No telling where dreams will lead.

“I woke up early one Sunday morning, disturbed by a dream. I was standing in the ocean, the breakers, staring at the shore. Something was wrong with the ocean, and I was shouting this to the trees rising behind the dunes. Something was so terribly wrong that the very texture of the water was changing from liquid to a more solid form.”

That dream, which Billie Buie describes above, was the inception of her novel Nags Way. (See Novel Excerpts, this issue.) Robert Olen Butler could have used it as an example of “cinema of the mind,” the examination of the common ground between fiction and film that appears in his book on writing, From Where You Dream. Billie’s dream has an establishing shot (dreamer standing in the breakers), a long shot (trees rising behind the dunes), and a close-up (the texture of the water). The cinema-like examples Butler uses come from the opening of Great Expectations: the establishing shot of the cemetery, the long shot of marsh and river, and finally, “the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all” that was Pip.

Billie’s ocean and Dickens’ “small bundle of a body” are images that a reader might skip over if not for the fact that something was terribly wrong with the water and that the bundle was fearful and shivering. These are what David Madden calls “charged images.” (See his Craft Session, “Images that Move,” this issue.) David, author of two story collections and nine novels, master teacher of fiction, and the self-described “last writer-in-residence on the Warner Brothers lot,” defines the charged image as the powerful one in a story, “the one that electrifies all other images, as does the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in The Great Gatsby, Huck and Jim on the raft on the river, the spider web in All The King’s Men…and when we look closely at each image in the novel we see that it moves; it is not static.”

Ah, stasis. When trying to get going on a fresh chapter or story, we writers sometimes find ourselves knee-deep in that condition. One cure, we’re told, is to stop writing, close our eyes, and make a mental movie for ourselves. The challenge then becomes one of focus. What is the charged image that will electrify all others and make the story move along? The fiction writers among us might let the poets be our guides: “an iron bed with a mattress caved in the middle that stinks of old fish” (Shirley Elias); “the red knotted ropes of hair that you cultivated in college” (Samara Scheckler); “that detached smile of granite, gold or jade”  (Pat Bresnahan); and “hard-cored female brown-tufted cattails anchored in fertile black muck” (Alexandra Burroughs). Also from this issue, the whole of poet Charlotte Wolf’s “Tsunami” takes us back to the troubled waters of Billie Buie’s disturbing dream.

Dream or nightmare, reality or imagination, or somewhere in between, a cinematic vision helps the reader share the writer’s world.

Elizabeth Lutyens teaches the Prose Master Class of the Great Smokies Writing Program. For more about her, go to www.elizabethlutyens.com

A few weeks ago I talked my wife out of us going to see the latest Harry Potter movie and going instead to a “small” indie movie called The Trip which I knew from the sound of it wouldn’t be in town longer than a weekend. It’s about a British actor who has been hired by the Observer to review upscale restaurants throughout the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales. He’d planned to travel with his much younger beautiful girlfriend and make a romantic trip out of it, but at the last minute she decides not to go, and after being turned down by everyone else he knows, he reluctantly asks another actor friend.

Together the two men drive through the English countryside, staying at picture-postcard inns, eating elaborate meals at chic restaurants, all the while bickering and when they’re not bickering they’re competing as to who can do the best Michael Caine impersonation.

It’s a funny movie. But honestly, I was as engaged as much by the landscape as I was by the characters. I was as interested in the fields they hiked in or the rolling countryside they drove through. In one scene the main character paces alone in front of a beautiful lake, but he’s on his cell phone with his girlfriend who’s being difficult, and he’s so engrossed in the conversation that he doesn’t notice the idyllic setting. In fact he seems to spend much of the movie on the cell phone with his girlfriend or his agent while the very places he’s supposed to be reviewing pass him by. And maybe there’s something to the notion that because the characters tend to be overlooking the beauty surrounding them, the audience is made even more aware of it.

Many people would find this too slow and too quiet a movie. (Thank the Lord my wife didn’t, although Harry Potter has already left town and she’s not happy about it). Anyway, there isn’t a lot of what we fiction teachers preach as that absolute necessity– compelling tension. Nothing big happens. These two mismatched characters drive around, eat, talk, sleep, then, after a week of this, return home. That’s about it. I never worried after the characters, as I always worry about Harry in Harry Potter. I was never on the edge of my seat, wondering who Voldemort will inhabit next.  Yet I couldn’t have enjoyed a movie more than I did The Trip. I was wholly, if gently, transported. Watching it, I entered that sweet solitude that good movies create, even in the most crowded of theaters.

I think one reason I’m drawn to quiet movies like these, movies that theaters might show for a week out of the goodness of their cinematic hearts, is because they give me permission. Permission not to have to dream up some earth shattering tension that’ll suck my readers in, although it sounds like Contagion is a quite an infectious ride. Permission not to come up with some irresistible “hook,” a metaphor I hate, suggesting that the reader is a mindless fish and fiction nothing more than glorified bait. Permission to relax and explore my characters’ world and the places they inhabit. Permission to follow the tensions, however small, wherever they may lead.

Tommy Hays is Executive Director of UNC Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program. He also teaches in UNCA’s Master of Liberal Arts Program. For more about The Pleasure Was Mine and other books by Tommy Hays, go to www.tommyhays.com.

Before I was old enough to know that I was actually a bluegrass fan, I fell in love with a saxophone player named Franc. With a “c.” It was 1981, and I was a freshman in the Brevard High School marching band. Franc was a senior, and he was going to be famous one day. I didn’t know that back then, but he did. Franc was a rather nerdy kid, skinny and pale with light brown hair and gray-blue eyes, but he had talent, and I had a thing for talent.

Here is my first memory of Franc: it was Friday night, at the close of the halftime show. The wind section moved in sync to form a blue semicircle, and then Franc emerged on the 50-yard line. He stood with his feet shoulder-width apart, his saxophone resting against the gold buttons of his jacket. The sky beyond was black. The stadium lights hummed and cast an odd glow on the field. Bending his knees and leaning back so far his hat fell to the ground, Franc pressed his lips to his mouthpiece and began to play “In a Sentimental Mood.” Franc was a natural performer, passionate and powerful. His white-gloved fingers caressed the keys, each graceful note rising above the field and swimming in the foggy light. When he finished playing, the entire stadium stood and cheered.

After the game, the musty instrument room was packed with kids reaching over and under each other to retrieve instrument cases from the shelves—a game of Twister with wind instruments. I took off my hat, shook out my long hair, and waited for the crowd to disperse. Then I stood on my tiptoes to retrieve my clarinet case. Wedging the instrument between my knees, I unscrewed the midsection, then the mouthpiece. Spit flew across my legs. I wiped my pants with the back of my sleeve, then unscrewed the reed and inspected it. Tiny flecks of mold dotted the underside. I placed the clarinet into its velvet case, and, just as I slid the case back on the shelf, Franc strode in. He tossed off his royal blue uniform jacket and leaned against a shelf.

“So, how’s it going?” he asked.

“Okay,” I said. “You sounded great.”

“Thanks.”

He dismantled his sax in one fluid movement.

“If you’ll hang on a sec, I’ll walk you out,” he said.

I looked at my white Nikes. The edges were stained lime green.

“Okay,” I said.

I leaned against the cool, concrete wall in the hallway until he appeared—wearing sunglasses, white t-shirt, and blue polyester pants. He slipped an arm over my shoulders.

“Jailbait!” his friends taunted him as we walked out.

He laughed and pulled me closer to him, squeezing my face against his musky shirt. A few weeks later, our football team made the conference playoffs, and the band rode on a chartered bus to Shelby, North Carolina. Late that night, on the way home, Franc and I pulled our jackets over our heads and leaning back our seats, we kissed, the taste of hot chocolate fresh on our tongues.

Thirty years have passed since that night, yet I still remember the salty sweet of the chocolate, the thick exhaust fumes rising through the open windows, the rumbling of the tires against the pavement, the muffled chatter of teenagers, the cool jacket buttons pressing against my cheek. And there is another night I remember just as clearly. Franc and I had been dating for a few months when Carolyn, the first chair percussionist, had a party for the band.

“I’ll be right back,” Franc told me as soon as we arrived at her house.

I sat on the creamy carpet while Carolyn arranged a tray of Kraft cheddar cheese and Ritz crackers on the coffee table. Carolyn had long, sleek, black hair and graceful, delicate hands. She slipped a stack of napkins next to the cheese tray, glided away to answer the doorbell when it rang, then drifted back with a set of wine glasses. Arnie, a teacher at the high school, popped open a bottle of pink Zinfandel.

“A toast!” he called, reaching his full glass high into the air. “To all of you!”

Arnie was in his mid-twenties, skinny and small-boned, with wiry brown hair that stuck out all over his head. Rumor had it that he was sleeping with the first chair flute player. She curled next to him on the sofa, and every few minutes she leaned forward and giggled into her knees, her long blonde hair falling over her shoulders and brushing his cheek.

Franc’s best friend, Ron, eased onto the carpet beside me and stretched out his legs. He playfully knocked my bare feet with his argyle socks. I smiled and fidgeted with the alligator on my shirt. Ron was the first chair clarinet and a brilliant scholar who would one day become a renowned public policy expert. First, though, he would begin tutoring me in algebra on Sunday afternoons, and one day, when we were finished with a particularly challenging problem, he would kiss me—not a passionate kiss, just a soft, wet one.

“You are smart,” he would tell me, though my algebra average was 52. “You just don’t yet know that you are.”

“Would you like some wine?” Ron asked me now.

“Sure,” I said.

Christy, a petite blonde flutist, was perched sideways on the sofa arm. She called across the room to Franc, and he idled over to her. He wore an un-tucked white polo, jeans, and sunglasses. A wineglass rested between his smooth forefingers. When he leaned into Christy and said something in her ear, she tossed back her head and laughed. Her bright blue eyes were highlighted with sparkly blue eye shadow and midnight blue mascara, so that when she closed and reopened her eyes it was like a wave was cresting, deep black-blue cresting into an azure peak, and then fading into indigo. Over her head, Franc caught my eye.

For a brief moment, I thought I saw something there, and then it was gone. Ron crossed his legs, took a sip of his Zinfandel, and with his free hand brushed Ritz cracker crumbs from my pants.

…

In early spring, after Franc and I had been dating about six months, the band had a picnic and square dance at Sherwood Forest, a gated golfing community just outside town. The dance was in an open-air structure designed to look like a barn. It smelled of damp pine. While the band played “Orange Blossom Special,” Franc and I do-si-doed and wheeled around and promenaded. Then, he pulled me aside and leaned against one of the wooden rails. His face was flushed and shining. He loosened the bandana around his neck and wrapped his fingers through the belt loop of my French cut jeans.

“So do you want get some air?” he asked.

We left through the side of the barn and walked hand-in-hand through the cool evening air. As the sun dipped behind the ridge above us, the sky fractured crimson and fuchsia. By the time we reached Franc’s Honda Civic, it was dark. Fat rain droplets hit the maple leaves, and then splattered onto the hood, forming flat, silver pools. A fiddle squealed in the distance, and then came a low growl, a rising, rumbling chorus of heels clattering against the barn floor.

“Let’s take a drive,” Franc said.

He pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward the main road, but just before we reached the highway he turned. The dirt road dead-ended at a mountain laurel thicket. Franc cut the engine and cracked the driver’s side window. Delicate blossoms swayed in the breeze like folded doilies, and the soft, sweet scent of laurel filled the car. And then the car lights went out.

Now, all these years later, the precise details of that evening have been obscured and altered by time, but here are the images that remain: the cold hard vinyl seats; Franc’s hard, scruffy cheek against my own. The ping of his jeans unsnapping. My long damp hair clinging to my face. The cloying scent of misty rain.

The next morning, in Introduction to Physical Science class, I passed a note to my best friend, Angela.

“We did it,” I wrote.

Down the table, she leaned forward and raised one dark, delicate eyebrow.

…

Like that night in Franc’s Honda, my memories of those last few weeks of school are reduced to a series of sounds and still pictures: a long, white prom dress with tiny flowers on the skirt and a low neck that showed off my suntanned chest; Franc in a tux with a narrow tie that hung awkwardly to one side of his neck, like a noose; Franc and me eating rib-eyes, medium rare, and drinking Cabernet at Stephen’s Pub in Asheville; Franc’s hand sliding beneath a gray cashmere sweater I had borrowed from mother and sprayed with Love’s Baby Soft perfume; Franc and me on the leather sofa in his dad’s apartment, Franc’s father at work, Dizzy Gillespie searing through the loudspeakers at our heads, the crinkly leather sticking to my bare back.

Then, at the end of May, just before graduation, all the school bands—jazz and concert and special orchestras—gave a combined final performance in the high school auditorium. I took my seat with the concert band, fifth clarinet from the right, and arranged my music on my stand. The lights were hot, and for a few moments, I saw only green spots in the audience. Finally, my eyes adjusted, and I could see the band director. As he raised his baton, I crossed my ankles, raised my clarinet to my lips, and with the dip of the conductor’s wrist, we began Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Moments later, the conductor drew two graceful semicircles in the air. Our performance was over, and I went to the back of the packed auditorium. Finally, after all the other bands had played, Franc stood alone on stage.

He wore khakis, a white button-down, a skinny black tie, and a maroon Members Only jacket. His saxophone rested against his hip as he waited to be introduced. Then, he nodded to the audience, lifted the sax to his lips, and crooned “What I Did For Love.” He closed his eyes, his narrow hips swaying to the beat, his head rocking gently back and forth. The stage lights reflected off his saxophone and bounced above his head, and though I was listening, I was also remembering.

“I can’t do this,” I had said to Ron the night he had kissed me over an open algebra book.

“Why not?” Ron asked.

“Because I’m in love with Franc,” I said.

Ron’s lips parted. He kept them there for a moment, open but silent, and then he closed them. He cocked his head to one side, then reached out and touched my arm.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said, moving his hand.

Franc hit a high note. It shot through the auditorium and shook the air. A brief pause, and a dip, lower, softer, and suddenly I saw Christy again, her blonde head thrown back, Franc’s bent knee leaning in toward hers, his cool even eyes meeting mine. And I knew.

