench coats, black hoodies, sunglasses. Jet black hair. Black fingernail polish (even on the guys). The only thing not black on these people was their skin, which didn’t look like it got much sunlight along with the occasional flash of silver jewelry dangling, wrapping, or piercing ears, lips, noses, necks, wrists, eyebrows and fingers.

He drove by, trying to look inconspicuous. A few were down sketching on the blacktop with white chalk. Two others were unfurling a banner with white background and red and black letters. He couldn’t make it out. He parked a few spaces away and watched.

They weren’t talking much, but pointing and nodding, working. They possessed dark demeanors, which concerned him. These had to be the dreaded goths he’d heard mentioned. He’d seen these types around town – singularly. A few together. But never in a group this large. To Amos, they looked downright evil. He kept watching, peeking over a newspaper.

The ends of the banner got secured to flag poles sunk into sand buckets. As they finally pulled the sign taut, Amos thought he was in a dream. Or a nightmare.

It read:

There is no Hell

Sincerely,

The Church of Satan, Inc.

Amos groaned, “What in God’s name is this?” Other than that, he was speechless for a few moments there alone in his car, emotionally a mix of confusion, curiosity, and incredible building anger. He put the car in drive and pulled closer, he wanted a better look without having to be outside the safety of his vehicle. No telling how these punks acted when approached.

He crept up nearby and was better able to see. They noticed him pull closer but kept working.

They’d assembled on the blacktop a kind of altar on a box covered with black lace. On that was black candles in fancy brass candle holders. In the center was a ceramic goat’s head with an upside-down star in a circle on the forehead. In front of the altar was another star in a circle drawn with chalk on the blacktop with weird scribbles here and there.

Devil worship, he whispered to himself. The banner was behind it all.

He couldn’t stop himself. The words were out before he could stop them. He felt his face flushing hot, his blood pressure rising, that old tingling in his fingertips. He yelled from the car.

“Hey! What do you punks think you’re doing here?”

One of the guys looked over, gave Amos and his vehicle a look, and went back to arranging items.

“What do you mean, there’s no hell? Hey!”

One of the girls said, “Sounds like he’d be very disappointed if there weren’t, huh?”

Another young lady turned and stepped closer. “The Church of Satan doesn’t believe in hell, sir,” she stated matter-of-factly.

“Church of Satan? What in the world? Hell and the devil and evil is all y’all worship!”

Another guy turned. “No, sir. We don’t worship anything. We believe in logic. You should do some research about Our Church.”

“’Our Church’?” Amos repeated. “I rebuke thee in the name of the Lord!”

Another turned. “We don’t believe in your god either. If anything, we’re closer to atheists.”

“Jesus.”

“Whatever gets you through the day, man.”

“Who gave you permission to do this?” Amos wanted to know.

They all laughed at that. One replied, “Who really gave you permission to start a tent revival based on a lie about a hole leading to hell and start selling dollar rocks to toss at the devil?”

With that, Amos huffed and sped off and circled around to his safe side of the hole and his tent and pile of rocks.

This was my idea! Why can’t people leave it alone? he stewed.

“Sister Leslie,” Amos asked, “would you open us in prayer? I think we really need it.”

It was Wednesday night. The church crowd was bigger. So was the security detail. Not only were there two sheriff’s vehicles, a Tennessee state trooper’s vehicle was parked nearby as well. The trooper was posted over near the goths for protection, since as soon as the church folks started showing up, threats were getting shouted at the “devil worshipers”. There were ten of them now, still dressed in black, some with long capes with hoods covering their heads. They’d occasionally chant, “Logic is the answer! Be your own god!” Some people were gathered up at a distance just to watch what was happening, probably hoping for a good showdown.

Sister Leslie began, “Father in Heaven, we thank you for a good turn out tonight. We’re grateful the hole ain’t no bigger than it was last time and we’re not having to move the tent again. That’s a bunch of work. We’re thankful for our blessings and lessons in life. Help us seal this awful thing up, Lord, so things can get back to normal around here in Fetch. And forgive them young’uns over there all dressed in black and so tempted off the straight and narrow. They don’t know what they’re doing in the ignorance of youth, Father, but just in case, don’t allow any of them to put a curse on us. Oh, and help Mr. Dan out with his Miata problem, please, and…”

In the middle of Leslie’s prayer, a strange mechanical noise came buzzing from across the parking lot like some giant mosquito or a sick moped, growing louder as it neared, flew overhead, distracting everyone from the prayer as they looked heavenward to the sound as it passed over the tent, loud and obnoxious, swinging toward the hell hole.

It was a drone. Along the side of the machine were the words:

Dave’s Drones

We See All

It wasn’t a big drone, but it wasn’t a small one, either. A foot and a half square. Four propellers. It was loud, like a flock of weed eaters flapping by. It flew over and hovered right above the hole at about ten feet.

Preacher Amos said out loud, without realizing he was hot-mic’d, “Dang it, why didn’t I think of that?”

The noise had started a baby crying. An elderly lady was asking, “What’s that racket? Who’s mowin their yard?” A kid was sticking his fingers in his ears. Officer Lennie had his hand resting on his gun in the usual resting spot, but with intent in his eyes.

“…Preacher, how’s God gonna hear me with all this noise!” Leslie yelled, her prayer now interrupted and probably ruined.

Amos was down from the pulpit now, making his way around the caution tape to get as close to the hovering drone as possible. He yelled over to officer Lennie. “Can’t you do something about this?”

Lennie shrugged. What could he do? From what he saw, no law was being broken, just some people being inconvenienced. He didn’t police up rudeness until it led to law breaking.

A light on the bottom of the drone flipped on. The drone turned mid-air, lowering, spotlighting the shadowy walls of the hole, past the crumbling asphalt, along gravel and clay, lowering until the drone and the noise it made faded down, vanishing into the hole’s depths.

The trooper said, “Well, what the hell is that all that about?”

Preacher Amos realized he’d lost all control of the day’s service, replying, “Exactly.”

One of the kids from the Church of Satan said, “Cool, man!”

Members of his congregation were leaving their seats, trying to get a closer look at the drone, talking in small groups, speculating. Some were holding rocks from their earlier purchases. It was turning into more of a circus than usual.

Distracted, hardly anyone noticed the dark van with dark windows pulling up. Small white plain letters across the side read:

PARANORMAL ASS.

of PARTIN COUNTY

P.A.P.C.

Amos crept up over to the mysterious van. Someone inside was obviously in charge of the drone and they’d interrupted his important work. The Lord’s work. He put his nose right up to the passenger window but couldn’t see a thing.

“Don’t reckon these tinted windows are within regs, do ya?” Amos asked a nearby officer. The officer glanced at the window but didn’t respond.

Amos squinted at another window and thought he saw a shadow of movement. He knocked with his knuckles. “Hello? That your’all’s drone making all the hullaballoo? Hello?” He knocked on another window. “You broke up our church service with that blame thing!”

A window rolled down a few inches. It was dark inside but for some flashing lights.

The voice said, “Yes. That’s our drone, sir. We’re working.”

“So were we.”

The voice whispered inside the van with others.

“We didn’t know you were going to be here.”

“You didn’t notice a ton of people under a big tent literally right beside the hole? The eye in the sky didn’t clue you in?”

More whispering.

“Sir. We’ve got just as much right to be here as you. There’s no reserving square footage of the Wal-mart parking lot.”

Jeez, did they have a lawyer on their team in there? Amos laughed to himself. He looked down the van and read it out loud. “Paranormal Ass of Partin County.”

“Association!” the girl yelled.

“What?” Amos asked.

“Not ‘Ass,” it’s ‘Association’, sir!”

That embarrassed Amos, him being a preacher and all.

“Oh, excuse me!” he said, turning a little red. “What’s the paranormal got to do with that hole anyway?”

The girl rolled the window down another few inches, but not all the way. She was in her twenties, maybe, hair back in a tight ponytail, wearing a black t-shirt with the same logo as on the van. Two fellas were back in the van’s shadows monitoring small screens and equipment. One looked to be in control of the drone with a piece of equipment that reminded him of his nephew’s videogame controller. It all looked very CIA.

“There’s a rumor that people think that’s a doorway to hell,” the girl said, nodding at the hole.

“Portal,” Amos corrected.

“Whatever.”

“So, you’re here to prove that?” Amos asked, suddenly very interested.

“Um, no, sir, we debunk claims, too,” the girl added. “That’s why we’re here, to prove it’s a hoax. Just a regular old sinkhole. A silly hoax.”

Amos frowned and backed up. “Honey, we’re here to prove just the opposite.”

The girl asked, “You the preacher stirring up all the excitement then?”

“You might say that,” Amos said, backing up a few more steps. He knew what he had to do.

He turned to his scattered and confused church members and yelled over the noise, “Alright, here we go! Line up with your rocks! We’re all gonna throw at the same time. Gather round, y’all!” Church members started making way to the yellow tape, encircling the hole this time, not where Amos had restricted throwing in a controlled fashion. “Everyone get ready and we’ll throw at the same time!”

The girl in the van knew exactly what the preacher was doing. He was about to knock their drone forever down into the hole with a few hundred stones.

“Reilly! Get that thing outta there!” she yelled. “Abort! Abort!”

“On the count of three!” Amos yelled.

“Abort!”

It was going to be close.

“Hurry, man!”

“Father!” Amos yelled.

Reilly yelled, “I am hurrying! It’s way down the hole!”

“Son!” Amos yelled, which was his way of counting off three, two, one.

“Almost!”

“And the Holy Ghost!” Amos screamed, figuring he beat the drone out of the hole and was about to make a great point about not messing with the church, and to not interfere with their services, etc. “Throw!”

At that very instant, with dozens of fist-sized gravel stones in the air, the drone shot straight up from the hole with a loud buzzing and hovered, as if daring one of the stones to get near it. One did dare, glancing off a propeller and causing it to lose a foot of altitude, another smaller one bounced off the top of the drone causing it to veer to its right, looking like it might crash into the hole for good.

Back in the van, Reilly the controller was having a terrible time. He recovered, flying the drone into no-man’s land between the hole and the revival tent area. People were waiting. More stones.

As happens in such chaotic moments, people become very focused on the one thing they’re concentrating on, and in this case, the crowd tossing rocks on the far end kept throwing at the drone as it hovered quickly toward people still along the caution tape at the tent area who were concentrating on throwing their rocks at the drone headed directly at them. Reilly knew what he was doing. In another second, he’d guided the one side’s aim against the other side’s area and dozens of stones were falling around church members. Most were falling short, but a few were finding heads and shoulders and toes and backs and butts as people turned away.

