Celie lived with her six children in a tumbled down company house beside the railroad. Coal dust covered everything within a mile of the track but no dust ever covered Celie. She dressed her family like she dressed herself – in white – and was known for starching and ironing every piece of linen she
It happened on a Sunday. Will would remember this when other details had been lost to other days. When he could no longer remember the color of her eyes, or the way her mother squalled into the air and gnawed her knuckles until they bled. He would remember the missionaries. For most of the year
Laura Jean Puckett was fourteen years old when Angus Mullins walked up to her and asked “Where’s your shoes?” She was playing a child’s game on a child’s bench outside her parent’s boarding house. And it was the first time she had ever met the short man in the newsboy cap who smelled like he’d
I had this dream. I was being proposed to. In my high school gymnasium. It was all a bit unsettling. Like dreams sometimes are. Before you realize they’re dreams. And my suitor, my suitor says “Buffy, will you marry me?” Before I can say ‘what’, before I can say ‘huh?’, this really hard-knocks, city centre
When Effie saw Cosby Puckett out of the corner of her sight she saw a woman with a want. Not some innocent school girl who sat studying a bunch of books on her momma’s porch. Letting on, like she always did, that she was too shy to smile at a man and too innocent to
Someone died and I was sitting on a set of concrete steps that belonged to a neighbour thinking “I’ve been ostracized and I don’t even care.” My head hurt from the weight of itself and when I tried to turn it, to unstick the glue that made it stuck, I saw the neighbour whose steps
Seen and unseen. Thought and not-thought. Henry sits down and looks out the window and tries to think, for just a moment, about what he doesn’t want to think about. About the thing he knows is there, but can’t quite work out. “Down the drain. Down the stairs. Out the door. Hit the floor!” It’s
(photo via sharon montrose prints) Today’s Writing “Sheep is the gentlest things. And they can walk a fence better than any goat.” “It is much better to write small things than big ones: they are unpretentious and successful.” – Chekhov Anton tells me to keep it simple. And I feel stupid every time I read
(photo via annamoller.net) Today’s Writing The only thing people noticed that summer was the beauty of the creature. The way she held her head when she spoke. Or parted her lips when she smiled. The way her eyes seemed to shine with see-through innocence, and the soft purr her voice made when she laughed. She
His wife sat next to him on the porch. Out of the corner of her sight she watched him breathe like a man in the middle of a heavy labour. She’d see him stand up and look down the road and say ‘Alright boys, time to go.’ every time he heard an engine, or what
“You haven’t lived until you’ve been to a Piggly Wiggly. And that’s all I have to say about that!” ——- On the night Cosby Puckett was murdered most of the town – and all of the Bean Boarding House – were bunched up in a brush arbor down by the river waiting for Brother Ernst