When Franc finished playing, he paused dramatically, his mouth still closed around his mouthpiece, his head bent dramatically forward. And when he rose and opened his eyes, the audience members jumped to their feet. I hugged my knees into my chest, and I sobbed until the curtains closed and the auditorium cleared.

…

That August, Franc left for Appalachian State University to study music performance. At first, he still called me occasionally, on holidays or whenever he happened to be in town for a weekend, but eventually he stopped calling altogether, and I tore down the pinups of Sean Cassidy and Leif Garrett from my bedroom wall and tossed out all my back issues of Tiger Beat. For weeks on end, I lay languid in my bare room, writing sentimental poetry and listening to Eric Carmen records.

“All by myself… Don’t wanna live all by myself anymore,” Eric sang, and I thought he could see directly into my soul.

Finally, I emerged from my room, but I wasn’t quite the same. Many of my good friends had graduated with Franc, and I felt isolated. Formerly a good student, I was now unable to concentrate on academics. My grades dropped dramatically, and I became restless, rebellious, and insecure. I begged my parents to let me leave high school, and finally, after my sophomore year, they agreed to let me graduate at the end of my junior year and begin college a year early. Appalachian was the obvious choice. It was close by, and it didn’t require the math credits I was missing. I began school there just after my seventeenth birthday, and one night late in October, my phone rang.

“Hey,” Franc said.

I sucked in a deep breath.

“I heard you were here,” he continued, “and I was just wondering if you might want to come over to my apartment for dinner tonight.”

I was homesick and lonely, and I had just traded my meal card to buy five fifths of liquor, a bag of pot, and a gram of cocaine. And so I said yes. It was snowing when he picked me up at my dorm—heavy, wet flakes that settled on the sleeves of his leather jacket. Back at his apartment, we sat at the bar in his kitchen and ate sweet and sour chicken and jasmine rice with chopsticks.

“How have you been?” I asked.

“Good,” he said, his gaze fixed somewhere over my head.

“Do you ever talk to Ron?”

“Every now and then,” he said.

Franc tilted his head to one side, the one closest to the stereo, and made rapid, clicking noises with his tongue. Then he jiggled one leg up and down and drummed his fingertips across his thigh. His rapid movements had an odd, hypnotic effect on me, so that soon I too heard my voice folding and collapsing into the sultry strains of John Coltrane’s “Blue Train.” A little while later, Franc took me back to my dorm.

…

That was the last I saw of Franc until about a year ago. I was reading the local newspaper when I noticed an article on the bottom of the front page: “Local Musician Joins Marshall Tucker Band.” The article was continued on the back of section A. I flipped the paper over, and there he was—long, flowing shirt with pastel swirls across the chest and sleeves, sweaty hair falling into his closed eyes. He had a mustache, and a hint of a beard, and he gripped a microphone with both hands, his lips parted, a row of wide teeth above his wet tongue. His saxophone hung loose around his neck and rested in the crook of his rainbow-sherbet-colored arm.

I stared at the picture for a long time, struggling to recognize the boy-man I used to know. Then I held the paper up and turned it so that the fluorescent kitchen lights caught the glint of the saxophone, and in its reflection I saw a fourteen-year-old girl riding home from a band picnic:

It is almost midnight when we pull out of the dirt road, back onto the highway. Franc steers with his left hand, his right hand resting high on my thigh. Just before we turn into my driveway, I pull the rearview mirror toward me and roll my shirtsleeve across the cold glass to clear the fog. My eyes are burnished brown. I wet my forefinger and wipe the jet-black mascara from above my cheekbone. Then I spread my fingers wide, like combs, and run them through my chestnut hair.

Jennifer McGaha is a native of western North Carolina. She writes both nonfiction and creative nonfiction. She also teaches part-time at Brevard College and is creative nonfiction editor for The Pisgah Review.

About The Images That Remain—“The Images That Remain” is a piece from my growing collection of literary nonfiction.

Prologue

Gwyn found the dolphin struggling through shallows that morning, inching towards shore. The rising sun washed light over its back, staining it yellow. The dolphin stopped when Gwyn drew near, its wet eyes alert, watching her when she knelt beside it. Its body hummed, a searching that purred through her.

“Where are you going?” Gwyn touched its sand crusted skin, taking in the silver hue and old scars, the fresh hunk of flesh bitten out near its dorsal fin, and the small round bullet hole above its left pectoral. Gwyn jerked back when its flesh rippled under her hand. She stumbled to her feet and ran.

Her great aunt Camby stood in the driveway of the Big House, talking with Ernest Ray, whose truck idled as her aunt talked. Their faces were drawn with worry, at odds with the bright morning. Gwyn had the crazy notion as she ran across the yard that they already knew her bad news.

“Slow down and breathe,” said her aunt when Gwyn pounded up to the truck, gulping and stuttering about the beached dolphin. Color drained from her aunt’s face as Gwyn talked, leaving a chalky grimness almost as white as her hair.

“Hop in, Camby,” Ernest said. “My truck can handle the main beach path.” Gwyn followed her aunt around the truck. Her hand tingled where she’d touched the dolphin.

Aunt Camby stopped and pressed her fingers against her temple. “Get some towels out of the laundry room and a sheet too,” she said. Gwyn whirled and ran toward the kitchen. No one argued when Aunt Camby gave orders.

Her aunt met her at the back door with an opened sack in her hand. A green striped dress and hairbrush were inside; Gwyn saw them as she stuffed in the towels and sheet. “Not a word about this to anyone when they wake, or to Lida when she gets here.” Her aunt was brisk, all business, the way she was every morning at the store.

“You don’t want me to go? I can show you right where the dolphin is.” Gwyn followed her aunt outside, feeling a strange reluctance, almost fear, when she thought of touching the dolphin again. “Are you going to head it back out to sea?”

Gwyn looked down at her bare feet, feeling stupid and slow. She’d usually fight to be involved in a rescue like this, but something had sparked through her mind when she touched the dolphin, something that prickled under her skin and wasn’t leaving.

“Not this time.” Aunt Camby slammed the truck door and stuck her head out the window, the cords of her long neck popping. “Happy Birthday, Gwyn. We’ll take care of the dolphin. You enjoy your day.”

“It won’t spoil my day, even if it dies, I promise.” Gwyn jogged beside the truck as it backed out the drive, clenching her fists. This day would pass a lot faster if there were a dolphin rescue to talk about. If she pressed her hands on the dolphin again, made herself press and push it to safe water, surely the tingle and sting in her fingers would go away. Plus her aunt would tell her why rescuing a beached dolphin was such a big deal kind of secret.

“Cake and presents at noon.” Aunt Camby’s eyes grew black and fierce as she searched Gwyn’s face. “Not a word. I know I can count on you.”

Gwyn stopped and pressed her hand against her throat, feeling the damp scratch and stickiness of the dolphin, the stinging that sank into her skin. Ernest’s truck sped down the road, spraying sand when it veered onto the beach path. Maybe waves had lifted the dolphin back to deep water. Maybe it was swimming now, searching for its family. Maybe this birthday would pass more quickly, with less pain, than she thought.

Aunt Camby walked in the front door at noon, just in time to gather with them in the dining room and say the blessing. No one asked her where she’d been. Aunt Camby always headed to the store before most people were awake. She looked at Gwyn right after the blessing, a question in her eyes. Gwyn shook her head, a small tilt that no one else noticed. She knew how to keep secrets, even if they made no sense.

Gwyn blew out fourteen candles after lunch, looking away from the anxious smiles around her. No one mentioned Renny, but they all thought about him, she could feel the tension when the table fell silent for her birthday wish. They walked to the beach with her after lunch, this family she barely knew. She thought about the dolphin when she splashed into the water, how its dolphin family must be searching for it.

Chapter One

“Gwyn! What are you staring at? You’re missing some good rides.” Blake twisted to face her, keeping his surfboard pointed toward shore. He said something else, but a wave crashed between them, crushing his words. It was just as well. Conversations aren’t the easiest when you’re on autopilot, waiting for the day to pass.

“Okay, I’m watching.” Gwyn looked up, forcing a smile, but not for long. The water drew her today in a way she hadn’t felt before. Long shadows played beneath the surface. Shark size, dolphin size, they melted to nothing under the foamy surf. The tingle and sting in her fingers vanished in the cool wash, but Gwyn couldn’t stop thinking about the dolphin’s struggle that morning. How would dolphins look for a lost one? Did they mind the darkness? Water slipped over her skin in rushes that pulled her deeper, where the sand shelf she followed sloped into the ocean.

“Look up,” Blake called. “This one’s yours!” He whistled, pointing to a wave swelling in front of her, a monster wave she wasn’t expecting.

Gwyn whipped her surfboard around, but not fast enough. The wave crashed over her, pushing her board into a nosedive and flipping her under. Sand grated her arm as she hit bottom. She clamped her lips tight and thrashed forward, but the wave tumbled her, pulling and shoving with relentless force. She hit sand again, skidding and sinking under the awful weight of the ocean.

She rolled off the sand shelf, into a cold current that pressed her down and sucked her seaward. She needed air. She tried to swim, but her strength was nothing in the enormous rush of water that carried her. Gwyn narrowed her thoughts to keep from thrashing in panic. Facts, think of facts. Riptides can spit bodies out as quickly as they suck them under. Your lungs hold more air than you think. Lots more.

Something swirled beside her and stayed until she looked at it. Renny’s face wavered through dimness, eyes wide and searching. He stretched his thin arms out, unperturbed by the current, waiting, waiting for something. Her chest was almost exploding but the current pinned her, a waterfall of force.

A shadow passed in front of Renny and strange sounds grew: chirps and whistles that swelled into a chorus of voices that weren’t voices she’d ever heard. The water was different here, thick with the calls of shadowy creatures that blocked Renny from sight. Something rammed her back as a dark shape skimmed over her, clicking and roiling the water above until wavelets feathered over her chest and arms. She spiraled upward, kicking out of the current with frantic energy. She surfaced in a calm spot, beside a sun-flooded sandbar.

She was far down the beach from her aunts and cousins, who jumped up and down in the shallows yelling at Blake. He was riding the monster wave, milking it all the way to shore. The kids were screaming now, waking Aunt Camby, who sat up and stared in her direction, wisps of white hair blowing loose from her scarf.

Gwyn looked down, straining to see beyond the pale blur of her legs. A shadow, longer than she was tall, circled toward her. She lunged to the sandbar with a last, panic-driven rush, scrambling to the center of it where the water was calf-deep. Something surfaced beyond the breakers, a rolling crescent that sank from sight as soon as she glimpsed it.

She dropped to her knees, hunching over and gulping air; waiting for her body to quit shaking. Renny had followed her to the Outer Banks. She’d been sure he’d stay in Asheville, sure she was free of him, at least for the summer. She scooped sand and squeezed it in her fists, trying to block Renny’s face from her mind, but it was useless. Sand streamed between her fingers until her fists were empty. The pain that had blasted a hole through her this day last year, the pain she fled a week ago, wished away at noon, settled back in her body.

Renny was dead, no matter how many times she relived that day in her mind, altering what happened. A car backed into the street on this day last year, no big deal, except it was her birthday, and her brother Renny was flying downhill, stealing a ride on her new bike while she told Ferris Moony off for making fun of Renny’s stutter. The driver didn’t see him until Renny smashed into the car’s rear bumper, his body sliding over the trunk and beyond like he was skimming over ice. He slammed into a stone pillar that snapped his neck and dropped him to the ground.

She’d rethought that day, changing it a million times. Except for the way Renny’s fingers twitched when she held them, the way the ambulance wailed until her mind split open and someone pried her fingers loose.

A wave rushed over Gwyn’s hips, reminding her how fast the tide rolled in. A wide stretch of water ran between her sandbar and shore. She needed to swim across it before the current grew too strong. She estimated the distance, comparing it to a swimming pool. Two laps, maybe a little more. The panic trembling through her eased. It was a good trick to know, thinking about facts, concrete things that pushed fear, or Renny, or both, from her thoughts.

“Hey, Gwyn, are you okay?”

Blake swam toward her sandbar, frog-legging the last few yards as he stared at her scrunched-up figure.

“I didn’t see you fall. Did you lose your balance or bail out of that wave? It was a rough one.”

Gwyn stopped hugging her chest, hoping she hadn’t been rocking the way she sometimes did when she thought about Renny too much.

“I thought everyone was yelling about my great ride,” said Blake, “but they were really yelling that you’d taken a tumble and disappeared.” He paused, treading water and watching her. “Are you hurt?”

She lurched to her knees.

“The wave caught me wrong, no big deal,” she said. “Tide’s coming in fast.”

As if Blake, Mr. Outer Banks himself, wouldn’t know exactly what the tide was doing.

She stood, took a ragged few steps, and dove off the sandbar. Did Blake think he was rescuing her?

She swam fast, trying to out-swim the sounds that pressed against her every time her head dipped under, calls and clicking that made her gasp for breath. Blake caught up with her when she touched bottom. The calls faded into pounding surf. Blake pointed to the side of her face.

“You really did get creamed by that wave. Does it hurt?”

Gwyn touched her cheek and chin, aware of the stinging as she touched it. A hand-sized streak on her shoulder was scraped raw. Her hip ached.

“So how much can I bleed before sharks notice?” She forced a laugh, trying to joke about it. She walked faster, holding her breath until the water was knee deep and underwater shadows shrank to minnow size. A shark had bitten the chunk of flesh out of the dolphin she’d found. Ernest Ray had told her that fact when she described the beached dolphin to them that morning.

If her face looked anything like her shoulder, she needed to put a bag over her head. She turned her scraped side away from Blake. Waves winked around them, splaying dots of light over their bare skin. Blake was the most beach-colored person she’d ever seen, with his sun-dark skin and sandy hair. His eyes changed a lot, but they were always some shade between sky and ocean, depending on his mood. A gold hoop pierced one of his ears.

Aunt Camby hadn’t said anything about working with him at the store when she asked Gwyn to spend the summer on Nags Way Island, but he’d been there her first day at The Sir Walter Raleigh store, looking as surprised as she was, and just as suspicious.