Amos yelled, “What are you doing, people!? Stop it!” just as a stone grazed him across the left eyebrow, then another hit him square between the shoulder blades nearly knocking the wind out of him. He was caught in the crossfire, his own people stoning him. Oh, St. Stephen!

Reilly yelled from the window, “Knock it down. Knock it down, y’all!” and u-turned the machine back to the other side of the action, rocks now raining down harder in the other direction trying to take down the drone. It was like a hailstorm of gravel.

“That’s enough!” Officer Lennie yelled, hesitating long enough to decide which implement from his utility belt best served the moment’s insane emergency.

The drone slowed, lifted, and hovered higher, out of reach of most anyone’s accuracy, and hung in the sky.

Shielding his eyes, gazing up, as if maybe Jesus himself had chosen this moment of craziness to split the sky open and return, Amos noticed what a perfectly blue sky they’d been gifted with this day when Lennie’s standard issue Glock 21 .45 ACP sang out three explosive rounds, plugging the drone dead center twice and taking off a propeller. The drone lost power and fell dead in the middle of no-man’s land like a giant horsefly zapped by a lightning bolt.

Amos ducked behind the pulpit. Men and women, kids, the old, ducked and scattered and yelped out of fear from the gunshots. One man was forced to catch another from trying to jump into the sinkhole for cover. A woman ran up to the van and begged the paranormal team to be let in. Lennie grabbed a bullhorn from his trunk and began barking orders.

“Attention! Attention, folks!”

Lennie yelled at the other officers. “We’ve about got a riot on our hands, fellas!”

“Folks, remain calm! Quit throwing them rocks! Mrs. Anderson! Quit it!”

Lennie yelled to a state police officer. “Roland, call up a few buses, will ya?”

The state police officer squawked his shoulder mic, Charlie 24, 11-41, Fetch Wal-Mart, multiple injuries.

The van’s tires barked as it took off, leaving behind its tattered drone remnants.

Amos turned and turned, taking in the awful scene. He’d been in control moments earlier and now look at it all. People yelled and argued, they were bleeding all over each other, nursing their injuries, were laid out on the asphalt, getting drug under the tent for shade, his own head was bleeding down his face on to his starched white, sweat-stained dress shirt.

The surge pumped from his chest out to his limbs like overfilled live wires, a strange worrying warmth turning to a quick cold sweat, then the dizziness swam through his head, the pain of falling to his knees on the asphalt, the reaching for equilibrium, trying to catch his breath on all fours, the sounds of people yelling falling distant, someone asking what was wrong with him.

“Sir? Hey, are you okay?”

He was on his back, vision narrowing, slowly, slowly, all going dark, but noticing a lone cloud now in the middle of the perfectly blue sky.

Two days.

Preacher Amos Stout was unconscious until early Saturday morning. Just over 48 hours. He woke up in the hospital. The wing was dark, his room was dark and quiet except for all the machine lights and movements. He’d been dreaming that Jesus himself was giving him a solo tour of the Heavens, leading Amos by the arm, but Jesus’ grip was just too much, being omnipotent and all, and was really hurting Amos’s right bicep. Jesus just kept tightening his grip on Amos and finally, after feeling bad about complaining to the Savior’s face, grimaced and said, “Jesus! Please, that hurts! Can you loosen up a little?” at which point Jesus wept and snapped his fingers. Now Amos was waking up on Floor 2 of the Partin County Miner’s Memorial Hospital not knowing where he was while the blood pressure cuff on his right bicep was squeezing its half-hourly reading.

“Jesus! Ow!” he whispered, grabbing at the cuff and squinting around the room.

A surprised voice in the dark spoke out, “Nurse! He’s awake!” The shadow of a woman went to the door and walked out getting help. Yes, this was a hospital. What’s the last thing he remembered? A mix of the sinkhole, chaos, a black van. A drone? Had a rock knocked him out?

A moment later a nurse swings the door open and storms in, talking a mile a minute, flipping on the lights. Another nurse was behind her. They get on each side of him, checking his vitals, his IV line from the bag to his hand, his blood pressure cuff, his heart monitor hook ups, his pulse-ox finger monitor, the artery plug in his groin.

“Sir, do you know who you are?”

“Do you know what year it is, Sir.”

“Sir, can you speak to us? Can you say your name?”

“How old are you, sir? Do you know?”

He was about to try answering some of his interrogation questions, when he noticed a third person at the foot of his bed. A woman, dressed in all black. Lots of buttons and a little leather and lace here and there. A silver upside down star in a circle hanging from her necklace. She had neck tattoos of some animals.

He let out a gasp. “What the hell? What’s she doing here?”

A nurse said, “Oh, he speaks! That’s great! Welcome back, Mr. Stout!”

Why were they yelling? Welcome back from where?

“I’m Elisa,” the woman said.

“She’s been staying with you some while you recovered,” a nurse said.

“Recovered from what?” Amos finally managed to ask.

“A heart attack,” the other nurse said. “They had to put in some stents. They went up through your groin.”

“A heart attack. My groin.”

“Yep, and while everyone was losing their minds, future physician’s assistant, Ms. Elisa here, protected you from all the rocks and gave you CPR until the EMTs arrived.”

“Why?” Amos asked Elisa a few moments later after the nurses were satisfied with how Amos was looking.

“You’d fallen down, helpless. We could tell something was bad wrong, even with everyone going apeshit,” she said. “I ran over to protect you. A lot of people ended up hit in the head with rocks. You were bleeding but you said you couldn’t breathe and then you were just gone. I thought you’d died at first.”

“Now here I am. Two days later. Alive, thank God.”

“I’m not here to argue who’s to thank, it just seemed like someone needed to watch out for you while you were out. My friend Paul helped some, too.”

Amos looked the room over. He’d delivered flowers from the church enough to recognize an empty room void of evidence of having had much visitors. Cards. Flowers. Stuffed animals. Balloons. Not much.

“We just kinda hung around once we got here,” she said. “The cafeteria food’s actually not bad.”

“We?”

“Thorn and Me. And Cindy. I came in the ambulance with you. They followed on Thorn’s motorcycle. A “Why you? Why them?”

“I got to you first. People started saying stay away from her! And they did. But they were avoiding you, too. At your hour of need.”

“So, they’ve stopped coming because of you showing some care?”

“I can’t say exactly.”

“Some preacher I am, huh? My own church won’t hang with me. See how I am. Scared of a couple of goths.”

“Trad-Goths.”

“Say what?”

“I’m what you call a Traditional Goth,” Elisa corrected. “We have sub-types.”

Preacher Amos Stout and Traditional Goth, Church of Satan member, Elisa Smith, spent the afternoon talking about all the goth sub-types and what Elisa thought were legit versus posers and Amos managed a few subtle witnessing remarks about salvation and Elisa admitted that a religion based on the metaphorical consumption of the man-god’s body and blood was pretty kick ass and Amos said he hadn’t really thought of the doctrine of salvation in that way but whatever works and that he still wondered how you could have Satan in your church’s name but not believe in him or his Hell. They were getting along pretty good.

By the time Amos was getting out of the hospital three days later, the sink hole was just a memory. Within twenty-four hours of his heart attack there was a constant stream of city dump trucks delivering rock and fill dirt that a frontend loader would carefully push into the pit. The city hired Dave’s Drones to watch progress from above (after settling on a sum quickly after Lonnie had shot their other piece of property out of the sky). For the longest time there was no indication of a bottom to the hole. There was no report of screams or smoke or flames or gnashing of teeth being seen or heard as the fill dropped in. The fill was eventually noticed, after twenty-nine truckloads, slowly rising, sealed with a new layer of fresh asphalt, which was already sinking by a foot by the time Amos got the energy to visit some weeks later.

Amos wouldn’t go near it. He knew better. Not just because it was already sinking, and not because he was still convinced something hellish was down below the Fetch Wal-Mart parking lot. No, this was where he’d preached his last sermon, at least as a tent revivalist. He walked around, as close as he’d let himself get to the old spot, walking around cars parked nearby as if there weren’t any danger here just days ago. He noticed a good-sized gravel and picked it up and switched it hand to hand, weighing it as if he might toss it. But no, he only shoved it in his jacket pocket and walked back to his car.

Larry D. Thacker is a writer, artist, and educator hailing from Middlesboro, Kentucky. He is the author of the paranormal folk history Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia, four poetry collections, including Drifting in Awe, and three works of fiction, including Working it off in Labor County and Labor Days, Labor Nights.

Fiction

Fired Up

by Thaddeus Rutkowski

I was sitting upstairs in my family’s new “house.” They had moved to a converted Odd Fellows hall while I was away at school. I’d set up my bed and desk in a large space upstairs. The wood floor was unfinished, and decorative paper covered the walls and ceiling.

Next to the outside wall was a potbellied stove. A smoke pipe ran from the top of the burner to a chimney. I opened the hinged-metal door and discovered the stove was empty. The main compartment looked like it could be used, so I fetched some sticks from a brush pile behind the house, laid the sticks on newspaper in the firebox, and lit the tinder.

My brother and sister came to look at the flames. “Can we toast marshmallows?” my sister asked.
My brother went to look for the candy. He found some dried puffs in a plastic bag and brought them upstairs. “We can use this,” he said, offering a long metal fork.

I skewered a marshmallow and held it over the fire. My idea was to brown the outside and soften the inside, but the white puff caught fire and turned to ash.

At that point, my father showed up. “The chimney is full of soot,” he said. “You could start a flue fire.”

I sat on the concrete front steps of the building and looked out. Two farmers, a father and son, passed in front of me. One was driving a tractor that had a wagon hitched to it. The other was walking between rows of corn, pulling ears off stalks and throwing them into the wagon. When they passed in front of me, they looked at me with recognition but made no gesture of greeting.

I looked to the left, down the one street of the town. There was an intersection a few hundred yards away. It was T-shaped, with a county road ending at the town’s one street. My family’s former house stood there, but I couldn’t see it. Other houses and full-leaved trees were in the way.

At supper, my father told us how he had acquired the building. “It was up for auction,” he said. “I put in a bid of two thousand dollars. The next-highest bid was five hundred.”

We were sitting in at the back of the building, where a kitchen and a small dining area had been added.
“It was a meeting hall for a fraternal group,” my father continued. “Did you notice the peepholes in all of the doors? It was a secret society.”

“The building had no plumbing,” my mother said. “There’s an outhouse in the back. It reminds me of the latrines we had in China.”

“I hired a contractor to dig up the yard,” my father said. “A backhoe made a trench for a septic tank. That project cost twenty thousand.

“They should install plumbing in the countryside,” my mother said. “It’s not healthy to put human waste on the fields.”

