Excerpts
Digging a Well
By hand, with a blunted pickax, a plastic bucket, and a sledge— a spade’s no good in stony ground. Six feet, and still no water. Moses struck the rock and bliss gushed out, not blood from blisters, not curses from a cracked tongue. Each strike I make makes more rock. Tell my wife the kids …
Angle of Separation
The blue trees of winter stand at intervals with naked branches. Even when the sun touches them like the third circle in the archer’s target, their burnt cherry twigs hardly flinch. A train passes in the distance, carrying its cargo of smokers in black jackets. How seldom, the moments when anguish …
Anxious
My eleven-year-old niece calls me once a week, on average, to ask if she can come live with me if her parents and older brother are killed. We don’t live in a war zone, or even a big city; the nearest thing to us anyone would recognize on a map is Sioux Falls, and that’s …
The Boathouse
We turned back from the bay while light still hesitated. You said, “Can’t see how you lived here all this time, and never fished, or swam, or sailed,” but I found the poison-ivied path down to the old stone boathouse with its rotten roof. Watery light shimmered inside the arches boats once glided through. Among …
I Am Sitting at the Table
I am sitting at the table in my friend’s dining room her children age five and two are there also, the little one with her curly electric blonde hair that reminds me of my daughter’s hair before my sister decided it was too messy and had it cut short. When I came home from teaching …
Red Jar
Meadow’s wife was with child, and it had given his mind no end of trouble. That Saturday in April he was out at the family’s country property, running the noisy tiller along the flat bank just above the Maury River. Since the newcomer wasn’t due till early August and he had heard what a misery …
Scenes Abroad
I Paris. At twenty in this city, I was afraid of everything. Out of the jet’s huge belly, we detached from our own hour into this other. Set down into foreignness I’d trembled, as “other” as a bride. Now, in a marriage to myself that will last 60 years, I have outlived the first chapter. …
Lydia Peelle. Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing. Harper Perennial.
In Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, her exceptional first collection of short fiction, Lydia Peelle addresses the consequences of humanity divorcing itself from nature, using the context of the American South losing its rural traditions as an accelerant for her characters’ existential pain. Within her stories, Peelle develops the idea that individuals resemble what …
Ladette Randolph. A Sandhills Ballad. University of New Mexico Press.
It might be easy when describing Ladette Randolph’s first novel, A Sandhills Ballad, to slip into a summary that sounds a little melodramatic. There is death, dismemberment, and divorce. There is rage and despair, determination and triumph, and ultimately (thankfully) a measure of contentment. The plot is, to say the very least, full. But because …