“Show Gwyn the ropes,” her aunt had told him. He’d veered from jokes to intense instructions all week, until his thick Banks accent, the vowels that puckered his lips into a circle, actually sounded normal.

“It’s ugly.” Blake peered at her shoulder, squinting with mock concentration. “But not shark bait.”

Blake was different at the beach, a lot more relaxed without inventory sheets and Gwyn’s nervous questions. He’d slipped on and off his surfboard like a seal all afternoon, showing her tricks she couldn’t do, even when he gave her a boost with his knee in shallow water.

Gwyn’s skin crawled with confusion, stinging where she was scraped, tingling when her arm brushed Blake’s. She was almost glad to see her cousin Allie, who met them on the beach. Allie was sixteen, the same as Blake. She talked about high school with him a lot, opening a gulf between Gwyn’s life and theirs that felt wider than two years.

“You missed the dolphins,” Allie said. “They surfaced over there but I haven’t seen them since.” She pointed beyond the sandbar.

“Eweww, Gwyn.” Allie stared at Gwyn’s shoulder. “That’s disgusting. You should put something on it.”

“I feel fine, if you’re wondering,” Gwyn said. “It looks worse than it really is.”

“I think she’s fine too.” Blake stepped back and looked Gwyn over. “Except for salt water up her nose, scrapes, a limp, and a pulverized shoulder.”

Gwyn straightened her gait, wincing at the pain that shot through her hip.

“You were swimming fast across that dip,” Blake said. “A shark would have given up if he’d seen you.”

Gwyn glanced at him, looking for sarcasm. If he made fun of her, she’d make him sorry he ever tried it. Anger might stop the tremors coursing through her. Taking deep breaths wasn’t helping.

Blake’s eyes narrowed with the same hooded curiosity he’d shown all week at the store. “I mean it. I was barely keeping up with you.”

“You’re a regular fish in the water,” Gwyn said. “I could never out-swim you.”

“None of us could.” Allie danced a few steps ahead, turning to face them. “You could be a lifeguard, Blake, when you get tired of the store.”

“Nags Way doesn’t have lifeguards.” Blake looked up and down the shell- and driftwood-littered beach. “There aren’t enough people here to need one.”

They were still at the far end of the beach, near an overgrown path that wound through the dunes in the direction of Aunt Camby’s house.

“I’m going inside.” Gwyn veered toward the weedy path. “To tend these scrapes. Don’t worry about my shoulder, Allie. I’ll find a bandage so you don’t have to look at it.”

“I’ll go with you,” Blake said. “I think there’s a first-aid kit in the kitchen.”

Gwyn hesitated, shifting from one foot to the other as she scowled at the hot sand. She needed to be alone for a while, to stop the panic fluttering through her gut. Renny’s face still swam through her mind with painful clarity.

…

“Sorry, Gwyn, I didn’t know you were upset,” said Allie. “I’ll help Blake look for Band-Aids while you clean yourself up. I bet you need to check some private places, if you know what I mean, for scrapes. You don’t want company for that, do you?”

“Right.” Heat pulsed over Gwyn’s face. Sometimes Allie made her feel twelve instead of fourteen. Private places.

Gwyn led Blake and Allie through sea oats and dunes to the first line of twisted oaks. The trees were short and dense, holding welcome shade and cooler sand beneath them for the long walk to Aunt Camby’s house. The steep roof poked through thick oak crowns. No wonder everyone here called it the Big House. It was visible from every direction. It was the only house at this end of Nags Way Island, unless you counted Fenner’s tiny house by the store.

The Big House was old, built with a wide center hall that connected the front door with the back. When they reached the back door, they heard Lida haggling with someone on the front porch. Lida worked at the Big House, using the large kitchen for her bakery business during the day and cooking dinner for everyone at night.

“I’m watching all day,” Lida said, “but don’t expect me to see what isn’t here.”

Lida was talking to two men, her short bulk blurred by the screen door and shadows in the wide front hall. Lida talked with anyone who passed by the Big House, fishing for gossip about Northenders, the islanders who lived in Trotsby, Nags Way’s only town.

Allie grabbed Blake’s arm and barred Gwyn with the other. “Don’t let them see us.” Allie’s eyes gleamed. “I love it when Lida gets worked up over something. If it’s juicy gossip, I can spill it at dinner before she does and drive her crazy.”

Gwyn might have joined in; Lida could blow the smallest event into a soap opera, telling every detail in a broad dialect that made Blake’s accent sound mild, but Gwyn was still rattled by the current that had caught her, still shaky from seeing Renny. She ached beyond the scrapes on her face and arms. The air around her felt too clear, so focused it hurt her eyes.

“You listen,” Gwyn said. She slipped inside, easing the screen door shut so Lida wouldn’t hear her. She sidled along the wall and ducked into a back hallway, toward the small bathroom there.

Her face was scratched, but it wasn’t bleeding. A bruise darkened her hip. Gwyn splashed water on her face and arms, wincing when it hit her scraped shoulder. She touched her back where something had thumped her, knocking her free of the rip current. A spasm of fear shot up her back when she touched it.

Allie stood in the kitchen doorway with a fistful of Band-Aids when Gwyn came out. She put her finger to her lips. Gwyn darted across the hall and edged toward the kitchen door, staying in shadows. Lida and the two men were visible through the front screen door.

“We need some solid proof, some good evidence,” one of the men said. “Queenbee covers her tracks, but there has to be something here we can use.”

Lida set her hands on her hips the way she did when she grew agitated. She had a temper that could flare at any irritation.

“Don’t get on a high horse about this, Lida,” said the older of the two men. He looked nice, the kind of dad who’d remember you and say hi on the street. “You said you’d help if any wrong-doing was involved. You know what’s at stake for my family, and you know better than most what a tyrant Queenbee can be.”

Lida nodded but she moved in front of the screen door, blocking the door handle. The man eyed her firm stance.

“Tip Peterson shot a dolphin yesterday,” he said. “Several of them charged his nets, starving or crazy, he didn’t know which, but he had to protect his catch. Queenbee was waiting for him when he docked, wanting to know if he’d netted a dolphin. How she gets her information nobody knows, but she’s meddled in other people’s business for too long. Lives have been ruined because of it.”

Lida was quiet for so long that Gwyn slipped deeper in the shadows, afraid Lida might turn and see her. Gwyn held her breath, willing them to keep talking about the dolphin.

“Did he tell her he’d shot one?” Lida’s voice was strained.

“Of course not. That’s what I’m telling you. She had no right to snoop after him, acting like his catch was her business. Besides, the dolphin got away. Tip’s a terrible shot.”

Lida snorted. “Whose business is whose? Tip knows he shouldn’t be shooting at dolphins. I don’t like snoops either, not one bit. Tell me plain out what you’re after and I’ll tell you if it’s here. This talk of evidence this and business that is wearing on my nerves. I’ve got five chocolate cakes to finish today.”

Allie faked a disappointed pout and leaned close to Gwyn’s ear. “Lida’s getting worked up, but no good gossip. Let’s get out of here before she sees us. You can put your Band-Aids on at the beach.”

Gwyn hesitated, torn between listening and getting out of Lida’s sight. Gwyn had been on the island a week, but Lida still watched her with small suspicious eyes, giving Gwyn the same treatment she doled out to anyone who wasn’t a Banker. Creeping up the hall with her back pressed to the wall was more than Gwyn wanted to explain right now.

Blake stood in the kitchen, waving a large square of gauze at her. He made Gwyn sit down while he fixed her shoulder. Allie stayed by the door, fidgeting between them and the conversation outside. Blake was efficient, rubbing Gwyn’s lower arm to confuse her nerve endings, then applying antibiotic and gauze to her oozy scrape. He taped the edges with adhesive he’d already cut into strips. Jolts of warmth shot through Gwyn’s arm when he touched her.

“That’s as good as a doctor would do,” she said, eyeing the bandage.

“Boy Scout training fools them every time,” he said. “I got asked to work in the emergency room last week.” She rolled her eyes at the grin on his face. He had a goofy sense of humor sometimes, but she felt more relaxed than she had all day. Blake repacked the first aid kit and slid it in a cabinet.

Gwyn’s counselor in Asheville had told her this day would be hard. Post-traumatic stress, she’d called it, pain that would ease as time passed, but Gwyn never told her about seeing Renny after he died. It was okay to get help with the fury that shook her days after Renny died, the despair that left her unable to talk with friends, but no one could tell her what was real and what wasn’t. Renny was still around, whether she wanted him to be or not.

“Quick, they’re talking about coming inside,” Allie said. “Lida will call us snoops forever if we don’t get out of here.”

They ran across the yard to the main beach path. Gwyn glanced down at a trickle of blood rolling from a knee scrape. “Where are those Band-Aids, Allie? I need one.”

“Oh no,” Allie said. “I must have dropped them in the kitchen.”

Blake turned back to the house.

“Hold on.” Gwyn grabbed the back of his shirt. “I’ll go back. I’m the only one with a good excuse for Band-Aids.”

“Good idea,” Allie said. “We’ll see you at the beach.” She eyed Gwyn’s hand until Gwyn let go of Blake’s shirt.

Lida and the two men were in Aunt Camby’s study, an odd place to look for anything. There wasn’t much there except a few chairs, an old post office desk, and a fireplace. Gwyn crept as close to the study as she dared, but they weren’t talking about the dolphin anymore.

“I don’t understand this sudden interest in something you’ve known about for years, Luther.” Lida scolded with familiar irritation. It was the same tone Gwyn used to take with Renny when his buzzing curiosity drove her crazy.

Lida’s next words knifed through Gwyn. “Digging up the past is no better than digging up graves. You’ll find something rotten that maybe wasn’t rotten before.”

Band-Aids littered the floor just inside the kitchen doorway. Gwyn slunk into the kitchen and raked them up. Leaving the past behind was her whole reason for coming to Nags Way Island this summer. Seeing Renny underwater was probably some weird oxygen deprivation thing, something that wouldn’t happen again. Renny was in Asheville, drifting through pools of grief that would swamp her house forever. She peeled a Band-Aid and stuck it on her knee.

A desk drawer slammed and one of the men grunted. “We’ve found gold.” His voice was quiet, but there was no mistaking the excitement in it.

A movement flickered on the back porch, so fast she almost missed it. Renny hovered at the screen door, his small shadow barely more than a shiver in the sunlight. He beckoned her, dancing back and forth on the top step. Frustration welled in his dark eyes when she shook her head. She crunched her body as small as she could, fighting the panic that shook her. A thin mewling rose, a damaged kitten sound that she didn’t know was hers until one of the men spoke.

“I thought you said everyone was down at the beach this afternoon.”

“It’s the cat, as tired of your suspicions as I am,” said Lida. “It’s a good thing no one else is home to hear you, or they’d think I was talking to lunatics. Stop pawing through those letters and put them back.”

“Suspicious is right,” Luther said. “If there’s proof here, you’re standing between us and justice.”

Renny’s shadow disappeared.

Gwyn rolled to her feet and edged along the wall to the back door, whispering to herself that Renny was gone, gone, gone. He never appeared where others could see him. She needed to get out before Lida caught her listening to a conversation that was obviously some secret.

“Someone’s at the back door, Lida.”

Footsteps slammed down the hall as Gwyn fled across the yard. Renny stood by a hedge, motioning her between two hydrangeas before he melted from sight.

Gwyn darted after him, terrified but certain that he’d help her hide. She didn’t know what Lida would do if she saw her. Gwyn balled her shaking fingers into a fist. If anyone suspected she’d seen Renny they’d question her sanity. She’d never get past her grief if that happened.

She crawled under a holly, gasping as leaf needles jabbed through her bandage. She crept behind the hydrangeas in the direction Renny had run. Footsteps crunched behind her. She ran toward the vegetable garden that flanked a wall separating the yard from the trees and dunes beyond. Something scrambled over the wall as a man burst through the shrubs. Gwyn crouched between Lida’s yellowing sugar pea tents.

“I told you, it’s the cat,” called Lida from the porch. “He hates strangers.”

The man stood a few moments by the hedge. He was a lot younger than Luther, but the hunter’s concentration in his eyes sent a chill through Gwyn. She watched his brown shoes through the leaves, gathering herself to bolt.

“Come back inside,” said Lida, her voice resigned. “if you’re so sure you’ve found something. I’ll be shocked if it amounts to more than a hill of beans.”

Their voices faded and the back door slammed. Renny peered over the wall, straight at Gwyn. His face wasn’t as tortured here as it had been in Asheville. He was small, insubstantial under the trees. The longer Gwyn stared at him, the less frightened she felt. His eyes were enormous; two caves that had petrified her in Asheville, but they weren’t so despairing here.

He turned toward the woods, looked back at her once, and wavered out of sight. Gwyn crept to the wall, staying low. The wall was so old that its plaster was pale yellow. Shells and sea glass were embedded along the length of it, glowing in the afternoon sun. Gwyn inched a wooden gate open enough to squeeze through. She closed the gate and wedged a stick in the latch to jam it. It wouldn’t stop the men if they came back outside, but at least it would slow them down. The beach path everyone used ran alongside the wall, leading east toward the ocean, and west toward the Trotsby road and sound beyond.

…

There was no sign of Renny on the path. Gwyn ran toward the beach, toward the crowd of relatives where Renny would never show his shadowy face. She stooped below the wall until a dune rose on her right, blocking any view from the Big House. Dunes rose everywhere on Nags Way, great shaggy humps covered with grasses near the beach, crowned with trees further inland that rose in height until they towered over Roanoke Sound.

A bird swooped over her head, a tropical flash of yellow and green that disappeared into the trees behind her. She crouched down, spooked by its sudden flight. She’d flushed birds before when she trotted down the path, but none like this one. It dropped a melody into the air around her, a mix of whistle and song that made her sure she’d forgotten something important. She glanced over her shoulder. The path behind her was empty. She retraced her steps, listening for another whistle. She’d heard the bird before, but she couldn’t remember where. She stopped when she reached the gate again. Renny stood by a broken cedar, watching her. Amber sap, thick as blood, oozed from a split branch beside him. She backed away, jumping when a dry twig snapped under her foot.

A second whistle broke through the air with a thumping rhythm that no bird would make. It was Fenner; she knew it before she saw his short stocky form through the underbrush. Renny wavered into nothing but shimmery heat waves. Gwyn rushed past the broken cedar, calling Fenner’s name.