My father picked up a beer bottle from the spot next to his plate. “I got the money from my mother,” he added. “My father was a banker. Now that he’s gone, she has all the cash.”

My brother and sister and I invented a routine for entering and leaving rooms. The one entering would knock, and the two inside would respond. “Is someone at the gate?”

The “gatekeeper” would flip open a peephole cover and look through the lens.

“Is it a trusted Fellow?”

“Yes, a faithful Odd Fellow,” the gatekeeper would reply.

“Open the gate.”

“Honorable Fellow, the gate is open.”

The faithful attendee would then enter the meeting hall.

I had brought my belongings in a used car my father had given me for my last year of college. The car was almost twenty years old, and it didn’t move fast. Its top speed was sixty. I’d piled my possessions onto the seats and into the trunk. I had clothes, books, and a bulky stereo system. I took everything out and made a pile in the room where I was staying.

I was planning to go to New York, where a college roommate had extra space on his floor. To stay there, all I needed was a sleeping bag and some clothes. I wouldn’t need the car, so I offered it to my sister, who had just gotten her driver’s license. “Do you want this car?” I asked.

“Does it run?” my sister asked.

“If you can change the tires and the fan belt, you can keep it going,” I said. “The alternator might freeze up, but you’ll be able to drive about fifteen miles before the engine stops completely.”

“I’ll take it,” she said.

At night I could hear my father’s voice coming through the floor: “He’s a flower child.”

“What do you mean?” I heard my mother ask.

“He’s a delicate flower. He wants to put blossoms in his hair; he wants to find peace and love.”

“I haven’t seen that in him.”

“He wants to go where there are lots of flower people. Well, he can go there, and they can grow their own garden.”

I started another fire in the potbellied stove. This one was larger than the first. I’d found some sizable pieces of wood and had jammed them into the fire holder.

Presently, I heard a neighbor yelling, “Fire!”

I looked out a window and saw a woman waving her arms. Her children were with her, and they were all jumping and shouting.

I ran outside and saw flames shooting from the chimney at the side of the house. My brother and sister soon joined me. My father was sleeping off his latest binge, and my mother was away at work. I went back inside and struck at the fire in the stove with an unburned stick, but that didn’t stop the flames in the chimney.

Momentarily, a fire truck arrived and firefighters propped a ladder against the house. They climbed to the top of the chimney, pointed the nozzle of portable extinguisher into the opening, and unleashed a white cloud of chemical foam. Some of the particles came down the flue and into my room.

Later, I gathered what I needed for my trip to the city. My belongings were still intact. I had been home a total of two weeks, but I was ready to hit the road.

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of seven books, most recently Safe Colors and Tricks of Light, a poetry collection. He teaches at Medgar Evers College and Columbia University and received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Fiction

Under the Table

by Mikey Lockett

Who cares if they ran me out of the fort in the woods? None of those boys own Dukes of Hazzard. Especially not Danny Drasky. Who says a boy can’t play Daisy Duke?

Well, Danny doesn’t know I stole his Matchbox General Lee on my way out of the fort.

I head down the path from the woods to my house. I can feel the little General Lee against my leg in my pocket. I imagine the look on Danny’s face when he realizes it’s gone. He might think he lost it, have all the boys search for it. He might figure I stole it, but by then, he’ll be too late to catch me.

The path from the woods comes out between my yard and our neighbor, old Ms. Cunningham’s. I step through her grass. I rip a fistful of the pink peony blossoms that grow next to her house, since they happen to be near me. I toss them in front of me, like real hard, but the pedals just float gently as I move along. Some stick to my shirt.

My mom appears from the corner of our house on her way to Ms. Cunningham’s back door.

“Mom,” I call out, as I run toward her.

I want to tell her what happened in the woods—well, the part about being run off. Not about the car. I reach her and throw my arms around her waist.

“Danny Dra—” is all I get out.

“Quit your whining,” Mom says. She pulls my head against her hip.

Ms. Cunningham comes to her back door. “Hello,” she says.

Mom brushes my bangs from my forehead with her hand.

We step up onto the porch.

“Shoo,” Mom says to the cats on Mrs. Cunningham’s porch. The cats eat milk and bread from the old pie tins Ms. Cunningham puts out. A white, a tabby, and a tiger cat all scurry off.

“Oh, the cats are no bother,” Ms. Cunningham says. Then, she waves us into the house with her arm.

In the doorway, Ms. Cunningham stoops over to kiss me on the cheek. Her lips are red and wet. She peers over the top of her glasses at me. She grabs my chin. Then, she gets her handkerchief from her shirt pocket and dries my eyes and nose.

“Did I see you out the window ripping up my posies?” Ms. Cunningham asks. “It’s a sad world for a boy who destroys pretty things. Now what’s the fuss?”

“There’s always a fuss with that one,” Mom says.

“Why don’t you go get Dolly,” Ms. Cunningham says. “Only if you can be ginger with her. She’s upstairs on the footstool in my room.”

Dolly is an old Barbie Ms. Cunningham and Mom let me play with. Only when I’m at Ms. Cunningham’s place though.

“Promise,” I say, looking deep into Ms. Cunningham’s kind eyes.

Then, I dash up the steps to fetch Dolly.

I pick Dolly up from the footstool upstairs. I move my finger across her pretty face. She’s old. Mom says from the fifties. She has curly red bangs, big blue eyes, and a black and white swimsuit. I pull the General Lee from my pocket to show Dolly. I run the little car over the foot stool at her feet. Then I take Dolly and the General with me downstairs. I peek around the landing at the bottom of the stairs. My mom and Ms. Cunningham’s backs are turned at the sink talking. I think it is a fun idea to spy on them a bit, and I slip under the table. Surely, they don’t know I’m there. The lace tablecloth hangs over the sides of the table, like a roof to my very own fort. Who needs one in the woods with the other boys?

“You and your cats. Psst. Down now, Suzie Thomas! Nothing like a cat’s arse in your face while you’re sipping tea,” Mom says.

The kettle on the stove hisses softly.

“Don’t you mind old Suzie Thomas,” I hear Ms. Cunningham say.

With a soft thud, Suzie Thomas appears like magic on all fours near the edge of the table. A fine, fat, old tiger cat with a pink collar, Suzi Thomas stays low to the floor. The cat comes under the table and rubs against me. Then it slips around the leg of the table, out of sight at the stairs.

“And what a name for a cat, at that,” Mom says.

I hear a noise at the screen door. I peek under the tablecloth. I see two pairs of legs sticking out of two pleated khaki skirts. Brown nylons. White loafers. One’s ankles are thick and fat, like dough. The others are thin and nice. Not like they belong to a plump lady, though they do.

It’s old Mrs. Goss, Ms. Cunningham’s sister, and Mrs. Goss’s daughter Mary Catherine.

“You’d have to have the good sense to know a girl cat from a boy cat,” Mrs. Goss says, as the screen door creaks open. “How long did it take you, sister, five years to figure it out?” she asks.

“Oh balderdash,” Ms. Cunningham says.

I lift the table cloth to get a better look at the women.

Ms. Cunningham steps over to Mrs. Goss. She takes a covered dish and pecks her old sister on the cheek. She comes toward the table, so I slide back to the middle of it to keep my cover. She sits the dish on the table. It clanks above me.

“Maybe six,” Ms. Cunningham says, laughing. “Hey, I don’t go ‘round inspecting cat genitals with a magnifying glass. I’ll never forget the vet’s face when he told me she was a he. So, I just added the Thomas for good measure. Whatever it was, I reckoned, it was up to Suzie Thomas to decide.”

The women all laugh.

“Where’s the boy?” Mary Catherine asks.

Even under the table, I can smell Mary Catherine’s dank, old perfume and the hairspray on her perfect blue hair. Mom says Mary Catherine looks awfully old for her sixties. I envision her face, which is round and wrinkly and always full with a smile.

“Up playing with that old doll again,” my mom says.

I pull the doll close to my chest.

“Aren’t you afraid that boy will turn queer?” Mary Catherine asks.

“Better queer than like the rest,” my mom says.

I think on the word queer—I hear it means strange.

The women laugh again.

“Isn’t that the truth,” Ms. Cunningham says.

“Oh, there’s no harm in a boy playing with a doll,” Mrs. Goss says.

“As long as he only plays with it here,” my mom says. She raises her voice, I think, so I can hear upstairs, where she thinks I still am. “His dad would stomp him into the lawn if he found out.”

“Let the boy be,” Ms. Cunningham says. “Besides, I heard you caterwauling on the porch last night, after your husband’s car tore up the road. He’s stomped you into the ground a time or two.”

The room gets quiet.

“He’s running around again,” I hear my mom say. “I wouldn’t care so much, but he spends all the money on the whore.”

“Who is it this time?” Mary Catherine asks.

“Angie Davis,” my mom says.

I put my hand over my mouth. I’ve heard mom use the word whore when she gets angry about the women who run around with my dad. Because of this, I know it’s bad. I imagine Angie Davis. She’s the lady, I’m pretty sure, that works at the little post office down the road. Bright red hair. Great big boobs. Shirts so tight they look like skin. A little like Dolly but with wonky teeth, I think, looking down at the Barbie.

“That old cat! She’d lie with anything,” Mrs. Goss says.

“Men!” Ms. Cunningham says. “The only man I had ran off with my sister. I haven’t had one cross my door stoop since.”

I imagine Ms. Cunningham, how she stands firm at her front door every time my dad comes over. What she says is true.

“Hey,” Mrs. Goss says. “Lucky you. I had to put up with him for thirty years.”

“And how long did it take you to figure out he was queer?” Ms. Cunningham says.

The women laugh.

“That’s my father you’re talking about,” Mary Catherine says.

“Well, I’d say in our first year of marriage. I came home and found him in my chiffon. God rest his soul,” Mrs. Goss says.

“Dear God, Mother,” Mary Catherine says.

“What can I say? The girl’s proof. I tried my best,” Mrs. Goss says through a snort.

The women laugh even louder.

I can’t help but laugh with them this time. I put my hand over my mouth again, so I don’t blow my cover. My mom has a pink dress she calls chiffon. It looks like a peony. I imagine an old, bald man twirling about in it. I think Mr. Goss has been dead for a long time. I never knew him. I imagine he might look like Boss Hog from The Dukes. What does it hurt? I think. Girls wear pants. Why can’t men wear chiffon?

The women carry on laughing and talking and milling about the kitchen. I hear the clank of china being set out on the table; the stir of a kettle coming to a soft whistle on the old cook stove; the sound of drawers opening and closing with silverware. I hear the sound of the cookie tin being pried open.