Fenner waved to her as he tucked a white shirt into the baggy pants he always wore. His brown shoes scuffed the sandy path. He might have been as old as Aunt Camby or he might not have been; it was hard to tell. He had the same wrinkles and weathered skin, but his hair was silvery brown and wavy, thick and twiggy as a nest. He was the night watchman for the store, but he spent all night drinking wine instead of watching anything. Her aunt never seemed to notice the sweet, fruity smell that clung to Fenner in the evening. He ate dinner with them at the Big House most nights, oblivious to Lida’s clucking disapproval every time he topped his wine glass off.

“Whoa there, Gwyn, I thought the birthday party was on the beach.”

“Are you headed that way? May I walk with you?” Gwyn swallowed, struggling to hold her voice steady.

“Of course, of course. I’m honored to escort the birthday girl.” Fenner rubbed his eyes, a brisk twist with each fist, but he couldn’t hide the sadness that rose as his gaze lingered over the wall by the wooden gate. The plaster there was pocked with holes where shells and glass had been torn out. Gwyn hadn’t noticed it before.

“Strange, but I thought I heard you calling me,” he said. “What brings you up to the Big House on such a momentous day? I was sure you’d be frolicking in the sea most of the day. Very healthful activity, especially on birthdays.” Fenner took her elbow, gentle and courtly and as outdated as he always was.

“A wave tumbled me.” She pointed to her bandaged shoulder. “I needed some first aid stuff.”

“Yes indeed, the waves here can carry quite a punch. Don’t swim much myself.” Fenner touched his neck, clucking over her scraped shoulder. He frowned at the broken cedar, holding his fingers at his throat.

Hoof beats sounded in the open stretch of dunes and a horse trotted into view. Gwyn thought at first it was one of the wild Outer Banks ponies that roamed the island but this horse was taller, moving with heavy-muscled speed up the path.

“Gwyn, my dear, step behind the shrubbery a moment while I examine this curious equine. We don’t want to startle the poor creature.”

Fenner’s face tightened as he steered Gwyn behind a thick stand of cedar. The horse headed toward them, disappearing for a moment behind the slope of a tree-covered dune. Gwyn heard a faint scraping and screeking, the sound trees make rubbing against each other on a windy night.

Fenner cocked his head, listening and muttering at the same time. “What mischief is this on an already difficult day?”

He glanced at Gwyn and flung a handful of sand over the cedar she stood behind, only it wasn’t quite sand. It flashed and settled over her face, cool and light as sea mist. Gwyn blinked in the brightness of it, gripping a branch to steady herself. She popped her eyes wide to see better.

Fenner jumped toward the gate, really jumped, faster than an old man could move. He pushed the gate latch, but the stick Gwyn had shoved in it held firm. The horse rounded the curve of dune, snuffling the path Gwyn had walked over. Every part of the horse moved in silver and duskiness; hints of all the colors in the world in shadow form. Its creaking filled the air. The horse was made of driftwood, dozens of pieces smoothed and flowing together into sinew and muscle. The wood looked like living skin from a distance, except for the horse’s forehead. Thick splinters rose from a gouge there, spiking outward into wicked points.

The horse paused and sniffed the cedar. Gwyn was sure the horse knew she was there, all animals knew things like that, but it passed the cedar and danced toward Fenner, pointing its spiked forehead at Fenner’s chest. It tossed its head as if the gouge there was hurting.

Gwyn stared at Fenner, clamping her lips tight and inching backward. One second he was normal, the next his clothes curled into dried leaves, then nothing. His body, from his waist down, was covered in thick curling fur. What she’d assumed were his brown shoes were leathery hooves, broad and almost as flat as feet. He was a faun. She’d seen pictures enough to know it, but this was no fairytale. Fenner’s legs were as solid and real as hers and strangely normal in the tangy breeze blowing up from the beach.

Fenner looked over the wall at the Big House, more wistful than panicked. “Stay where you are, Gwyn,” he said. “You’re well hidden.”

He trotted away, down the seaward path. The horse wheeled and followed him, passing Gwyn in a rush of cedar-tinged air. It lowered its head when it got near Fenner, keeping its spiked forehead pointed at Fenner’s back.

Fenner passed under a spreading live oak whose branches stretched over the path and garden wall. Two legs swung down from the upper branches, then a face, shadowy and intent, but unmistakably Renny’s.

Fenner glanced at Renny’s legs and turned back to Gwyn, concern flickering over his face. She thrashed out of the brush when she saw Renny, slowed by confusion. Renny didn’t let anyone but her see him. At least that’s what she’d thought.

The horse stopped, looking from Fenner to Gwyn with troubled eyes. It turned, pointing its splinters at Gwyn. Fenner sighed, a sad, resigned breath. He vaulted onto the horse’s back and turned it away from Gwyn. He reached up and pulled Renny down when the horse passed under the tree. Renny tumbled onto the horse’s rump behind him. The horse broke into a gallop, outpacing Gwyn’s desperate run.

Gwyn’s breath tore her lungs, starved for air as she ran through hot sand. The riders crossed an open stretch between dunes, the horse slowing to a shambling trot, looking like nothing more than a shaggy island pony. Fenner could have been anyone, riding toward the beach in rumpled pants with a boy bouncing behind.

They disappeared into the dunes. She almost caught them at the edge of the beach. The horse paused, raking sand with its front hooves and dancing to the side, fighting the way Fenner pulled its neck away from the water.

Allie and Blake were in the water, their backs to the dunes. Allie held a conch, playing keep-away from Blake. She laughed and fell against him when he grabbed it. She snatched it and flung it into deeper water. Blake dove after it just as the horse galloped into the surf, straight toward Allie. She turned, her mouth opening in silent shock. Fenner turned the horse before it trampled her, but it knocked her over, sending a wedge of spray in the air. A wave crashed through the spray, swallowing Allie and foaming over the horse’s chest as it plunged out of sight. Blake surfaced, holding the conch shell high.

“Allie went under!” Gwyn smashed into the water, pointing where Allie had fallen. Blake dove again and surfaced a few seconds later, hauling Allie’s limp body from the water.

Billie Harper Buie grew up in eastern North Carolina, but has lived in Asheville almost 25 years. She has published several short stories and received the 2007 Thomas Wolfe Fiction prize for her short story, “Shining Rock Wilderness.” Nags Way is her first novel.

About Nags Way–My first real job landed me on the Outer Banks for two years as part of a land use planning team for Manteo, on Roanoke Island. A community listening project was part of our job and I was appointed the head listener, mainly because everyone else was busier and better at graphics than I was. The first person I interviewed was a gray-haired, chap-faced fisherman who showed up barefooted and convinced me that I’d tumbled into a passing way of life that wouldn’t exist much longer. Writing Nags Way all these years later, I still hear his voice, the improbable Elizabethan cadence and absolute belief that there is what Tolkien calls “faerie,” a realm on this earth veiled from sight but affecting us in ways that are ordinary and magical at the same time.

Abe picked at his supper. A thousand times he’d eaten his wife’s stuffed cabbage and never given it a second thought. Now he was sickened. Squat, green-eyed Essie sat opposite in their tiny Bronx kitchen, oblivious. She was spitting out complaints in a litany so familiar, the words vaporized: the crooked butcher, the nosy neighbor, the impudent kids on the block; all conspiring to make her day insufferable. He sat stiffly, eyes on his plate, choking an urge to tell her to shut up.

“What’s the matter, Abe?” she said as she cleared the plates. “All of a sudden you don’t like my cooking?”

He got up and walked past her, toward their living room. “Just leave me alone,” he said. She shrugged.

After she tramped off to her latest night class, watercolors, Abe fell asleep in front of the TV. He glared when she came home and shut it off, rousing him. He muttered under his breath before climbing into bed.

“Abe,” Essie said after she’d gotten into bed with him, a bed they’d shared since they’d gotten married nearly fifty years before, “I get so tired of your moods, like the world owed you. Why don’t you grow up already?” He rolled on his side and went to sleep.

The living room of their three-room apartment faced the street, while the kitchen window looked out over the alley, crisscrossed with clotheslines strung to the adjacent building. Beneath the window there was an unused icebox, the wood polished from years of use as a window seat. For grandchildren if they ever got them. An old gas range sat opposite their two-seat Formica kitchen table.

Their living room furniture was upholstered in muted velvet, purchased when they moved in more than forty years before. Along the walls, Essie had hung stock Gauguin prints, de rigueur at one time in a lower middle-class Jewish home with pretensions of culture. Sometimes Abe wanted to rip them off the wall. An empty mezuzah was fastened to the front door frame.

When Abe awoke, with a start, long before the winter sunrise, Essie was snoring. His stomach still felt quivery. He rose quickly and pulled on his pants and shirt, nearly forgetting his belt. The front door shut with barely a click.

The subway downtown was nearly empty. He looked at the Daily News, skimming over the headline splashed over the front page about President Johnson’s latest war speech. He turned to the sports page, but spring training was still a month away, so he stopped reading and folded the paper under his arm. He felt himself dozing off. Twice he’d fallen asleep on the train, missing his stop, waking up in Queens. Then it was another 15 cents for the ride back. He willed himself awake.

The sky was growing light when Abe got off. He’d once been distinguished-looking, six-foot, mustache, the poise of an athlete. His hair had turned white overnight when he was 17 without apparent cause. He looked more German than Slavic, more gentleman than peasant in the Jewish world where German Jews looked down on the waves of Eastern European Jews who emigrated decades later. But he was a Russian Jew—or Polish, depending on when you lived there—first generation, as was Essie.

His stomach finally settled and he was hungry. Moshe, Abe’s business partner, sat on the next stool in the diner on 14th Street where they always met, and he rolled his eyes as he sipped his tea. Abe was putting a piece of grilled ham into his mouth.

To the counterman, Abe had said “emaneggs,” twice, because the man just stared the first time. Abe’s usual Danish and coffee were already set out on the counter. He’d pushed the pastry aside.

“So, what’s new, you disapprove,” he said, waving his fork in Moshe’s direction. Moshe turned on his stool. “I order treife and you give me that look. It ain’t gonna kill me, so lay off.”

“It just pains me to see a Jew who is not ignorant, just stupid,” Moshe said. “A man who throws away so much. Strictly kosher I know you ain’t, and haven’t I kept my mouth shut? But Abie, this is pig, pig, Abie, and this is too much.”

Abe chewed and swallowed. “If this God of yours is so interested in what I’m eating,” he said, his voice edging higher, “how come everywhere you look people are starving to death?” He took a gulp of coffee. “Kosher,” he said. “Big deal. Like a sheep you follow directions.”

He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “This is America, Moshe, 1964. We’re not living in the shtetl. These days everything is sanitary down to the last hair on a pig’s ass.”

“There’s more to kosher than what you eat,” Moshe said. “Keeping kosher makes you think. Makes you stop for a second and pay attention. And you, the way you fly off the handle; it’d do you some good. Anyway, don’t you got any respect?” He paused to blow his nose into a white handkerchief. “Okay, okay,” he sighed. “You don’t have to remind me how I’m wasting my breath. Last thing I need is a fight with you first thing in the morning. At least you’re on time.” Abe reached for his overcoat.

“You missed a spot,” Moshe said, and handed Abe another napkin. Abe scowled and went over his mouth again. “Okay,” Moshe said, “you got it.” He smiled. “See what I mean?”

As they walked into the frigid air, Abe muttered, “Kosher, smosher, who cares what they kill or how they kill it, so long as it’s good and dead. I got enough on my mind without worrying about kosher.”

Moshe sighed.

Moshe was half a head shorter than Abe and twice as thick, a peasant who looked it, Russian or Polish depending on when you lived there. He took three steps to every two of Abe’s and had to pant to keep up as they walked down Second Avenue, cut over on St. Mark’s Place to Avenue A opposite Tompkins Square Park to the novelties store they’d owned together for more than ten years. It was hardly more than a counter, a tiny office, and a few shelves with a meager assortment of merchandise—cheap gloves, scarves, socks, and a few second-rate toys. If you found yourself suddenly in need of a number 2 pencil, a spool of thread, or a little pad of paper, you could always go to The Dime Store—“Nothing More Than A Dime,” not strictly true since the number of dimes wasn’t specified.

When they reached the door, Moshe said, “And another thing. You at least got a family. Me, I got to do everything by myself since my Ada died. And no kids, either.”

Abe said nothing. He opened the door with a sharp push. So how can old Moshe believe in God?

On that Sunday the cold invaded every tenement on the Lower East Side, driving the inhabitants uptown to museums, cross-town to the movies, or simply onto the subway to find warmth. Only children seemed oblivious, playing their games on stoops and down alleys. Through the front window Abe watched a group of boys pitching pennies against a building wall. Still they use pennies, he thought, and laughed.

“What’re you laughing about?” Moshe squawked. “Why don’t they find something to do instead of loafing around?”

“Just thinking,” Abe said. “Nobody in here, anyhow.”

The morning moved slowly while Moshe dozed in their tiny office and Abe sat at the counter reading the rest of his paper. The sun was in his eyes when their first customers came through the door, three wiry black kids, new immigrants.

“Mister, mister, how much?” one of them asked in a Jamaican lilt, pointing to a hand-carved chess set on the uppermost shelf. It had been there for years, kept out of sight so as not to remind the partners of the fight they’d had when Abe had let a salesman talk him into purchasing it.

“What we got,” Moshe had said, thumping his fist on the counter, “is cheap stuff, you understand? Nobody around here is going to be interested in a goddam hand-carved, expensive chess set!”

And Abe had said under his breath, “We’ll see, we’ll see.” Now he reached up and looked at the tag. “For you maybe it’s too much–$18. And what do you want with a chess set, anyway?”

The boy said nothing. Abe saw movement in the corner of his eye and looked up just in time to see the other two boys run out, each clutching a pink Spaldeen rubber ball. Abe gasped with surprise. The neighborhood kids regularly came to the store to buy such balls, but no kid had run off with one, or if he had, neither Abe nor Moshe had seen him. Abe felt betrayed. The third boy, the decoy, fled through the door.

“Hey, you,” Moshe yelled, “Come back here!” He ran outside, shaking his fist. The boys disappeared around the corner. He came back in and slammed the door.

“It’s no use,” Abe said. “We’re too old. I didn’t even see those other kids come in. Anyway, it ain’t much, just a couple of rubber balls. What’d they cost us, twelve, thirteen cents?”

Moshe looked up. “You maybe are too old–letting that schvartze pull such a trick,” he said through tightened lips. “Maybe a ball today, who knows what tomorrow.”

“Don’t talk that way, “Abe said. “Schvartze—might as well call them niggers. You want that? What do they call us? Kikes, that’s what, Christ killers.”

Moshe slammed the front door shut, ignoring him. “You just let them get away.”

“Maybe so,” Abe said, “but you better be careful you don’t blow a gasket the way you jump up and down whenever somebody steps on your fat toe.”

He picked up a box of lace and threw it on the floor. He felt the blood rush into his face. Moshe was wide-eyed.

“The hell with you. I’m going out,” Abe said, grabbing his hat and coat.

He started walking downtown, toward the neighborhood he’d known as a kid. What the hell is happening to me, he thought. Nothing feels right any more. Here I am throwing stuff around the store and yelling at old Moshe. My wife’s cooking makes me sick. So many Jewish stores were gone—tailors, butchers, bakeries with their fresh bialys and challah, the dry goods places… Even the cry of the I-Cash-Clothes-man, who carried a complete stock of used clothing on his back, is a memory.

Abe looked up and saw he was on Houston Street, just around the corner from where he’d spent his boyhood in a tenement, with its cramped rooms, occasional rats, the grubby toilet down the hall.

Essie, the youngest Cohen daughter, couldn’t wait to move after she and Abe had been married. Amid the cries of mazel tov, Abe had caught her gazing straight out of the ghetto. But in 1918, few had the means for such a move, and Essie and Abe had taken a cold-water flat on Stanton Street, smack in the middle of their old neighborhood. They had promised each other it wouldn’t be for long. No child of theirs would grow up as they had.

Abe had been the youngest of seven. Two others had died. His parents had emigrated in 1892. Like so many, they had settled in the Lower East Side. His father had odd jobs. His mother had taken in laundry and birthed their children. There had never been enough money and the children had been pushed to get an education so they could do better. Abe’s two brothers were doctors, while he had just managed to finish the eighth grade.

Essie’s family had been smaller. Her father had been a rabbi, but since there had been an excess, he’d had no congregation. He’d had to brush up to officiate at Abe and Essie’s wedding. He had been famously unobservant, breaking Jewish law when it suited him. Essie had been his favorite child and she shone in the light of his irreverence. As was the custom, her father as a rabbi had studied the Torah and had been unprepared for other work. Essie’s mother, however, had been pious to a fault, had toiled long hours as a dressmaker, and had nagged both father and daughter. They had taken to ducking out of the house whenever possible for excursions uptown to Union Square and even beyond. Essie had concluded that God either didn’t know what He was doing, or He didn’t exist.

Soon after World War I ended, Abe, whose poor eyesight had kept him out of the Army, had gotten  a lucky break and landed a steady job as a shipper for a clothing manufacturer. Within a month, Essie had found them an apartment uptown, complete with their own bathroom. Now, as he waited for the light to change, he recalled how crazy they’d gone with the steam heat, how wealthy they’d felt. Then he shivered and jammed his hands deeper into his pockets.

The low winter sun was at its apex as he turned the corner onto Essex Street, where the Public Market still dominated the neighborhood. A contrapuntal chorus of buyers’ and sellers’ cries rang through the ancient, cavernous building and spilled out in the street. Through the din he heard a familiar, raspy voice. “Hey, Abe. Over here. It’s me, Izzy.”

Abe turned and saw an old man whose broad smile revealed a multitude of missing teeth. He was bundled in a heavy black overcoat and Russian fur hat.

“Izzy, you son-of-a-bitch,” Abe said, walking over to the old man’s stall. “I figured you must have retired by now.”

“Not me,” Izzy said, beaming. “What for? I should sit at home with that witch and watch TV so I can die in my crummy living room? Ten years you’re gone and nothing’s changed.” He laughed, and Abe noticed there were new gaps in his mouth. “But you, Abie, you’ve either retired, or that battleship wife of yours has thrown you out, ha, ha.”

Abe smiled. “Nah. I’m still up on Avenue A with Moshe Druckman, only I just now decided to take a walk. Glad to see you, you old goat.”

A breeze sauntered through the building and the two men shifted positions. “Remember your old stall, over there where that schmuck is leaning his fat thumb on the scale?” Izzy said, pointing to a middle-aged man weighing what looked like a large carp. When he was little, his mother would have had them deboned at the market for gefilte fish.

“Sure I remember,” Abe said. “Fifteen years selling in the same stall, you don’t forget just like that.” Abe noticed that the sellers seemed to be the same Jewish men as always. The buyers were mostly newcomers, and the fish was not a carp.

“Damn, Izzy. You look good. What are you now, 100?”

“Gimme a break already,” Izzy said as he vigorously gripped Abe’s shoulder. “You don’t look so bad yourself,” he said. Izzy’s hand felt good.

“So, how’s business?” Abe asked.

“Like always. I sell for five percent below cost and make it up on volume,” the old man said, laughing hard at his hackneyed joke.

Abe laughed too, until tears came to his eyes. He turned away. “I gotta go,” he said, suddenly. “Take it easy, you old buzzard.”

“You, too. And give what’s-her-name—Essie—a kick in the pants for me.” He was still laughing as Abe turned back uptown. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes. He started up again, eyes cast on the sidewalk.

It had been Moshe’s idea to go into business together. “It’ll be us that makes the decisions,” he’d said. Ha. Him and his kosher this, his kosher that. Sometimes I wish I’d never known him. Essie had fought against it, complained about the cost, the fact that they’d had to borrow money from his brother Dave, a doctor, but there was no changing Abe’s mind. Now he was still making payments.

He stopped in a luncheonette to get out of the cold and have a cup of coffee. He thought about the day he’d quit his first shipping job, not even a year after he and Essie had moved uptown. Essie had been furious. Abe had gotten into an argument with his boss over ten minutes of a lunch break.

“You quit—or got fired,” Essie had declared. “Maybe you won’t mind it if we have to move back,” she’d said sharply, nodding toward the window. “Me, I’d rather die.”

Yeah, he thought, but got her calmed down. He’d found another job within a week. A year and a half later, he’d gotten fired again, another angry outburst. By then, they’d moved again, to their present apartment. And this time, Essie had held a baby boy, Nathan, on her hip.

“You expect me to take care of your house and your son, and you can’t hold a job?” she’d yelled, in tears. “No, you get you a steady job and hold onto it, and that’s that.”

But he hadn’t. Although he’d worked most of the time, he’d quit or got fired regularly. Finally, near the end of the Depression, fed up with bosses and reduced to a WPA job digging ditches, he’d gotten the idea to sell in the Public Market on Essex Street in the old neighborhood. Essie had been furious.

“You’re never gonna change,” she had said, shaking her head.

“I won’t quit right away. I’ll just sell on Sundays until I see how it goes.” But they’d both known it would just be a matter of time before he was there every day.

“I just don’t get it,” Essie had said as she wiped her hands on her apron. “You could try anywhere you please, but instead it’s back to that worthless neighborhood. What the hell was wrong with shipping?”

She’d never understand. How could he explain? Yes, the neighborhood was a slum, but he’d smiled when he thought of playing stickball in the street, building scooters out of wooden crates and roller skates, pitching pennies, stealing the occasional Baby Ruth, even, he had to admit, a Spaldeen or two. Yes, stealing, just like kids did today. Moshe was one of his friends, but not his best. That was Mickey Nussbaum, little Mickey, who could run faster than anyone, except Abe. Moshe couldn’t run to save his life.

By then Nate had been in high school. Essie herself had wanted to go back and finish. She had even talked of taking night college classes.

“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you,” she’d said miserably. “You got too much pride. Someone says something you don’t like, you walk out. Fine for you,” she’d said as she’d slammed her rolling pin into the sink, “but what about me and Nate? How can you expect me to take care of him on what you bring home?”

“Nate, Nate, Nate it’s always Nate, ain’t it?” he’d said, voice rising. “Gonna go to college. Yeah, well, I’m the one busting my back every day. Snow, sleet, don’t make no difference, I’m out there laying sewer every lousy day.” He’d kicked a table leg, and the pie Essie was making for Nate had tottered. She’d flung her arms out and emitted a small cry. Abe had wanted to smash something, anything, but had only run his hands roughly through his thinning hair. He’d jerked open the apartment door and had fled down the stairs. The next day he’d opened his stall.

Nate had never had need of him, he was sure of it. Sure, Abe thought, the kid had been happy when he gave him a treat from the store or talked baseball, but he knew Nate  had looked down on him, his lack of education, his string of nothing jobs. Nate had gone to City College and had gotten a degree in engineering, married and moved to California. They spoke twice a year by phone.

It was late afternoon and even colder when Abe got near the store. He couldn’t help thinking that he didn’t have much to show for his life.

Up the block he noticed a police car and an ambulance, and he broke into a trot.

“What is it? ¿Qué pasa?” Abe demanded of the Puerto Rican cop outside the door.

“What’s it to you, old man? Guy in there just dropped dead, that’s all.”

Abe gasped. “What the hell are you saying? Are you crazy? Let me in there.” The cop stood aside and Abe headed for the counter where another cop and a couple of ambulance attendants stood. One of the attendants was laughing. They turned when Abe got near. The laughing stopped.

“You know this guy?” the cop asked. He was big, bigger than Abe.

“Sure, I know him,” Abe said, breathless. “That’s Moshe—Moshe—Moshe Druckman. My partner. What the hell is going on?”

Moshe was on his back on the floor in front of the counter.

“See for yourself,” the cop said. “Looks like he had a heart attack or something.”

Abe knelt beside the figure and gently placed his right hand on Moshe’s forehead, as if he was checking a child for fever. The skin was lukewarm. Moshe’s mouth was open and his nostrils flared. Abe thought he could see fury in Moshe’s dead eyes.

“Was it those damn boys?” he said. “They come back, right? And you, you schmuck, you. You were gonna catch them.” He saw that Moshe’s right hand was clenched in a fist. “You damn hothead. No, it’s me, isn’t it, me who’s the hothead. Me. If I’d been here, you’d be cursing me yet.”

“What about his family?” the cop asked. “He got a wife, kids?”

Abe kept his eyes on Moshe’s body. “No,” he said, “no wife, no kids.”

The cop tapped him on the shoulder. “Whaddya say? I didn’t hear you.” Abe turned his head. “No wife,” he said, his voice rising. “No kids, okay?”

The cop pulled out a pad and took a pen from his shirt pocket. “I gotta get some information on this,” he said.

“Like what?” Abe said.

“Like his name.”

“I already told you. Moshe Druckman.”

“What’s his address?” the cop asked. “Phone number.”

Abe stood and tried to think of Moshe’s address. He realized he didn’t know.

“I don’t know where he lives. Somewhere in Washington Heights.”

The cop looked at him.“How about the phone number?”

That Abe knew, thank God. He wondered what the cop thought of him.

The cop wrote down the number.

“And now, how about you,” he said. “Maybe you got an ID or something. That poor guy didn’t. We couldn’t find nothing in his pockets, not even a wallet.”

Abe knew Moshe kept his wallet in the desk in the office. The hell with the cop and his questions, he thought. He’s got the number, doesn’t he?

“I ain’t got one,” Abe said.

“All the same to me, bud,” the cop said. “You don’t need nothing official.”

He gave the cop his name, address, phone number. Where he’d been when Moshe had the dropped dead, about the three thieves earlier in the day. The cop nodded.

“Okay,” the cop said. “I want you to make a list of anything that got taken. Bring it down to the station. You know where it is?” Abe nodded. He looked around the store. Nothing was out of place, or if it was, he realized, he didn’t give a damn.

“Look out, buddy,” someone snarled. The attendants were waiting to place Moshe on a stretcher.

“Just a minute,” Abe blurted out. “Did anybody see him?” Abe asked. “Was he alone in here?”

“A lady come into the store about two-thirty,” the cop said. “Found him on the floor. “That’s about it. Now let these guys do their job, okay?”

“Who was the lady?” Abe said. “Who, who?”

“Look, pal, you can get all the details you want after I finish my report,” the cop said. “Right now we got to get this guy out of here.”

Abe grabbed the cop’s shoulders. “Now you listen to me,” he yelled. He could feel spit spilling into the front of his mouth. The cop pushed Abe in the chest, hard enough to send him tottering backward.

“You want to get arrested, buster?” the cop barked. “Lay another hand on me, and you’re in trouble. Now watch out.” Abe balled his fists and narrowed his eyes but kept quiet.

He turned back toward Moshe and frantically eyed the body, now on the stretcher, arms folded. The shiny blue pants looked shabby, the white shirt ripped open and filthy. He noticed that Moshe was in his stocking feet. He’d never seen Moshe without shoes, or more likely, he’d never noticed. The feet were short and wide, like Moshe.

He had an urge to pull down the socks. He saw a Star of David on Moshe’s chest, brought his right hand up to his own chest and then quickly dropped it. The attendants started to roll Moshe out the door. Abe walked out after them and watched them place the stretcher into the ambulance, leaned against the door frame, took out his handkerchief, and blew his nose. The ambulance drove off into the streetlights.

He turned back into the empty store and went to the toilet, went into the office and kicked at the ledger, which had fallen to the floor. Then he noticed the scuffed black shoes in front of Moshe’s chair. He picked them up. They smelled of sweaty feet. Moshe must have taken them off. Maybe his feet hurt, Abe thought. He visualized Moshe jumping up and running out in his socks. You should have let them have whatever they wanted.

He picked up the shoes and went to the open door. He’d forgotten the cold. He stepped outside and saw a black kid walking toward him. Their eyes locked, freezing the boy with mouth agape and his eyes white and wide.