I try to keep quiet, but I can’t stop thinking of Boss Hog in a chiffon. My laughter bursts from under the table and gives me away.

“What on earth?” I hear Mary Catherine say.

Mary Catherine’s face appears beneath the table cloth. As she stoops, her rosy, chubby cheeks droop around her round, little nose.

“Why you rascal,” she says.

“Under the table, of all places,” Ms. Cunningham says.

“God help those little ears,” I hear Mrs. Goss say.

“For Christ sake,” Mom says.

“This is my fort. I’m not moving,” I say.

Mary Catherine says, “I think any other boy might try and peek up the skirt, but—”

“I think we’ll be alright,” I hear Ms. Cunningham say.

The women laugh again, including my mom. Who’d peek up a skirt? I wonder. I’ve already seen Ms. Cunningham’s plain, white bloomers on the line. I can’t imagine Mrs. Goss’s or Mary Catherine’s would look any different. Now, Daisy Duke, curling her long, spider legs in the window of the General Lee…That’s a different story. Heck, you couldn’t cram a bloomer under those jean shorts of Daisy’s, I reckon. That’s why I pretended to kick off imaginary bad guys on my tip-toes back at the fort, like Daisy does in heels. I tied my T-shirt in a knot above my belly button, just like Daisy does. Well, until Danny Drasky said, “Disgusting. Man, you a sicko or something? Really, a boy acting like a girl.” Then, all the other boys said, “Ew.”

The smell of butter crisps from the tin fills the air. Ms. Cunningham hands me one under the table. I snatch it out of her hand and take a bite. The cookie melts in my mouth and crumbles down my shirt.

I hear the women pour out the tea kettle into cups on the table.

Then, there’s a knock at the screen door.

“Hello,” Ms. Cunningham says.

“Is Jimmy there?” I hear a boy ask.

I know that voice. It’s Danny Drasky. I peer under the tablecloth. I see his legs through the screen door. The other boys, too, stand with him on the porch. They have sticks, and they clank them against the floor.

“Is Jimmy here?” Ms. Cunningham calls out in the room like a mockingbird.

“We want him to come play with us,” Danny says.

I slide to the back of the table, away from the door, so the boys can’t see me. I hold Dolly firm. I hide the General Lee under my leg. I do not answer, thinking I’ve got the best of both worlds, a girl toy and a boy toy and no one to bother me.

“I guess he’s not here,” Ms. Cunningham says.

“You boys best be running along now,” Mary Catherine says.

I smile.

The boys scatter off the porch.

Suzi Thomas leaps from the landing of the stairs onto the table. Something gets knocked over and clinks above my head.

“Shoo,” Mom says, and she stomps by the table.

Suzi Thomas thuds back down on the floor. The old cat lands firm on its feet.

The women settle into their chairs for tea. Their legs come together under the table and wall in my fort.

Michael Lockett has an MFA in Creative Writing from Carlow University. His stories are published in the Northern Appalachian Review, Prometheus Dreaming, Twisted Vine, Hive Avenue, Taint Taint Taint, Matthew’s Place through the Matthew Shepard Foundation, History Through Fiction, and Quarter Press. His debut collection of shorts In the Cut is published through Sunbury’s Catamount Press. Originally from Central PA, he now lives in the Northside of Pittsburgh with his partner, cats, and birds.

http://michaellockett-author.com

Poetry

Suburban Pastoral

by Jason Irwin

The girls in the apartment below ours

let their mail pile up in the entryway—

envelopes with foreign stamps

& giant boxes of cat food.

They complain to the landlord

about our dancing, the music we blast—

Coltrane, Hank Williams, Zeppelin—

& how, during our late-night

lovemaking, our bed creaks & cries

like a rusted seesaw.

Don’t they realize that time is an illusion?

a construct created by factory owners & priests.

Yet each night I watch it settle

in my wife’s back, forming a knot

between her Trapezius & spine.

I see it in an old man on the bus who winces

with each guarded step before falling into his seat

whimpering like a mouse.

I know he is my future self,

& that the future, if it holds any hope,

is like an hourglass turning over & over.

In the evenings, when the cicadas’

crescendo rivals the whir of cars

on the parkway, my wife & I

drive down to the Rankin Bridge

to watch the chemical sunset

reflecting in the river’s dark water—

the blood orange clouds

dissolving into blackness.

Jason Irwin is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently The History of Our Vagrancies (Main Street Rag, 2020). Watering the Dead (Pavement Saw Press, 2008) won the 2006-2007 Transcontinental Poetry Prize for a first book of poetry. He is also the author of two chapbooks. In 2022 he was a Zoeglossia Fellow and part of the Poetry Foundation’s Disability Poetics Project. His nonfiction has been published in Santa Ana Review, Panorama, The Catholic Worker, and City of Asylum’s Pittsburgh Live/Ability: Encounters in Poetry and Prose Project. He grew up in Dunkirk, NY, and now lives in Pittsburgh PA. http://jasonirwin.blogspot.com/

Poetry

To Lancaster

by Kimberly Rhoades

the frigid blue Susquehanna

with endless white cracks-

a sea of bare trees before me

sway in the billowing breeze

and the tip of the mountain-

he had talked about.

unlivable shacks on the waterfront

with a “beware of dog” sign-

then a tunnel filled with a pure

black-

velvet-

nothingness.

a child flat on their belly

sledding down the snow dusted hill

so innocent-

and at play.

the dizzying train window

framing a picturesque Pennsylvania.

these rapid rousing glimpses

into lives other than my own.

reminding me that there are

fisherman knee deep by houses

with endless drab colors.

each with their own stories

in whatever the Hell

this town is called.

“Hope has a name

… and it’s Jesus!”

Patsy Cline’s crisp notes serenade me

into yet another sleepy town

with an antique shop on the corner

I’m daydreaming and thinking if I tried…

could I walk from one side of the bank

to the other?

did “God” make the ice strong enough?

could I handle the shock my body

would surely endure if I went through?

what I would give to feel that-

instant peace.

my ailments would fly away

like a white harmonious dove-

flapping it’s thunderous wings

steadily towards the heavenly skies

above.

Then we could be together again.

grey chimney smoke ascends

from that frosted mountain tip

off in the distance ahead.

like clockwork

he carefully tends to his fire.

his fervent soul running

through my weaving veins

to this day and those to come.

I imagine he is happy-

living in those “little trees”

of rural Pennsylvania.

To Lancaster

I am reminded-

of him.

Kimberly (Kimmi) Rhoades is a 26 year old video/content creator who lives with her wife outside of Pittsburgh. She has lived in the Pittsburgh area her entire life and has always been fascinated by the beauty of nature, even as a child. Rhoades wrote this poem “To Lancaster” a few years after her father’s passing. It’s about when she took a train to her cousin’s wedding from Pittsburgh to Lancaster (where her father grew up and died at 55), she wrote what she saw and felt into this poem framing Appalachia Pennsylvania.

Poetry

WHEREAS Appalachia was always Black, queer, and wild:

by Torli Bush

a sax solo following the guitar riffs of a grunge duo
rocking against the man at 123 Pleasant Street in Morgantown.

WHEREAS Pittsburgh is our Paris, the Presbyterian church in East Liberty
a Notre Dame across from Capri’s Pizzeria where I started performing poetry.
The Abbey on Butler Street a quaint apothecary of food and spirits,
an alternative healing through hospitality and wine.

WHEREAS the religiosity has a way of splitting people,
I was the only Black person in my church growing up;
I say was cause I left it for Methodism,
not cause I left the faith altogether.
Many of us are still in the process of toppling White Jesus.

WHEREAS I have to get away from the fire & brimstone
so I run from Parcoal to Webster Springs and back every morning,
play basketball from 5PM to 1AM every weekend
for the entire summer with my rival of sixteen years
on the concrete courts of Baker’s Island.

WHEREAS I return home to my grandmother’s
corn-oil salt & peppered fried potatoes;
I throw some chicken in a skillet,
have a feast, and crash on the couch
cause my room’s wall mounted AC
got infested with yellow jackets one summer
and my grandpa had to kill ‘em and seal it up.

WHEREAS I’m having one of those wild dreams
of outrunning The Flatwoods Monster,
who swallows everything in his path
towards a pink sun horizon,
in my workhorse Chevy Impala
that my grandad got in 2005
when I was ten and hooked on the Playstation 2.

WHEREAS I stopped at a Tudor’s
along the way, I figured I had the time.
It was only the end of the world.
Til I saw The Mothman chase his dinner
down with raspberry moonshine,
fly out the window at Mach 1,
and beat the Monster’s green maw toothless
for threatening them biscuits.

WHEREAS I stepped through the exit of Tudor’s
and found myself back in Pittsburgh
performing at City of Asylum: a haven
for writers escaping political persecution abroad;
what a hope to write in the face of injustice,

WHEREAS I remember going to Harper’s Ferry
for the first time, learning about
Storer College and The Niagara Movement:
Black men becoming educators,
and planting seeds for the NAACP.
In West Virginia.

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED:
We have always been here
like the church,
the moonshine,
the wild music playing us out into the night.

Torli Bush is a poet from Webster Springs. He is a 2017 graduate of WVU’s Mechanical Engineering program, and is currently pursuing an MFA at West Virginia Wesleyan College. He has been featured at The Lewisburg Literary Festival, WV Governor’s School for the Arts, and Travelin’ Appalachians Revue.

Book Reviews

**Michael Dittman on Seldom Seen: A Miner’s Tale by Mitch James Catamount Press 2023.**

by Mike Dittman

The descent into the underground is one of humanity’s oldest stories. The archetype attempts to explain the order of the universe and what happens when that order is turned on its head. The underworld is the dark abode of the dead and those who make the journey. If they can return, they come back changed. To that point, Mitch James’ debut novel, Seldom Seen, begins with the discovery of a desiccated body in a mine, and the plot never slows after that.

Brander, the protagonist, returns to his derelict Illinois hometown after years in the Alaskan bush working as a trapper to find his mother dead. On his way back from drowning his grief in a local bar, Brander is accosted in an alley by Richter, an Ancient Mariner-like figure. The man insists that Brander go to Seldom Seen, a mine in Patton, Pennsylvania, to find all of the answers that the young man seeks. Brander does so only to lose his bearings and possibly his sanity below the horizon of the world.

At Seldom Seen, Brander becomes friends with the ironically named Lucky, a rough veteran miner who trains him. Lucky’s wife has asked him to move out while, at the same time, he struggles to support his brother, Cane. Cane’s quick spiral from sobriety back to drug addiction provides the showpiece of the book – a raid on a meth lab by Brander and Lucky which sends Brander himself spiraling into a place both emotionally and physically from which there seems no return.