“You… you…,” Abe stuttered, his heart pounding. “You want the chess set? You want the chess set? Okay, you can have it,” he bellowed as he brought his right arm up with one of Moshe’s shoes in it. The boy broke and ran, disappearing around the corner. “You can have it, you, you schvartze,” he said softly.

He went back into the store, looked around and shut off the lights. Damn you, he said again, under his breath. He locked up and walked slowly toward the subway.

He got on a half-empty uptown subway holding Moshe’s shoes in his lap. He looked up and saw an old woman sitting across the aisle, asleep, with a shopping cart in front her. Her filthy red cloth coat had opened and Abe could see she was dressed in a stained, badly frayed black skirt that came down nearly to her feet. Bits of newspaper stuck out from her worn-out Keds. Her lumpy bosom was covered by a dingy gray sweater, and she wore a Navy blue wool cap.

He watched her chest rise and fall with placid regularity, how her body gently rocked over the staccato jerks of the train. Her hands were clasped on top of her large belly, as if she had just consumed a generous meal.

He glanced down the aisle at the other passengers. Some were reading, others dozing. One middle-aged man, dressed in business clothes, seemed intent on scanning the advertising placards near the roof of the car. He saw his own tired face reflected back from the darkened train window. So many arguments, fights over God, keeping the laws, life. But there was something else, wasn’t there? He looked up once more and blinked. He realized with a jolt that the store would have to close. Without Moshe, there was no store. And there was no going back to the market. There was only the three-room apartment and Essie, green-eyed, snoring Essie.

The train pulled into his station. The street lady had opened her yellow eyes and was staring at him. The shoes, he thought. She wants the shoes. She’s looking at me and she thinks I got these extra shoes. The train stopped and he got up. He would not let go of the shoes, no matter how she looked at him, no matter how pitiful her shredded sneakers were. He would bring the shoes home. He would open the junk drawer in the kitchen and take out his can of Kiwi polish and his shoe rag. He would get his shoe brush out from under the sink, and then he would brush Moshe’s shoes clean. He would put one hand inside the left shoe and spread polish on with his other hand. He would feel the place where Moshe’s foot had stomped, had strode to keep up with him. He would do the same for the other shoe. Wipe until there was a gloss on the shoes, as close as he could get them to brand new. And he would put them in the bedroom closet next to his best pair of Florsheims. They would always be Moshe’s shoes. He would never give them up.

Peter Solet’s short fiction has been published in Fresh and his poems have appeared in Quiddity, ARS Medica, Argestes, and the Asheville Poetry Review. He retired in 2008 after stints as a journalist, hippie, SAAB mechanic, administrative assistant, cab driver, and clinical research monitor. He has lived in Madison County with his wife Katherine since 1999.

About Kosher—The genesis of “Kosher” came about in a fiction class. One of my classmates used a common and mildly insulting term for Jews, and I vowed to write something in reply. That said, the original impetus was soon lost and “Kosher,” based loosely on my grandfather, is the result.

Eliza pulled up to the curb outside the brick house on that cold street, the street that had not seemed warm to her once since they moved in together that November. Shaking her head and curling a lip, she tightened her coat and plunged into the wind. Following the crumbling outer moldings up to the bowed chimney, her head drifted to one side as she walked up the driveway where the earth leaned heavily against the retaining wall. Its stone masonry bent toward her and the torn-up concrete of the drive. Though the dry drafts of oil heat from the underground belly of the house fought the cold in fitful gasps, a chill settled tenaciously into the old place like a skeleton at the bottom of a lake.

Inside, Eliza peeked around corners, listening quietly, opening all the closed doors where the shiver of rooms with leaky windows rushed to meet her before she could close them and sigh into the enfolding warmth of the hallway. She was alone that day, the house empty of Richard. Softly sliding in stocking feet on the nearly empty wood floor of the living room, she talked to herself, not from solitude or distraction, but more an incantation, the words of a song her mother sang to her as a child. As she mouthed the words, the felt-covered hammers of her mother’s piano rose and fell inside her with reverberations of giddy tremolos and sobbing bass notes. Underneath, a burning smell and the overdue clamping pop of the toaster.

The nearly hundred-year-old house, once an orphanage, answered her incantation with reassurance that came from inside the walls, a sound Richard could not hear. The voices of the house washed through her, leaving no physical boundary between them and her own self. And with no skin or bone or air around her, all was vibration. In this state, she felt less alone. But just as the house began to breathe into her, the door unlatched and the cold of the outside rushed against her shoulder. Richard, with his arms full of groceries, stomped into the kitchen, snow sliding off his dark coat.

“Christ, it’s cold out there. Can you help with this stuff?” The banging of heavy bags hitting the counter echoed throughout.

Eliza stood still, absorbing the leftover silence, her head turned toward his words.

“Eliza,” he spoke from inside the refrigerator door. She could tell because of the strain from crouching and the muffled emptiness of it, the coolness of it.

“Yes?” she broke away and walked slowly into the kitchen.

“Where did you put the rosemary?” he looked up from the glow of the refrigerator door. “It’s not in the drawer. I thought you bought it yesterday.”

“I did. It’s here.” Motioning toward the basket of fruit, she reached in under a bag of dried figs, pushing aside a couple of red grapefruit.

“Why’d ya put it in there?” His eyes focused on her with a coiled rage that had nothing to do with rosemary.

Suddenly light, her arms seemed unattached to her body.

“How am I supposed to find stuff when you put it wherever you feel like it?” His eyes fixed on hers and even after she looked over toward the door, she felt the heat of them. “I only have a couple of hours to finish this dish for the Bane wedding.”

She didn’t have an answer.

“Well, are you gonna help me?”

Wordless, she left the room to stand just outside the door that opened into the dining room. First there was the soft suctioning closure of the fridge and then a loud stumbling clamor of what must have been the footstool, always in the way no matter where she put it. And so she crossed her hands over her waist, and she stood frozen staring at a tall vase in the center of the dining room table which she had cleared earlier that day of all other debris. Then came the banging of cupboard doors and low growls that made her straighten the flowers in the vase with her one hand. She brushed the wrinkles from the muted green linen tablecloth. What was that stain from? She couldn’t remember. She covered it with the vase.

“Jesus!”

Turning toward the kitchen, then toward the front door, Eliza’s eyes hardened in her head. She lifted her hand up to smooth them out but froze again at the sound of Richard’s voice still coming from the kitchen.

“How can we talk when you just walk away?”

“I’m right here.”

“We can’t even have a real conversation!”

Quiet. Then more clamoring.

Eliza looked down at her fisted hand, still gripping the little bag of rosemary. She followed it back into the kitchen where Richard stood over the cutting board on the counter, wide-bladed knife in hand, systematically chopping parsley into fine, bright green sand. His hand moved skillfully in and out of the way of the blade, thumb bent and the raised tendons of his hand casting shadows that made the spaces between each of them seem like the gaps between old mountains. She admired those hands, their certainty and hardness, the way they held so much even when they were empty. Sometimes their contours were the cradling ripples of river valleys, other times they were snakes gliding impossibly fast on high ridges.

She handed him the bag of herbs, not knowing what else to do, stretching her hand across the space. His lips pursed and his head swiveled in an audible breath, chin lifting toward the counter. Dropping the plastic bag of tiny purple flowers there without looking at him, she turned and walked back out of the room and out the front door, without her coat, and down the front steps. Though the top one was too high and dangerously different from the others, she was so used to that her feet measured the distance on their own now without a thought and made no false step. She nearly floated down the cracked driveway and along the frosted street where evening darkness already crept up the hill. Then something popped and imploded in her chest, and would have made a sound if her own body were not so cold, if what rose in her were weeping. But instead all that came to her—all that resonated in her throat—was a few little gasps before a yawn.

When Eliza reached the end of the street, shivering uncontrollably, she turned her head faintly in both directions, along toward the elementary school where the buses all huddled together for the night, and down the other side toward the bed and breakfast with its ornate trimmings and circular drive watched over by two stone lions. Looking down at her feet, she noticed that they had acquired boots at some point in the last ten minutes, though she didn’t remember putting them on. She watched them turn all the way around on the glittering street and go back. Where else would they go? She sighed, though her chest barely moved.

As she walked, Eliza listened to the drumming of her boots on the pavement and to the neighbor’s cooing chickens settling into their coop nests and to the traffic that sped up and slowed down and stopped and started again, and she imagined too the voice of the moon drifting down to her, that nearly invisible ivory sling that hung over the house like a fishhook. She could tell that if the fishhook were turned just a few degrees clockwise that it would be a smile or maybe the crescent-shaped almond cookie that Richard made for her on her birthday which she loved.

Finally she opened the door again to see him sitting at the dining room table. His eyes were distanced, softened—just a very small change but one she recognized. She looked back at him, an animal stare that was honest and wary and willful and he met her stare as though through the bars of their respective cages until he said a quiet sorry. That’s when she smiled softly and nodded and went back into the living room where the wind puffed fitfully against the windows. Soon, also the soft creak of the table and sliding of the chair, and the next creak of the table, and another sliding of the chair, and then his footsteps, and the resuming of the chopping on the wooden board, and an exhale which slipped out of her chest like a thief over a fence.

…

The next day he was cheerful again.

“Taste this, baby,” Richard stood over the stove, a pot of red bubbling liquid burping under his hands, one with a wooden spoon reaching toward her lips, the other ushering beneath. Eliza smiled at the expectancy in his eyes, which watched her lips as they enclosed the spoon and the warm marinara sauce.

“More garlic, you think?”

“No, there’s enough.”

He nodded slightly, eyebrows pulling together. “This is for tonight, for us.” She smiled.

“Need help?”

“Nope. Got it all covered.”

Richard kissed her, and with a gentle finger, dabbed red sauce from the corner of her mouth, tasting it with reverence, then kissing her again, tasting with equal reverence. They stood looking around each other’s faces for a long moment until Richard placed his forehead against hers. Then, only warm breath and the buzz of the refrigerator before he was called again to some pressing kitchen task. Eliza leaned back against the counter as they parted, not wanting to leave yet, though the kitchen felt small with both of them in it and there was always the possibility of an angry collision. She remembered her father, his back to her as she approached him in the tiny kitchen of black and white tile and yellowing lace curtains in the window where her mother once piled dishes on the wooden rack.

“Give me some space!” Her father’s sharpness cut her severely. She was already so jumpy. And then came the hollowness—Eliza could feel it still there in her gut—that emerged with the sudden emptiness of the kitchen her father soon avoided and the hush of the house where music no longer played. In the darkness, she saw his long body sunken lengthwise into the couch as she tried to quietly climb the stairs, each penny-loafered foot choosing its position, her small hand on the roundness of the wooden banister.

Eliza’s chest pulled inward around the memory. Suddenly it was as if the kitchen walls warped with the heat of the stove, sagging, and the ceiling drooping. She walked out the kitchen door to stand under the old tree that now had no leaves but whose feet disappeared under the ground. She imagined her own feet held that way, how heavy she would be, and how sturdy. She touched the body of the oak, running her fingers into its grooves, leaning her head against it. In the steadiness of the tree, there was a dropping inward, like some precarious thing stacked high inside her falling to the ground.

Behind her closed eyes appeared the dark back of her bent grandmother sobbing over her mother’s newly filled grave and the huge stone she hid behind without breathing as she watched her. And she became her own thirteen-year-old body, which could feel so easily through herself and clothing and air and stone into other people, and which could somehow disappear into the open air of the graveyard along with the sound of weeping. And if it settled into the trees or the earth or the clouds that day, she didn’t know, but now the ripple of it sped through her and landed in her throat, where it pressed hard until her hand clasped around it.

Richard escaped out of the kitchen with the familiar creak and slam and the shattering fall of plaster from above the door frame. Jolting through her body, the vibration loosened her from the ground. She turned to watch him walking to the car, and thought to call out to him, but did not. And she knew then that something inside her which must at one time have been an instrument of wanting lay smashed, its strings slack and heavy, because as she breathed deeply against the old oak she felt the useless pieces of it clanging around in her chest.

After one long morning of shopping for Richard’s odds and ends to complete the catering job (he was off doing other last minute preparations), Eliza opened the front door to see a baby grand piano dominating the better part of the living room. Her breath rose up but no words came out. She simply walked over to the huge instrument and picked up the envelope that sat atop the keyboard cover. Opened, it revealed jittery cursive.

Eliza’s mouth fell open as she looked up. Running her finger across the sleek black surface, still silky after all these years in her grandmother’s house, her hand rested on one wooden shoulder as she lowered herself onto the bench. Sitting there at the baby grand and staring across its wideness, Eliza rested her fingers soundlessly on its keys and watched the sunlight dance on the surface of the hood which, opened on a slant, reflected the sun from the living room window with such intense brightness that she couldn’t look at it directly. She closed her eyes and felt the warmth of the sun, the piano waiting for her to play.

But she didn’t play.

Instead she listened, hearing the music, knowing it so well, tasting it deliciously all over her body. And her heart swelled for a few bars and contracted again with the next. The draft from the chimney flue breathed lightly on her extended hands. The house began its indiscernibly soulful whispering and she stopped to listen, her spine cold and straight. And it was as though her eyes deepened in their sockets, veiled and turned around to face the other way. Images of Richard putting a vinyl record on an old turntable he’d bought at an outdoor flea market, the crackling intrusion of Brahms, Copeland, Rachmaninoff, images of this same piano which long ago stood on an oriental rug in her grandmother’s house amid the smell of cedar and dust.

Suddenly some tiny black thing fell from the ceiling and dropped with a gentle tickle onto the back of her hand. Instinctively, she flung it away with a gasp, recoiling from the little creature that now scurried toward the fireplace on eight needle legs. Squinting, she watched for the course of its escape. At once commanding all her attention, the disappearing spider and the long, nearly invisible strand hanging by her face, brought her back to her body, the fireplace and the dim naked bulbs of the ceiling fixture above her head. Reaching out again, she took the thread between her fingers and pulled. It floated down, slack and feathery. A familiar sensation drew her into herself again down this long wispy line.