After the tragedy of the battle, Brander finds himself drawn deeper into the mine, following the reappearance of the long-dead miner, Richter, who works as both a figure of help and damage. Brander becomes a spectator to his own life, drawn into a play over which he cannot control, pushed through torments without a single pleasure for the amusement of some unnamable force.

Seldom Seen is a real mine, located in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, now abandoned and considered by local folklore to be haunted. James’ Seldom Seen is one of the biggest underground mines in the world and the biggest in the US. The mine is unusually rich with quality coal and a character itself in the book as are the huge machines that move apace through the dark splintering earth and rock and spitting it out. James’ writing preys on the strangeness of mining, to both the reader and Brander, to layer in a touch of Lovecraft’s weird – the horror of the unknowable or incomprehensible. The mine and the machinery exist alongside the men but are heartless and, although part of the world, not of the world. Beyond the comprehension or control of the men working it, this place and these tools have no regard for lives, loves, or tragedies. The mine is special, readers are reminded again and again, but that specialness is because it simply has no regard or recognition of the human world.

Although the novel’s setting, Patton Pennsylvania, is a real place, James creates a fun-house mirror of the locale to continue to set the audience ill-at-ease. Like the mine itself, the story exists outside of time and place. James uses local details and a vague timeline to reinforce the idea that something is not quite right. Lucky’s daughter has a smartphone, but the character’s vehicles are decades old. The brick factory where Lucky’s brother works is real but closed in 1968. Patton can be found just off I-80 we’re told, but characters drink Lion’s Head beer from Wilkes Barre while rooting for the Steelers in a Pittsburgh accent. The setting seems to be both familiar and strange as James works to create a mythical Appalachia, familiar, yet not quite right to further ratchet up the feeling of unease and strangeness. It’s an uncanny valley of Appalachia if you will: an uncanny holler.

James writes tough masculine prose bereft of flourishes. He has a cinematic style. His scenes play out in a way that the reader can visualize film cuts moving back and forth during scenes of dialogue. His chapters are short and punchy and the action and violence spin with a ruthless intensity.
Seldom Seen is a plot-driven narrative rather than character-driven sometimes to a fault. Most of the characters would have benefited from just a little more fleshing out, a little more back story to fully invest the readers in their lives and to make the horrific events of the book have a deeper emotional impact. The pace of the novel is so fast that catching one’s breath or feeling suspense is diluted.

However, that price of admission is well worth the ride. As Major, the mine foreman tells Brander after he’s hired. “I promise you, you ain’t even imagined the kinds of things you’re going to see.” Seldom Seen is too complex a book to be placed into a pigeonhole of a supernatural story. The mine is haunted in the same way that Brander is haunted, in the way that we are all haunted, by failure, by success, by happiness that seems just ahead, around the corner in the dark mineshaft of existence down which we fumble.

Michael Dittman lives and writes near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania surrounded by the palimpsest of the Appalachian Rust Belt and its ghosts. He’s worked at bike shops, in newsrooms, and on top of roofs, but today he can be found more often at the front of a classroom. He is the author of Jack Kerouac; A Biography, Small Brutal Incidents, and Who Holds the Devil. His short stories and poetry, as well as his journalism and non-fiction, are widely published. Contact him at www.Michaeldittman.com.

Book Review

Patricia Thrushart on Red and Crescent Moons by Tabassam Shah, Watershed, 2022.

The allure of Red and Crescent Moons by poet Tabassam Shah begins before you even open the book. There’s the title: evocative and descriptive, with more than a faint nod to the flag of South Carolina, the author’s home state. But even more so, there’s the cover art— glorious and rich, with undulating lines, saturated colors and a mystic landscape. Created by Shah’s relative, Fatima Zahra Hassan, the title of the cover art is “Assembly of Birds.” It’s a perfect name for the artwork, and a perfect precursor to the poetry that follows. Shah’s work is filled with birds, with ancestors, with memories. Her stories, told with impactful images and sometimes playful observations, allow you to imagine what it was like to grow up Muslim in Southern Appalachia, the daughter of a dark-skinned man and fair woman, eating saag-aloo along with collard greens. With that understanding comes a new awareness of what otherness feels like, how beauty can be found in the simplest places, and where love resides.

Shah is not the first to explore otherness in Appalachia. Her work stands alongside the writing of authors like Neema Avashia, who wrote Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place. Both Shah and Avashia defy long-standing Appalachian stereotypes. Yes, Virginia, there are Indian people, and Muslims, in the mountains. And Blacks. Affrilachian authors too have claimed their place in the sweeping narrative that captures true Appalachia. For instance, Crystal Wilkinson’s The Birds of Opulence explores the fictional saga of two Black families facing mental illness, complicated relationships and the demands of the land. Wilkinson’s voice— similarly poetic and lyrical— is another example of an emerging group of writers challenging the predictable characterizations of the region offered by many (here’s looking at you, J.D. Vance). Shah’s work belongs squarely within this movement.
Dr. Philip Terman writes in his excellent foreword that Shah’s poetry “shift(s) registers of tone, mixing, in the tradition of Adrienne Rich, a vivid lyrical sense with political invective,” referring to the very first poem in the collection, “Sanctuary.” The poem tells of her community’s efforts to hold their Friday prayers, and the passive-aggressive reaction among the people she thought of as neighbors. “Fear that lies deep within re-emboldened white fragility,” the poet laments, followed by a question asked in one form or another by wave upon wave of people considered “other:” “Do my blood vessels remind you of Shaytan’s fingernails, but not your own?”

Shah continues to examine that loss of innocence and desire for safety in the very next poem, “banned” as the narrator states:

I smolder, I simmer: I’m a closet muslim
members of my cohort banned
I’m done with apologies
this brown poet of rural America
I sought camaraderie with seekers of sanctuary…

In spite of the anger so deftly evoked in these first poems, Shah can imagine a better world: “in the riots of our dreams/There will be no mourning/for the old order/We will awaken to/Dusty cooing doves/Walking on embers and ash.” Perhaps it was the endearing cast of characters that we meet in these poems that kept Shad from complete despair. There is Momma, “the best church organist in town,” who yelled “bless you, child,” as the narrator left her house; or a patient of Shah’s father’s who “tamed the red clay to produce harvests” in a way that seemed magical to the young girl. Perhaps it was her uncle, “horn rimmed glasses precariously resting on the tip of his nose/Thick lenses with soda bottle bottoms,” who challenged his niece to translate his poetry written in Urdu; and surely it was her mother, her “deep orange lipstick/The color of nasturtiums…/Her sari the color of apricot blush/embroidered with violets…/the marigolds she loved so dearly/Keeping a bud in a vase at her bedside in summer…/ This poem, “My Mother’s Colored Afterimage,” is my unabashed favorite in the collection. I can practically taste her mother’s “saffron sweetened rice studded with pistachios and golden raisins../ and understand why Shah sees “holiness in this color/Worn by enrobed sadhus and monks…”

In many ways, Shah is at her most expressive when writing about the people who infused her childhood with humor, whimsy and affection. In the poem “Challo, Larki!” Shah’s mother insists on a walk even as she is being treated for breast cancer. Lacing up her “sparkly white tennis shoes,” she wears a linen shalwar kameez in the hot sun, and sallies out to kiss neighborhood children on the cheeks, pinch off plant cuttings to tuck into her dupatta, and embarrass her daughter with her “sing-songy Punjabi accent echoing in the neighborhood.” The poet recreates a picture of her mother as surely as a portrait painter, and the reader is both charmed by the mother, and sad to know she no longer is here to greet her neighbors on their porches.

Besides her writing, Tabassam Shah is an activist. One delightful aspect of her first poetry collection is its breadth of topics: otherness and the cruelty it brings, childhood memories, and lastly, a celebration of the natural world. Poems such as “Porcupinal Ponderings at Seneca Rocks,” “Prolonging the Bounty of Autumn’s Glory,” and “The Forest Cathedral” all celebrate the part of Appalachia Shah now calls home: the Pennsylvania Wilds. In these poems, Shah uses her rich language to capture the region’s beauty: “Hope was green in the misty glen/Toppled white pine and hemlock/Blanketed with moss and running ground pine/Creeping and colonizing thickets and clearings/Creating its own forest in miniature…”
The collection ends in the woods and the peace it brings, where Shah can “release the extraneous, the burdensome/To put aside all my needlessly costly ways of using energy/In true silence, I can reacquaint myself with the stillness within/To immerse myself in an inner nectar of love.” She leaves us there, after our journey with her through memories, moments of laughter, of wistfulness, and bursts of anger, all wrapped up in language and observation as detailed as the gorgeous cover art. And we sit, content.

Patricia Thrushart writes poetry and biographies from her home in the Pennsylvania Wilds. Her fifth and latest book of poems, Goddesses I Have Known, was put out by QPC Publishing with proceeds benefiting a local domestic violence shelter, Clarion County SAFE. Her previous collection, Inspired By Their Voices: Poetry From Underground Railroad Testimony was originally published by Mammoth Books and benefits social justice causes. Patricia’s poems have been published in numerous journals. She is co-editor of the blog and anthology series for North/South Appalachia and co-founder of the group Poets Against Racism & Hate USA. In 2021 her work was chosen for an award-winning anthology of Ohio Appalachian voices, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing. She’s had poems included in the “Women of Appalachia Speaks” series. Her narrative nonfiction book, Cursed: The Life and Tragic Death of Marion Alsobrook Stahlman, was published in December 2021 by Adelaide Books.

Interviews

A Conversation Long Overdue: Jennifer Haigh Talks about Her Novel Mercy Street and the Right to Choose with Christina Fisanick

The following interview was conducted live on stage at the Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books at Kelly Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dr. Christina Fisanick, writer and English professor, asked New York Times bestselling novelist, Jennifer Haigh, questions about her book Mercy Street (Ecco, 2022), which looks deeply at the issue of abortion from inside and outside a Boston abortion clinic. Less than six weeks later, on June 24, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, declaring that the constitutional right to abortion no longer exists.

Sydney Etheredge, President and CEO at Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania, introduced the session.

Sydney Etheredge: Jennifer Haigh is the winner of PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction and has been published in 18 languages. Haigh is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and won a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her new novel, Mercy Street, was published in February 2022. Just a quick excerpt from The New York Times, Janet Maslin: “For years Haigh has been peering deep into the heart of lost America, a superb unsung novelist hovering just under the radar. Abortion, guns, vigilantism, drug dealing, white supremacy, bitter misogyny, and online fetishism all figure in the tableau Haigh expertly details.” And I must say, following the Supreme Court leak that happened just a few weeks ago and the potential fall of Roe later this summer, a book like Mercy Street is a must-read now more than ever. And so, without further ado, I bring you Jennifer and Christina.