She saw her mother pull a gray hair from her head, holding it out like a foreign entity and letting it find its way to the floor, smiling with half her mouth at Eliza, who picked up the silvery strand, wound it around a pudgy index finger and watched while her mother went back to grooming her hair in the hallway mirror, patting it closer to her head and studying the tight curls that drew themselves along the edge of her face. In the moonlight outside, Eliza’s father stood, slightly hunched in the open doorway, smoking and looking out into the street. Lights from passing cars appeared on the wall of their tiny living room, passed across its length, and disappeared out the far window. As cold from the open door poured in, the end of her compressed finger began to hurt. Her father turned to look at her, eyebrows low over his pale eyes, and she felt a familiar tingling on the back of her neck.

Unwinding the hair, Eliza let it fall on the woven rug and ran past him, her own shadow disappearing into his. Darting into the living room, she scurried to the small space between the wall and the upright piano, big enough for her eight-year-old body to sit, knees up to her chest, arms folded between them. The night before she had nestled there, the vibrating panels of the piano melting her shoulder, the thud and clack of the pedals as her mother pressed and released them. Her mother, looking at her with lifted eyebrows, pulled her sleepy body firmly out of the spot for the third time that week.

That night she waited until the door finally latched to let her eyes fall closed, and she imagined the sense of the humming piano. But soon there was just the stiff wall of the living room against her back, the emptiness of the room. Her shoulders dropped a little and the sudden quietness sent a kind of elated pleasure through her. Finally, no one to watch over her! The line of her mouth gently lengthened and turned up at the corners, and she crawled out of her favorite spot to sit, knees folded beneath her in the middle of the floor. She swayed there for a few moments in delight, rolled over and made faces at the hanging crystal light fixture that her father always cursed because of the way it would frantically swing when he pulled the little chain to turn it on or off. All of the little glass pieces would tinkle and blink, and he would grab them to try to quiet them down. Eliza giggled and then frowned, thinking of it.

Bouncing up, she shuffled carefully onto the wooden stool in front of the grumbly old upright, the kind of stool that you can screw up to the height you need. Assessing the approximate distance, she gave the circular seat three turns and then slid between, resting both hands on the keys, yellow on the outside ends, whiter near the dark graying ones. She rested them gently, as she’d seen her mother do during moments of studying the music, eyes squinting, mouth pursed, until her hands animated again, and the keys would rise and fall with them in a kind of dance.

Staring at her own hands, little Eliza could feel the whole piano swell and sink with the bending notes as she struck the keys, tentatively at first, listening after one short phrase for some hidden answer. But when none arrived, she tapped out another short progression of notes and soon lost herself in atonal banging. Staring at her moving fingers, her eyes blurred and closed entirely, and she listened as each of her small finger tips searched and landed with blind magic. She felt the pulsing click-clack of the pedals through the floorboards, and she felt her mother’s voice in her own throat and the popping sounds her father made as he smoked his pipe and crinkled newspaper in the sinking armchair by the window.

Shivering now in the stillness, Eliza had begun to slump ever so slightly over the sleeping beast when the front door slid open and Richard, scarved and hatted and mittened, stared across the room at her, his mouth slowly opening into a grin.

“Ah ha! It has arrived! What a colossus! I didn’t tell you, sweet thing, so it would be a surprise. Are you excited? Let’s hear!” He busied himself with the removal of his layers.

“It’s beautiful. I love this piano.” Tears glassed Eliza’s eyes as she looked down at her hands, which hadn’t moved on the keys. “I have no idea what we are going to do with it, though. It takes up the entire room.”

“Well, aren’t you going to play it? This is a great chance for you to play again. I want to hear you!” He looked at her with such sweetness that she smiled and could have cried, almost.

“We could sell it, Richard. It’s probably still worth something, and we could really use the money.”

“What!”

“You know I’m right.”

“I’m surprised, baby. I thought you’d go nuts over this thing.”

“Can we not talk about it right now?” Eliza got up and escaped to the kitchen, away from the looming monster that had moved itself into her favorite room of the house.

…

That night Eliza curled like the gently spiraling folds of a nautilus next to Richard in their bed on the second floor. It was warm there under the heavy blankets, though the slow dripping of rainwater drummed in the gutters outside. Richard’s body breathed thickly next to her, radiating warmth. As he slept, she very softly laid one hand on his naked back just between the shoulder blades where the large muscles came together at a valley along his spine. He shuddered. She drew her hand back. He turned over toward her sleepily, taking over the bed. Watching his closed eyes, she again wished she could touch him without him knowing, or, if he did know, that it would not cause a stir.

“You can’t sleep?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Come here.” He pulled her to him with one enveloping arm, and turning her back against his body, she was cradled there, soothed in slow sighs as his breath deepened.

“I want to play the piano,” she whispered. “I wish I could.”

“You can.”

“I thought you were asleep.”

“So why were you talking to me?”

“Maybe I’m talking to me.”

“I wish I knew what the hell you mean sometimes, baby.”

Then there was just the rain in the gutters and one shuffle of the blankets and the creaking of the old house as it held them there, so tentatively, in the cold, in the winter. Downstairs, she could feel the piano sleeping like a snoring dinosaur.

Just as she began to fall into the dreamy state of strange images and unclaimed thoughts, Eliza became her 11-year-old self again walking in the rain, walking to settle herself back in her bones. She felt her body pulled down the steeply inclining street with cracked sidewalks back in Pittsburgh, jumping over the uneven upturned concrete in her penny loafers. There, the sun lay low in the sky above the looming hill where one white, leafless tree stood between their lawn and the jagged sidewalk, its branches pulled outward seemingly by static electricity. Eliza remembered once liking the way it threw itself out in every direction like a star, unimpeded. Even its roots did not heed the human construction of pavement. The slow pressure of those expanding, invisible limbs had deepened and lengthened the cracks over time, so that rainy rivers with a sound like tinkling glass dribbled between Eliza’s feet as she walked that evening, thinking with folded brow how things can grow inside a person too, imperceptibly, quiet in their determination.

The rivers began to wash away the soil as well, so that the tree, like an unkempt and peeping intruder, began to lean toward the house, and her father talked about cutting it down. Her mother didn’t say anything but only looked out at the old tree through the window where one shutter, a crescent moon cut out, slammed hard against the house. Her shoulders raised and dropped, and her eyes widened and narrowed and then fell on little Eliza with the smile she often used to wipe unpleasantness away. Eliza smiled back, but not as wide.

Folded next to Richard’s sleeping body in their bed on the second floor of their house, just between the world of dreams and the world of waking, Eliza listened. And her hand, which had curled up tight on the sheets just next to her face, relaxed as the familiar sounds of the oil heater and the refrigerator and the wind that rattled the flue faded in her ears, leaving only the tingling silence beneath. In that quietness, the glimmer of the sunlight bled through the spaces of her grandmother’s fingers. Her soft hand swished beside the dark suit on the walk through the grass and the gray stones. And she could feel how her arm lengthened to reach out toward it, and what it was to let her own hand fall slack in its holding.

…

Eliza woke to sharp banging just above her head. Blinking into focus, her eyes stared out at the bony limbs of a large tree branch scraping agonizingly against the window pane. In a second, Richard was up and wearing pants, running down the stairs in reverberating counterpoint to the steady rain that fell hard on the roof. Eliza sat up and looked out at the branch caught between the phone lines and the house. It moved wildly as the wind blew against them both.

“Get me the ladder!” Richard, out in the rain, looked up at the waiting disaster. “Eliza, I need your help! Come here!”

“Where’s the ladder? In the shed?” She pulled her arms through the sleeves of her wool coat as she ran out into the rainy darkness, though one arm caught, and so she was drenched before she could get it on.

“Yes, go!”

Richard cleared away the few remaining logs from the other tree that stood too close to the house, never taking his eyes off the branch above him. Eliza ran for the shed, her boots unlaced. With both hands, she threw up the latch and searched breathlessly for the ladder, shining metallic and heavy in a barely moonlit corner. She grabbed both its aluminum sides and nearly fell over backwards. The top hit the low rafters of the shed and halted there. Going around to the other side, she pulled on its legs and it fell to the ground. Outside she heard the sound of shattering glass and then wood splitting, scraping, a heavy thud.

“Oh shit!” Richard’s pounding feet splashed through the mud as he ran toward the shed. “It broke the window. Come on. Hurry. Forget the ladder. Jesus, girl, can you help me?”

Her eyes fixed on his silhouette there in the blurry moonlight. A horrible buzzing in her belly began to fill her like a cloud of locusts, so she couldn’t see in the dark shed anymore, and she bent over, one hand on the floating place beneath her ribs. When he disappeared again she heard the rain, amplified and deafening on the metal roof. In a moment, the sound let up a bit and the space left from it carried her back to herself. She stood and ran inside the house after him where they both pounded up the slippery stairs.

On their bed, glistening shards of glass glowed in the yellow light of the street lamp outside the window. Its bright eye blinked as the supple tree which had shed its branch swayed back and forth in front of it. Everything was drenched. Eliza, out of breath, heart pounding, stood frozen once more at the sight of their sodden and oddly twinkling room as Richard flew past her to the window. Rain poured in through the open drapes onto their bed.

“Come on! I can’t do this myself!”

“Well, what do you want me to do?”

“Go get something to patch this. Oh, I don’t know. Just push the bed away from the wall. I’ll do it.”

He shook his head and sputtered and growled as he ran once more down the stairs. Eliza pushed the bed, on squeaking wheels, away from the wall, then grabbed towels from the bathroom which she used to cover everything that had gotten wet. The roof itself seemed to threaten collapse, the plaster walls to dissolve completely. Her dripping hair chilled her neck until her back began to shiver uncontrollably.

A wooden board under one arm, a hammer in the other hand, Richard reappeared and stopped momentarily to watch her as she began to undress, a word forming on his lips and then dropping away.

“What?” Her eyes burned out at him.

“What are you doing?” At the window, he set the board on the ledge and a nail at the upper corner. Eliza threw her soggy nightgown on the floor.

“I’m freezing, Richard!”

He began to hammer. “O.K. Fine.”

“No! It’s not fine,” Her voice cracked above the banging and rattling of the plaster wall and the spray of dust that thrummed on the floor each time he hit the nail. “And it’s not my fault, so stop yelling at me!”

He stopped banging on the board, which had already quieted the room somewhat and now held back the rain, and so he turned to see her, and she felt him seeing her as she stood naked, shivering, her eyes like shattered glass.

“I know.”

Her lip began to tremble, as though her whole body did not tremble already, and she sighed hard in low bursts. Dropping the hammer on the bed, Richard came over to enfold her in his coat. Her body drooped as he held her up, gently rocking her side to side, and she knew he thought of something painful because his body hardened against hers, and the sound that emanated from him seemed to pull back and invert and fall to the floor. At this, her body turned liquid. Old sorrow, like a warm vapor, moved slightly beyond her chest where she could feel him again. It was then that the stoniness she had imagined in him seemed to melt too, leaving only the soft sweetness of his own grief–or was it hers? It spread inside her like honey. Somehow knowing this, he pressed his cheek against hers and freed the breath that had hung heavy in his chest.

As the storm died down, they left their flooded bedroom and curled up together downstairs. Richard built a cozy fire. Since the piano took up most of the living room, they used it to create an enclosure, draping blankets that hung to the floor where they huddled beneath the baby grand on a sofa cushion they brought from the den. Warm and tired, Eliza watched the flames reach up and release into smoke and form again and reach and release again. She told Richard about the time her mother set the kitchen on fire the year before she died.

“She always had that broken toaster going in the evening while she was playing the piano, but it never turned off on its own and she would always get so wrapped up in what she was playing that she would forget about it.” She smiled and watched the flames under the stone hearth, feeling Richard’s eyes on her and feeling his hand steadily, gently, push the last damp tendril away from her face.

“What did your dad do?”

“You know. He yelled and huffed around, just like you.” She looked at him, half a smile on her lips. His eyes closed a bit.

“You never talk to him anymore, do you?”

“I never really did. I remember how silent the house was after she was gone, like it was me and him and the silence. The silence instead of her. Maybe that’s how I still feel her. I listen to the silence.”

Richard reached toward her face again to wipe away a streak of mud stuck to her cheek, his palm lingering against her skin. “Did you get the fire out?”

“It wasn’t much of a fire really. Mostly just a lot of smoke. My dad unplugged the toaster and ran it under the sink. We didn’t use it again. That’s when my Nanna started bringing over the rolls from the bakery.”

“Those are amazing rolls.”

They fell asleep intertwined beneath the belly of the beautiful piano with only the sound of leftover wind and the crackle of cinders to lull them.

…

“Damn!”

The next morning, Richard clanged and shuffled around in the kitchen. Eliza, staring at a gray hair in the mirror, brushed her teeth upstairs. It was easy to hear him in the kitchen, so he talked to her as though she was right next to him. Looking in the mirror as he yelled up, she listened to the small spaces between his words, to the distance between her and him that the words had to carry.

“I still need two more eggs for this dressing. Oh shit. Baby? Baby, will you go over and borrow a couple from the Fergusons? I don’t have time to go to the store. Just take ’em out of the coop. I’ll tell him later. He won’t mind.”

Eliza spat out the toothpaste and then made her way down to the kitchen.

“You want me to take eggs out of their chicken coop? What if there aren’t any eggs?”

“Well, there might be. They always look for them in the evening. Just go and check, will ya?”

She shrugged and pulled on her warm coat, meandering out the kitchen door and across the backyard to the Ferguson’s coop at the opposite end of their property. Banged together roughly and made of old boards salvaged from something torn apart, the coop was a bit of an eyesore, and Richard liked to complain about it even though Eliza knew he secretly loved that there were chickens next door, on their block, squawking and pecking around in their little fenced-in chicken area. She liked them, though she’d never seen them up close.

She approached the chicken yard where one of the chickens was already squawking madly, running in little circles. Opening the gate, her boots padded softly, pushing ground corn into the muddy earth.

“Hey, little one,” she whispered to the bird as she crouched a respectful distance from her, the poor girl, those red feathers fluttering wildly on the top of her head, and her petticoat of fluff riding up and down as she ran. “What’s wrong, Sweety?”

This seemed strange behavior even for a chicken, and she could see a couple of tail feathers were bent and hung limply behind her. Pushing open the door of the coop, left ajar, Eliza looked in at the source of distress. There were eggs, but they’d been plundered, broken shells in a pile on the straw. Peering further, she saw the other chicken, unmoving in the dark corner, feathers strewn around her.