Jennifer Haigh: Thank you, Sydney, for that terrific introduction. I’m thrilled to be in Pittsburgh to be talking about this book. I grew up not so far from here, about 70 miles north and east in Cambria County, and I’ve not been in Pittsburgh since before COVID. So it’s lovely to be here in person with all of you. Thank you for coming.

Christina Fisanick: Before I ask you questions, I just wanted to say thank you so much for asking me to be part of this event and to talk about this incredibly important book. So thank you. So I want to get right to the point. Today all over the United States, including here in Pittsburgh, women are marching for reproductive freedom and our health rights. And this book, of course, takes up the issue of abortion, the psychological landscape, and the reality of abortion. The title of a review by Ron Charles in WaPo was Mercy Street may be the last novel about abortion before Roe v Wade is dismantled. And so even though this novel takes place in 2015, here we are in 2022. So how do you see Mercy Street joining that conversation?

Jennifer: Well, it’s a conversation long overdue. One thing I found in writing about abortion is how little most people know about the experience of it, even though 1 in 4 American women will have an abortion at some point in her life. So it’s a very, very common thing. It’s so common that every person in this room knows someone who’s had one. And yet the political climate is such that nobody can really talk about it. So part of what I wanted to do in the writing of this novel was just to offer up some reality, to shine a light on what this experience is, who has abortions and why, why it matters, and why we cannot afford to lose this right. So if I’ve managed to do any portion of that in this novel, I’m pleased.

Christina: So Claudia, the main character of this book, has a number of very fraught relationships with people in her family, with the men in her lives, and so on, including with Timmy, her pot dealer and, later, lover. And you’ll learn more about that. I swear I’m not going to spoil anything else from this wonderful novel. But it’s interesting because we see Claudia as this woman in 2015 who I think is in a place where a lot of women are, especially women who are educated and career-focused that have their own money wherein partnership and cohabitating and so on, is more risky than it’s beneficial. And it also, I think, allows those women to have more choice. In an interview that you did with Jess Walter, you said that many of the women in this novel, and many women in reality, don’t have a choice when it comes to reproductive rights and the decisions they make when they go to a clinic. So could you talk more about that?

Jennifer: Yeah. You know, for as long as I can remember, choice has been the euphemism we use to talk about abortion rights. We’ve avoided saying the word abortion because it’s so polarizing and people have this outsized reaction even to hearing the word. And yet choice isn’t exactly the right word either, because, I mean, as you say, Christina, for a lot of women, the choices aren’t good and they’re not balanced choices. One of the things I do in Mercy Street is look at a cross-section of all the different kinds of women who might have abortions. Unlike anything else I’ve ever written, Mercy Street draws directly on personal experience. I’m a novelist, not a journalist. I don’t really have an autobiographical instinct, which is a good thing, because I sit alone in a room for most of my life, so my own life doesn’t offer them much to write about. But some years ago, I started volunteering at a women’s clinic in Boston, where I live, and that was kind of a life-changing experience for me. I’d always been pro-choice, but until I started volunteering, I, knew very little about the world of the clinic or what it’s like for a woman who turns up as a patient. So there was a real learning experience for me in doing this volunteer work. I know I’m straying far from the question, but I think this is important background to the book.

So my work as a volunteer was on a hotline. I had some months of training, and after that, I would volunteer one day a week to sit in a call center and answer anonymous phone calls, mostly from women, sometimes men, but mostly women. They were questions about contraception. Often there were questions about, you know, ordinary health concerns. And in about a quarter or maybe a third of cases, they were women who were calling to schedule abortions. If you wanted to schedule an abortion at this clinic, your first stop was to talk to a volunteer like me. I’m not a doctor. I’m not a nurse. But I was trained to answer questions about this procedure. And in the process of doing this work, I talked to so many different women from different backgrounds. Before I started volunteering there, I had the sense that probably the people who have abortions are all teenagers. You know, they’re young. They probably don’t have a lot of family support. They’re probably still in school. They’re almost certainly not married. And certainly, some of the patients fit that description. But what I learned in working on this hotline was that most of the women scheduling abortions were not teenagers. They were more likely to be in their 20s or 30s. Most of them already had at least one child. Many had more than one child. Many were married. There were very well-educated professional women in their 30s and sometimes 40s.

So it was really anybody who can get pregnant could turn up in this clinic. You realize that this experience of an unplanned pregnancy cuts across all these dividing lines. There were patients from all parts of the city, from all educational levels, socioeconomic levels, people who spoke different languages, people of different races, different cultures. It was really the most inclusive, diverse cross-section I had ever seen in the city of Boston. And that leads me to talk about the cover of this book, which I love. This cover is particularly appropriate, I think because it does convey that – the diversity of the women the clinic serves. In the book, the women are pink, blue, and purple; in life, they are not, but they are different. If you look closely at the cover of the book, these are actually paper dolls cut out of construction paper. Allison Saltzman, the art director at my publisher, actually cut these out of construction paper. And if you look at them closely, you can see their heads are a little pointy – you know, when you try to cut a circle in construction paper. And the figures are the pictogram you see on the door of a women’s restroom, you know that figure wearing the dress. But I like that it conveys so much about the book in this really kind of economical, elegant way. So anyway, that’s the first thing I learned in doing this work – who has abortions and some of the reasons why.

Christina: So I want to move a little bit away from the sort of topical parts of the book to talk about the writing of this book. After I read the book, I read some reviews from just regular readers, and someone on Goodreads said, “Nothing happened in this book.” Have you read the book? You know that that’s not true. But Richard Russo, in his wonderful review of the book in the New York Times, said this about this very issue: “At this point in a rave review, critics will sometimes introduce a quibble to prove that they’re tough-minded and serious and not easily gobsmacked, so I’ll offer here that some readers may be disappointed that so many of the characters in Mercy Street get precisely what’s coming to them. They may suspect authorial – what? interference? artifice? – at work. But I’d argue the opposite: that it’s the characters themselves who have been working overtime, their entire lives, to arrive where they land. Haigh isn’t manipulating them, just paying close attention to their choices, large and small. That’s not artifice, it’s art. And I was gobsmacked.” And so my question is, you said in several interviews that you don’t always know what’s going to happen in your books and that, you know, it’s a good book when that is the case because the book comes to life. And so all of the mercy that these characters receive or recipients of, did you know their fates going in?

Jennifer: I knew nothing, and this is pretty typical for me. I start with the situation and some characters, and I know there’s one event that I’m sort of writing toward, so there’s maybe one thing that happens in the book that I know on the front end, but most of it is something I discover in the process of writing it. You know, books are made by writing. For me, books are not made by outlining beforehand. I never do that. So when I started writing this book, I knew who the important characters were. The main character, Claudia Birch, is a counselor at a clinic like the one where I worked. She’s not a volunteer. She’s a real full-time counselor. This is what she does day in and day out. I knew she was the center of the story, and I knew the story would begin with Claudia arriving at work. Because this, for me, as a volunteer, was one of the most striking features of doing this work. Every time I showed up for my shift, I had to muscle my way through this gauntlet of protesters. Some days there was just a handful, other days there was a huge crowd, but they were always out there day in, day out. I was only volunteering one day a week, but I found myself thinking about what would this do to you. How would this work on you psychically, if every day showing up for work involved these strangers getting in your face and yelling at you, shouting obscenities, preaching at you, telling you you’re going to hell? What if that were your every day? And so, I knew that’s where the story would begin, with Claudia at work.

The other thing I knew at the beginning was that there would have to be some kind of antagonist to Claudia, some kind of, you know, in dramatic terms, an antagonist, a kind of archrival. And as I was developing this character of Claudia’s antagonist – in the book, his name is Victor Prine – I thought about the little town where I grew up here in Pennsylvania. When I was a kid, you could drive ten miles in any direction from my mother’s house and see a handmade sign in somebody’s pasture or planted along the highway, and there would be slogans like, ‘It’s a child, not a choice,’ or ‘Abortion stops a beating heart.’ Now, these were not mass-produced signs. These were homemade. Somebody went to the lumber yard, bought the lumber, cut the lumber, painted the sign, and then drove around looking for places to plant them. Who does that? That was the question I asked myself. And that’s what led me to develop the character of Victor Prine. He’s the guy who makes those signs. And when you first meet him in the novel, that’s what he’s doing. He’s driving around with a, you know, pickup truck with a bed full of signs, and he’s looking for places to plant them along the highway. So in this way, Pennsylvania really figures in this story, even though it takes place in Boston and this Boston is kind of a character in the book. But Pennsylvania is really important to the book as well, and it draws heavily on my childhood, growing up in a part of the state where I never knew anybody who admitted to being pro-choice until I went away to college. So when I was growing up there, you couldn’t say it. Nobody said that. And some of you may be familiar with, you know, it’s a pretty socially conservative part of the world. It’s overwhelmingly Catholic. I went to 12 years of Catholic school, and I heard about how bad abortion was before I even understood how you got pregnant. So that was the background I was drawing on in developing this character of Victor Prine. Once again, this is an answer that goes so far afield of Christina’s excellent question, but it comes out the way it comes out.

Christina: And it dovetails nicely to my next question. So as the president of the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia and as a Northern Appalachian, I care very much about the region, and you talk about how Pennsylvania was so influential in this. And I really felt that in the experiences that Claudia went through, but also just in the overall flavor of this book. So, I wanted to ask you about how you represent characters like Victor and Claudia riding that line between stereotype and realness and making them characters. I think you said in an interview with someone – maybe it was Andre Dubus – you said that you try to write the character the way that he would write himself, and you were referring to Victor Prine. So how do you do that? Because I think a lot of people will struggle to find the humanity and people that seem to be unable to find the humanity in others.

Jennifer: It’s an excellent question, and it really has to do with the magic of point of view, which is something that fiction writers work with all the time. It’s one of the most powerful tools we have. When you’re writing from a character’s point of view, as I do with Claudia, but also with Victor Prine, it’s kind of like being an actor. You know, an actor doesn’t pass judgment on the character – an actor becomes the character. And as a writer of fiction, you kind of have to do that. You have to take that character’s side for the period of time when you’re writing from his point of view, even if you disagree vehemently with him about everything, as I do with Victor Prine. Victor Prine’s a misogynist. He’s a racist. He has some really warped ideas about reproduction and abortion. None of those represent my views at all. And yet, for the time I was writing Victor Prine, I had to write the world as he saw it. And it’s really a question of loyalty. As the writer, you can’t take sides among your characters, even though you agree with some of them and disagree with others. You have a responsibility to each of these characters to show them, as completely as possible, to be the people they are. And you know, none of us is a villain in our own life. I mean, we all think we have really good reasons for doing what we do and thinking what we think. And that’s true of all these characters. They all believe they have good reasons. And so, I simply tried to write them accurately without taking sides and trust the reader to come to her own conclusions about these people. You know, this is my seventh book. I know many of my readers. They’ve been reading me for 20 years. They’re really astute people, and I trust them to come to their own conclusions about these characters.

Christina: So this is my favorite part of your book. As I read this novel, I really felt very at home with these characters. And part of that is the Northern Appalachia thing, right? But part of it is I grew up in a trailer like Claudia, so I could identify with that, but mostly it was all of the 80s culture references – people she talks about, government cheese, and cancer. And if you were a poor kid in the 80s, it was like you dream of it still. [inaudible] And also, of course, the childbirth explosion, which for Gen Xers was a very defining moment for us. And so, I’ve observed in otherbooks that I ‘ve read that have tried to incorporate cultural references from recent times, and it’s not always done very well because I feel like people put so much in or they’re so unfamiliar with that time period that it distracts from the material. So how did you decide how to incorporate those details to make these characters real to us, without belaboring it, without making us feel like, you know, oh, there’s another 80s reference? You know what I mean I think?

Jennifer: I do, I do, and that can be a very challenging thing to do, particularly because I love doing research. It’s one of my favorite tasks as a novelist. I could do research for years on end very happily, and not notice that I’m not writing anything. My last book, Heat and Light, dealt with a fracking controversy in Pennsylvania, and I had to do some real research to write that book and get it right. This book was different in that I didn’t have to do a lot of research. So those, you know, cultural references to the 80s, those weren’t things that I went looking for. Those were things I already knew. Everything in this book I already knew. And so, it makes for a different kind of writing experience. The real challenge for, say, writers of historical fiction is not to show off your research because, you know, you’re very proud of your research. I’ve seen this in historical novels where the writer has spent a month researching chamber pots, and so ends up telling you all about chamber pots because she’s so proud of her research. And, you know, this isn’t that kind of book. I didn’t have to go looking for any of this stuff. You know, government cheese is in my own memory.

Christina: So my next question is another personally attached to me. So, Claudia has an unfortunate run-in with one of her mother’s boyfriends and he verges very close to sexually assaulting her, though he does not quite make it, though what he did was wrong. And as a result of that, Claudia and her mother develop eating disorders as protective mechanisms against sexual assault, future sexual assault, and in Claudia’s case, she becomes anorexic and her mother becomes a binge eater. And as someone who dealt with their own sexual assault at a young age by developing an eating disorder, one, I was very grateful to you for talking about that, because I feel like it’s not talked about enough or even at all. And I’m wondering how did you learn about that? How did you incorporate that? What was the driving force behind that? It’s not a big part of the book, but it’s a really crucial part of understanding Claudia’s mother.

Jennifer: I’m glad you asked that, Christina. And no one has asked me that question before. It is really crucial to the story – women’s relationships with their bodies, that’s what this whole controversy is all about, you know, to what degree a woman owns her own body, to what degree she’s in the driver’s seat in her own life. And in both of those cases, Claudia and her mother developed these eating disorders. In Claudia’s case, it’s an attempt to control her body and control the way other people respond to her body. And any woman who has gone through puberty understands this – that when you’re 13 years old, it’s like you have a target on your back. And I remember this very vividly – the way men respond to girls who are still children but are starting to mature physically, it’s a terrifying time. And that’s really what I was writing out of in Claudia’s case like this. You want to stop this process that has brought all this terrifying adult male attention to you when you’re still a child. You just want to make it stop. And in Claudia’s case, she does that by not eating. And, you know, all her sort of physical maturity kind of recedes because she looks like a skinny little kid. You know, in her mother’s case, that excess weight protects her from male attention, too. You know, really, they’re driven by this same need – it’s wanting protection from that kind of, you know, predatory thing.

Christina: And in that case, she did this not just for herself but for her daughter because once she becomes what she thinks is unattractive to men because she’s gained all this weight, then there’s no more boyfriends that could potentially take advantage of Claudia. So I really appreciate that part of the book, and I don’t think it’s just talked about enough. So this next question is the professor in me asking this question. So being a Wheeling, West Virginia girl, I am very familiar with Rebecca Harding Davis, who wrote ‘Life in the Iron Mills’ and recently a lot of scholarship has started to give her credit where credit is due as the founder of American realism. And there are many, of course, men that we know that have been considered part of that movement. But I believe that the women who have been absolutely foundational contributors to American realism, like yourself, aren’t really tied to that canon or that understanding. And so, my question is, what are we missing out on by not recognizing those women writers from the past, but also from the present as being part of American realism?

Jennifer: You know, it’s a frame of reference I simply don’t have. I am not an academic. I teach once in a blue moon. I’m a visiting writer right now at UMass Boston. But in terms of how my work is viewed or how other women’s work is viewed, you know far more about this than I do. I really don’t know. I really don’t know. \

Christina: I feel like you should be studied alongside all of these other American realists, Steinbeck and the rest. I mean, I think your work is so important in deftly describing and fairly describing and detailing the American experience for everyday people and their realities that we need to study you more.

Jennifer: Oh, Christina. That’s wonderful.

Christina: So the next question is about humor. No one expects a book about abortion to be funny. And yet there is a good bit of humor in this book. Can you talk about that seemingly odd thing to be in a book about abortion? How does that work?

Jennifer: Well, you know, abortion occurs in a life and lives contain all of that. You know, even when you’re in a moment of crisis, the world doesn’t stop being complicated. And so, you know, Claudia and the other characters, they’re people living their lives and they’re all, to me, very funny at times. I was highly amused by all these characters, as I always am by my characters. And I think it has maybe something to do with my worldview, but I found them all deeply amusing. Even Victor Prine, who is, you know, without a doubt the villain of the book, and I thought he was screamingly funny at certain points. He’s a guy who’s always deadly serious. He would never imagine he’s funny, but he has, at times, made me laugh. So, you know, it’s just that life is complicated. We can feel many things at one time, and we do. And for these characters to be fully human, you know, they’re experiencing all of that, that the world doesn’t stop being funny when it’s sad.

Christina: Yeah. And in a way, I mean, we can see Victor is being ridiculous, but you don’t make them ridiculous. And the humor is real. I mean, it feels very real, as well as the moment of mercy, I think, for him, when he’s being cared for by Ernestine in the rehabilitation center. And her laugh is music to him, you give him that. And he needed that more than any character in the book, I think.

So I have a question about the weather because the weather in this book is its own character, and it takes place in the winter of 2015, and this area got hammered pretty hard too. But Boston really got it. So do you want to talk about that?

Jennifer: Oh yes. Boston Winter is maybe the main character in this novel. So I grew up in Pennsylvania. I know for snow, I’ve never been afraid of winter. I always thought that, until the winter of 2015 in Boston, which is still remembered as the Snowpocalypse. People who lived in Boston during that winter really have PTSD from that experience, myself included. Now, when the first snowflake falls, I feel myself tensing. It’s happening again. This winter was so unreal. It just simply never melted. So we’d get these whomping Nor’easters, these storms that come up the New England coast would dump two feet of snow in 24 hours, and then we’d get another one in 5 days and it didn’t melt. And if you lived in the city, there was simply nowhere to put it. It felt like we were being buried alive. And so, when I started writing this story, I knew that it would be set during this winter, and it had something to do with the isolation of living in Boston at that time, where we were all marooned. It was COVID before there was COVID, you know, we were all trapped in our houses. So the novel opens at the beginning of that winter and ends when the winter ends, it ends when spring comes. And it really goes to that feeling of isolation. These are all lonely people. I think more than any book I’ve ever written, this is a book about lonely people. There’s Claudia, there’s Victor Prine, who I’ve talked about a lot. There’s also Timmy, who Christina mentioned, who’s Claudia’s weed dealer. He functions as a kind of first responder in Claudia’s life. You know, I thought about how does a person get through her life when you work under these conditions. This is a real pressure cooker environment. You know, this clinic has had bomb threats. There have been shooter threats. You know, it’s constant. There’s this constant feeling of being under attack. It’s a feeling of being under siege. And the winter seemed to me to reflect that. So that’s why it became so central to the book.

Christina: I remember that winter here and you’re having snow rage. Every time I looked outside and just hit this and started throwing things because it was snowing again and again. So my last question, and maybe our audience has some questions for you. What’s it been like reading from this book, taking it on the road, given the recent leak of the draft and so forth with Roe v Wade? How have people responded to you and what’s it been like for you to be talking about this book right now?

Jennifer: You know, it’s a very complicated answer. I will say that when I was about halfway through the writing of this book, it sort of hit me, ‘Oh my God, I got to publish this thing.’ And you know, when I’m writing, I really wear horse blinders. I’m trying to very deliberately avoid thinking about what reviewers will make of the book, what my editor will make of it, and what my mother will make of it. If I thought about those things, I would never write another word. So I really have to pretend to myself, that no one’s ever going to see this but me. And I spent a couple of years on this book when it sort of dawned on me, ‘I am going to finish this thing. It is going to get published, and I’m going to have to deal with people’s reactions to it, whatever they may be.’ And, you know, a lot of people are crazy on this subject. And when I felt this impending publication, I started to slow down in my writing. I really didn’t want to finish it because I didn’t want to publish it. I believed in the book, but I was really alarmed at the prospect of having it go out into the world and dealing with people’s reactions to it. Had I known there was going to be a global pandemic that would keep me from ever leaving my house, I might not have been so scared. You know, normally I go on a book tour.

For my second novel, Baker Towers, I went on a 40-city book tour. There aren’t 40 cities, I will tell you right now. So you get sent to all sorts of random places. But I did a ton of traveling, and that’s pretty typical for me. But with this book, I couldn’t for the first couple of months. The book was published on February 1st. Omicron was still raging. My publisher didn’t send me anywhere, so I was doing Zoom events from my study in the house in Boston, and I didn’t meet any readers at all. So it’s only in just the last few weeks that I’m starting to get out into the world to meet readers, talk to them about the book, and this happens to coincide with this leak, this Alito leak. So it is far more charged and more urgent than I imagined it would be. You know, writing a novel takes a really long time. And if you tried to write something this timely, you could not possibly do it. There’s no way I could have known five years ago that we would be on the precipice of losing Roe v Wade. Nobody knew this. So it is just a horrible confluence of events that this book turns out to be as timely as it is. So I sort of backed into it, and now I’m very glad I wrote it. I’m very glad for it to be out in the world because I want these conversations to happen. You know, this is one of those issues where nobody is neutral. Everybody has an opinion about abortion. If you don’t believe me, ask around. Everyone has an opinion. And yet, so many people have no real understanding of what this experience is like for women.

So I feel that if you’re going to have an ironclad opinion on any subject, you should do your homework and know what you’re talking about. And I don’t know that this book is going to change anybody’s mind about abortion rights, although I would love that. That’s not really my expectation. My hope is that people will walk away from reading this book with a much more complex and nuanced understanding of what this is all about, and I think that would be progress if people could be open enough to learn more about this issue before deciding they already know what they think.

Jennifer Haigh’s first novel, Mrs. Kimble, won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Since then, she has published six more critically-acclaimed works of fiction, most recently Mercy Street — named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker and winner of the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Published in eighteen languages, her books have won the Bridge Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, the PEN New England Award in Fiction, and a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A Guggenheim fellow, she teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at Boston University.

Dr. Christina Fisanick is the president of the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia (WANA) and the co-host of WANA LIVE!: The Reading Series. She teaches expository writing, creative nonfiction, and digital storytelling at Pennsylvania Western University. In addition, she is the editor or author of more than thirty books, including the memoir The Optimistic Food (MSI 2016) and Digital Storytelling as Public History (Routledge 2020) with co-author Robert Stakeley. Her latest book, Pulling the Thread: Untangling Wheeling History, is forthcoming from North Meridian Press. Learn more about her work at christinafisanick.com.

Visual Art

A Walk in the Woods No. 12, 30” x 40”, Oil and Cold Wax on Wood Panel, by John Swincinski

A Walk in the Woods

by John Swincinski

I am not a writer, but I feel compelled to write about my work. I paint for my own selfish reasons. When a painting is still in the studio, it’s all about me, all about my feelings, and all about my experiences. I’m a bit narcissistic. And while I fully embrace the idea that those who collect my work should have the opportunity to interpret it for themselves, I want to give them a head start. This is the explanation of the starting point for a series of paintings that will encompass all of 2024. I will paint these ideas over and over again until I can paint them no more.

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I wrestle the 175-pound rooftop tent onto the rack mounted to my pick-up truck. I Load the rest of the camping and fly-fishing gear into the bed and the back seat. I kiss my wife goodbye, and I finally take off. In the trailer is a nearly 12-foot by 6-foot oil on canvas painting, an abstraction of time spent hiking in East Palisades Park, a beautiful little gem of wilderness in Atlanta’s overwhelming urban sprawl. It is the largest and most profitable commissioned artwork I have created to date. But the thought of delivering it makes me nauseous. How will they react? Will they like it? Will they think I am a fraud? Will they want their money back? I am already having a shitty year, and the only thing keeping me from driving off the highway and into the Atchafalaya Basin is the knowledge that the minute I’m done delivering this work, I’m headed into The Great Smoky Mountains. I’m headed into the woods.

Echoes of East Palisades, 64” x 140” (diptych), Oil on Canvas, by John Swincinski, Private Collection

My need to isolate in the woods began when I was a child looking to escape a broken home life characterized by poverty and alcohol and drug addiction. I grew up in the small rural blue-collar coal-mining towns of western Pennsylvania. The heart of Appalachia. My parents divorced when I was 7. While my father worked tirelessly to set himself on a straight and successful path, my mother, who had custody of my sister and me, remained locked in the grip of addiction and mental illness. Add to that, my family’s lack of economic status, my skinny and awkward physical presence, and my nerdy demeanor, and the outcome is a somewhat tough childhood. As a result – I spent a lot of time alone…in the woods.

A Walk in the Woods No. 3, 20” x 16”, Oil and Cold Wax on Wood Panel, by John Swincinski

Nealy a half-century later, I spend every moment I can in the wilderness. After 22 years of military service, mostly during a time when our country was continuously engaged in war and conflict, I have no more stomach for the military-industrial complex that feeds on our worst human characteristics. Add to that, I am one who suffers insanely from “Righteous Indignation.” My existence is populated with a constant sense of moral outrage. While I am proud of my convictions and my belief in standing up for what is right, the constant anger weighs on me every single day like a collapsed mine shaft. I have learned that there is only one escape and only one respite from the indignation.

A Walk in the Woods No. 5, 40” x 30”, Oil and Cold Wax on Wood Panel, by John Swincinski

The woods is my sanctuary. The minute I step onto a wooded path and begin the simultaneous physical and metaphoric journey away from society, the weights I carry begin to float to the ground like the leaves beneath my feet. I cannot survive long without having the regular opportunity to experience these healing journeys. And so, I make it a point to set aside a bit of sacred time as often as possible, thus securing my survival.

A Walk in the Woods No. 4, 40” x 30”, Oil and Cold Wax on Wood Panel, by John Swincinski

I mentally catalog and then carry my wilderness experiences back to the studio. There I begin the process of conveying the often sublime emotional content of what I observed and witnessed. I believe that there is the experience we actually have, and then there is the memory of that of that experience. The two are not the same. The latter becomes the reality, and that is what I paint. And even though I am making paintings about more recent excursions, my childhood spent walking the woods at the center of the Appalachian rust belt is captured in every work.

A Walk in the Woods No. 13, 36” x 48”, Oil and Cold Wax on Wood Panel, by John Swincinski

The woods of my childhood is where the foundation of my abstract painting aesthetic originates. We develop our understanding of what is beautiful and compelling based on our early environment. There was no one to tell me that the sulfur orange “shit-crick” behind my house was not to be admired in the same way that someone from the Rockies admires a pristine and pure high mountain stream. The dirty dusty slag pile behind our house, refuse from decades of coal mining, reached over a hundred feet into the sky, just like a picturesque southwestern rock formation. Diesel carbon from the coal-laden dump trucks incessantly flying up and down the road in front of our house covered every surface like fine dry western snow, but black. Strip mining pits scar the land all around, but to me the vista from the precipice of one was as awe inspiring as standing on the edge of a natural canyon.

A Walk in the Woods No. 9, 20” x 16”, Oil and Cold Wax on Wood Panel, by John Swincinski

Over the years, I have been lucky enough to explore truly beautiful landscapes throughout North America and other parts of the world. I’ve immersed myself in the scenery of the Rockies, exploring Yellowstone and the Tetons. I’ve hiked Northern California and experienced the grandeur of Mt. Shasta. I’ve stood atop the Chisos Mountains on the border with Mexico. But my most recent journey to hike and fly-fish through the Smoky Mountains is the muse that kicked off this newest body of work. It was a gloriously painful and yet healing week.

A Walk in the Woods No. 10, 20” x 16”, Oil and Cold Wax on Wood Panel, by John Swincinski

I’ve learned over time to recognize and appreciate the wonderous and awe-inspiring beauty of the unspoiled landscape. And yet, when I paint these more recent experiences, somehow, the industrial degradation of the backdrop of my childhood remains encoded in the marks and surfaces, serving as a reminder of man’s impact on the natural world. Or perhaps it’s more personal than that. If I am being honest, the marks are a commentary on my childhood, a childhood scarred just like the landscape it experienced, but at the same time naive to the reality.

A Walk in the Woods No. 6, 48” x 36”, Oil and Cold Wax on Wood Panel, by John Swincinski

There is an angst to my painting style. Perhaps, the hand of the painter subconsciously keeps his work connected to that which informs his existence. Because of this duality of subject matter, my paintings emerge as a statement of both past and present. They are my autobiography. It’s a story I continue writing every time I walk in the woods.

Artist John Swincinski in his studio, photo courtesy of David Gamble

Artist Bio

John Swincinski (b.1974), an American Painter, was raised in the rural coal mining community of Windber in Western Pennsylvania, where he received private art instruction on various traditional drawing and painting techniques. He earned a vocational certificate in commercial art and graphic design and a BS in Communication from Norwich University. He then served 22 years as an officer in the US Marine Corps.

Near the end of his military career, John returned to his art, initially to cope with the upcoming life changes. He began showing his work again in 2016. Since then, his work has been in numerous group and solo exhibitions. John’s primary artistic focus is the creation of abstract oil paintings based on experiences he has while exploring nature and the wilderness all across North America. He considers his time in nature a critical part of his existence. His paintings reflect specific memories tied to these experiences. Still, his artistic style also recalls a childhood of living in a landscape of industrial decay combined with a military career, which included 17 years of being at war. Both influence how he sees the world and the aesthetic he imparts to his work.

When he is not exploring the wilderness, John works out of his studio in New Orleans, Louisiana. John received his MFA in Studio Painting from Louisiana State University in 2021. He is represented by Breckenridge Gallery in Breckenridge, CO, and Costello Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ.

You can see more of John’s work by checking out his website and following him on social media.

http://www.swincinskiart.com
https://facebook.com/swincinskiart
https://instagram.com/swincinskiart

Visual Art

Public Spaces After a Pandemic

by Wes Bishop

Appalachian Studies Conference, Athens, Ohio.

Woman smokes a cigarette in Athens, Ohio

Quiet cafe in Athens, Ohio

Coffee shop in Anniston, Alabama

Barista helps customer with app in Jacksonville, Alabama

Men get ready for work at gas station in Jacksonville, Alabama

Wesley R. Bishop is assistant professor of Public and American history at Jacksonville State University. Dr. Bishop’s research interests are primarily in public history, specifically public sphere studies. He is interested in how social movements use conceptions of “the public” and public space to challenge, reshape, and protest society. Dr. Bishop is the author of two books, Coxey’s Army: The Path of Protest from Populism to the New Deal, 1893-1936 and Liberating Fat Bodies: Social Media Censorship and Body Size Activism.

Visual Art

New Photography

by Greg Clary

Greg Clary is professor emeritus of rehabilitaton and human Services at Clarion University. He was born and raised in Turkey Creek, West Virginia, and now resides in the northwestern Pennsylvania Wilds. His photographs have been published in The Sun Magazine, Looking at Appalachia, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, The Watershed Journal, Hole in the Head Review, Dark Horse, Change Seven, Detour Ahead, Bee House Journal, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, North/South Appalachia, Tobeco Literary Journal, and many other publications. His writing and poems have appeared in The Rye Whiskey Review, The Bridge Literary Arts Journal, Northern Appalachia Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Waccamaw Journal, Rusty Truck, Anti-Heroin Chic, Sterling Clack Clack, Wingless Dreamer, and North/South Appalachia: Poetry and Art, Vol 1.