“Oh no.”

Warmth spread through Eliza’s chest, a pressure in her throat. The bird, its eye closed, its wings unnaturally splayed, feet stiff, looked like a prisoner there in that house of rotting wood and wire, a prisoner whose cell was struck by natural disaster and who could not escape in time. Tentatively, she laid a hand, which had been warming in her pocket, softly on the bird’s back, running her fingers along its soft feathers. It was still a little warm. Maybe it died sometime early in the morning.

But why didn’t the animal—a fox maybe—why didn’t it eat her? Eliza looked out the open coop door at the other, still disoriented chicken, not knowing if it was her own presence which had thrown the little thing back into distress. She looked at the dead bird and then again at the live one, trying to decide which to attend to first. She touched the dead bird’s torn plumage with one more lingering caress, her fingers slowly curling back into themselves. Closing the door, she again crouched before the chicken whose screaming must have been heard all over the neighborhood. Why didn’t she hear it earlier? Maybe she did, but was distracted with other things and hadn’t given it a thought. Did the bird’s screaming scare away the animal?

Then she felt herself reach out and grab the bird, holding it shrieking and wriggling against her coat until sobs like dry little retching gusts of air burst uncontrollably from deep in her chest. She stood there for what seemed like a long time, staring at the torn-up earth and tightly clutching the traumatized creature, which screamed now and then into the gray morning air.

“What are you doing over there?” Richard appeared at the kitchen entrance, spoon in hand, socked feet exposed. “I just needed a couple eggs!”

It took Eliza time to raise her voice to span the length of their two yards, to lift above the shrieking bird and to be steady and calm.

“One of the chickens is dead, and the other one is very upset.”

“Upset?”

“Yes, Richard, don’t you hear her crying?”

“I guess I didn’t know the difference.”

“What happened?”

“A fox. I don’t know.”

“Hmm…Well, poor things. They’re sitting ducks in that damn coop. Not built right.” He shook his head and lit a cigarette, which he held outside the door to let the smoke drift away. “Come inside, baby. There’s nothing we can do for them now. I’ll help Ferguson with them when he gets home tonight.”

“But shouldn’t we take the dead one out of here?” Eliza still clutched the chicken which had fallen quiet in her arms.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I’ll do it. You come inside.”

“But what about the dressing?”

“I still have a little time, I think.”

She waited there for him, feeling the warmth of the fluffy bird against her, both of them holding to each other and that spot of earth where her boots must have sunk deep into the mud. Richard marched across the yard in heavy boots, tilted his head just a bit to the right as he opened the gate and walked past her into the coop. In a moment, he carried out the dead chicken in gloved hands and without a word, trudged back across the yard.

“Where are you going with her?”

“Gonna put it in the freezer till I know what Ferguson wants to do with it. Today’s supposed to warm up but if we preserve it, it’ll still make a good soup.”

Eliza looked down at the bundle of feathers in her arms, mild fluttering waves passing over it. Now it had begun to squirm again, and so she set it back down on the earth where it began to peck and wander. She slowly moved herself away from it and back to the house, suddenly sobbing again in the loud wind, despite some deep cold tingling that also rose into her chest, quieting her just as quickly as the tears had come.

Silly woman. Just a chicken.

Above her, one shutter, loosened in last night’s storm, banged hard and drew her eyes up to the house. It seemed to bend down toward her, or maybe, in the last few hours, had simply settled deeper into the earth.

…

Eliza sat on the piano bench, listening to the house, which seemed more tender and sad now that the wind and the rain and the tree had done their worst to its already unsteady structure. And she could hear a sort of fearful whispering in her belly where those invisible insects which so often tortured her flew about as though her belly were their home and not hers. And there was another whispering too that sounded like the song her mother sang to her many nights when she finally made it to bed, a song about a sea captain and a mermaid. She wondered suddenly if her mother had made it up. She’d never heard it anywhere else. She missed her mother. She missed her so much.

Her throat closed painfully around the jagged thought, and she swallowed to displace it, but it stuck. And the piano keys began to blur in her sight, and the back of her head seemed to open, and some part of her seemed to eject. Richard came to sit by her on the bench, emerging at last from his final clean-up from the great catering push. Feeling his body close to her, she rested her head on his shoulder, her hand still holding softly around her throat.

“You okay, baby?”

“I guess.” She sat in silence with him, just feeling the warmth of his hand on her knee until she was calm again. Soon she looked over at him, his rumpled hair, the smell of rosemary and olive oil about him. And, with quiet attention, he turned and kissed her gently smiling mouth. They dreamed into each other this way until she could feel herself again. Then, with his arms around her, he lifted her onto his lap where she faced him, legs and arms encircling, her skirt loose and high around her thighs. They made love there on the hard piano bench, her hands finally pressing onto the keys in discordant tones of abandon. From her lips the most exquisite sound emerged that rose up through the whole house, and he sighed with relishing pleasure to hear such a tender and ecstatic cry.

When they became still again, sitting entwined on the bench, he pressed his ear up against the middle of her chest, and his breath grew soundless. Even the house had calmed its constant quiet chatter.

“Your heart sounds like liquid or air. It’s strange to really hear it, how it sounds different than you always assume it sounds.”

“What is it saying?”

Looking up at her with transparent eyes that searched back and forth, he seemed to decipher her. “It says you have needed more from me than I have known how to give.”

“I’m scared all the time, Richard,” she whispered, leaning pursed lips against his forehead.

“I don’t want you to be scared, but I think I know what you mean.”

They stayed like that for a long time in the quietly murmuring house, and she felt how its walls held her safe and captive, peaceful and frozen, and how its hollowness had located and amplified some deep echo within her. And as she ran her fingers through her lover’s hair, she decided she would play the piano.

Eliza turned, still sitting on Richard’s lap, and played the simple song her mother first taught her when she was only eight. It came as easily as it had the year she stopped playing, the year her mother died. She felt her mother’s softness next to her on the bench, her slender fingers pointing to one key, then the next, how she smelled of orange marmalade, and how sweet her voice sounded so close in her ear, the same sound as tea being poured into a china cup. And as Eliza collapsed after just a few bars, leaning over the keys, Richard laid his large hands over hers, and their fingers interlaced and drew inward until she was held entirely by him. It was then that the throbbing in her throat which had formed and reached up now released into the air in weeping that found its way from deep in her belly. Richard took both her hands and crossed them in front of her, holding her tightly until the last tear fell onto the ivory keys like rain trickling into the cracks.

Bonnie Freestone, M.A., writes, dances, improvises and facilitates somatic-healing. In the past four years, she has taught and performed improvised movement and storytelling, collaborating with other artists on dance and theater productions in Asheville. She has written poetry, plays, stories and journals since she was a child.

About Resonance–“Resonance” was inspired by a peculiarly reverberating old house and a complex compelling relationship: one seemed to magnify the other. As often happens with art, I found this piece developed intuitively, mirroring the desire to give my inner world a stronger voice.

Editor’s Note: Nancy Williams, Coordinator of Professional Education Programs at UNC Asheville, is also the Administrator of the Great Smokies Writing Program. She has worked as a university administrator for over 25 years, winning numerous awards for contributions to the field of student affairs. She is a recipient of the North Carolina Governor’s Award for Excellence, the highest honor a state employee may receive for performance.

But wait, there’s more. Nancy is a regular columnist for the Asheville Citizen-Times.

Whether it’s writing about being a mom who feels a failure at scrapbooking, or a frugal woman who gives blood to get free snacks, Nancy offers, week after week, unconventional takes on conventional topics that her readers find informative and entertaining.  In typical Nancy fashion, when The Great Smokies Review asked her to talk about her experiences as a newspaper columnist, she chose to interview herself.

Nancy Williams

Why did you decide to interview yourself for this piece?

I figure it’s my best and maybe only chance to be interviewed and get that little butterfly you get in your stomach when you realize you’ve reached a status such that someone other than your therapist wants to ask you questions about yourself. I’m quite honored. In fact, I’m blushing.

What made you decide to be a writer?

I didn’t decide. I’m still thinking about it. Mostly I’m a talker trying to capture on paper the chatter in my head.

Honestly, I went to college as a math major. Then at the end of the first year, I decided to drop out because I couldn’t finish the freshman English essay assignment I’d been given. I mean, how ridiculous to expect a math person to write a paper. As a first-generation college student, I didn’t have a clue that I could just pack up and go home. I thought my English teacher had to sign my withdrawal form before I could leave. When I took the form to her, she wouldn’t sign it. She forced me to sit in her office and tell her a story. Then she told me to write it down. That was the one-page paper. It wasn’t great, but it was done.  Afterwards, on the way to turn in my exit papers, I got distracted and sort of never left.

What have you found most difficult about writing a regular column?

The deadline is a good thing and a dreadful thing. Due dates encourage but also torment writers. The other hard thing was adjusting to the culture of a newspaper. No, I say, you cannot chop off the last paragraph of a piece I write, so it will fit the space. Yes, they say, we can and we did.

How did your assignment to write the column come about?

I used to write bi-weekly on the Op-Ed page. The people in power liked it but thought I was better suited for the Living section, because the Op-Ed page is more issue-based. I assured them I have issues. But they kicked me off that page and back to the Living section, among the recipes, weddings and obits.

What was your fear about agreeing to a weekly column?

That I’d run out of things to say. My college-aged son fell laughing in the floor when I said that. Snorted too. Trying to keep a straight face, he said if I ever run out of things to say, he guesses I’d just sit there catatonic. More snorts.

You write about family, but you don’t use their names… why not?

Mostly because of fear of lawsuits. As I understand it, if I use their names, they could sue me someday, but if I make generic references to them, they don’t have a leg to stand on.

How many children do you have?

It depends. And I don’t count them precisely, except to file taxes. Usually I approximate, based on how many it feels like I have. Some days it feels like I have six or eight—when I’m buying groceries (again) and figuring out transportation plans. Other days it feels like I don’t have any, like when I need help cleaning out the garage.

How would you describe your writing style?

I don’t know that I have a style per se. I’ve been told I have a distinct voice. (Actually, I have several voices in my head—something my son has asked me to not mention.)

If the question pertains to the mechanics of writing: I use ellipses more than most… and thrive on sentence fragments. (Good thoughts don’t necessarily come packaged in proper sentences.) I’m also fond of parenthesis. (Really I am.)

Do you know when you’ve written something especially well? And conversely do you know when you’ve turned in something that isn’t your best?

I know how I feel about most columns, but can never predict how any one of them will be received by others. I revel in the “loved it” notes I get from Bruce, my editor, after I turn a piece in. But it took me a while to realize those are more dependent on how busy Bruce is or his mood than on the quality of a column.

What have you been most proud of as a writer?

Maybe that I produced a writer. My son also loves words. He writes for his college newspaper as does one of his roommates. There are “word challenges” they assign to each other where they have to work a certain word into a piece. When he successfully got “artificial sweetener” smoothly worked into a column about voting, it made me teary. I was so proud.

Another highlight came when I wrote a piece for Super Bowl Sunday, which ran in the Sports section of the paper. This, after a lifetime superlative of “Least Likely to Be Able to Pick a Football Out of a Lineup of Sports Equipment.”

Could you see yourself doing this as a full-time endeavor?

It kind of already is a full-time endeavor. It’s less about writing than it is about seeing—a way of watching that I can’t turn off. It’s always on. But if you’re asking if I see myself taking on a bigger project, the answer is no.

I’ll admit, though, that I spend time thinking of book titles in case I ever did accidentally write one. That keeps me highly entertained and is a lot less work than actually producing the book itself. (Today’s book title is: Trolls with buzz cuts: A collection of all the toys, pets, and siblings my young son cut or shaved the hair off of.)

Who has influenced your writing?

The influences have been more types of people than specific people. One type has been the encouragers. People who are supportive and provide “yes you can” messages because they really believe in another person. Those who provide, instead of empty praise, genuine support.

Through the Great Smokies Writing Program, I’ve met some very accomplished and talented writers—the faculty and the students. I’ve been surprised by how even they, despite having proven gifts for writing, are still a little nervous and uncertain. The encouragement writers get from others is so important.

The other type of person who has influenced me is the corrector. Those who will tell you the truth, although it might not be what you want to hear. Something you can do differently to be better. Critical feedback and redirection. These people are rare, and I treasure them when I find them.

Do you get a lot of reader feedback about your work?

Certainly a highlight of writing is the reader feedback I get. That someone takes time to send a note delights me. Every time I’m genuinely surprised and blind-sided with joy. Like a version of Sally Fields at the Academy Awards. “Really? You really read it?”

Of the notes I get, 99 percent are positive. Some are far funnier than the column I wrote that inspired the feedback. Some are touching. Twice I think I’ve heard from people I inadvertently offended. Only one time have I gotten a really nasty note—a person who wrote accusing me of being a liberal and stating, after a full-page rant, that he was waiting for me to die. I thanked him for taking the time to write.

Are there themes you find in your writing?

Yes. I return over and over again to caring for others with their imperfections. Real is better. Love the person, love the warts. Don’t ignore warts, accept them. I also believe in finding the silver lining of almost any situation. Sometimes you have to dig for it. Scratch and claw. But it’s there. A smile to be had and genuine joy waiting to be found. That sounds so sappy as I say it. But I really believe it.

Any topics off limits?

A few. In-laws, employers, and the number of husbands my sisters have had.

Do you have hobbies other than writing?

I maintain (and will forevermore) that I’d give Martha Stewart a run for her money in a showdown of domestic skills (without her staff of hundreds of course). Just Martha and me. To the mat. I’ve also been practicing narration of my cooking. Like Rachel Ray, Nancy Nan has a ring to it. So I’m ready, should the call ever come.

What’s ahead for you?

This past summer I took a Great Smokies Writing Program class, just for the heck of it. Loved it. I typically write alone (not counting the voices) and am fine with writing as a solo venture. However, I enjoyed immensely the camaraderie of fellow writers in the class I took. I’ll be watching for more opportunities to interact with that special community.

I just have to ask: do the nutty things you tell really happen? Surely you exaggerate or embellish them?

Surely I do not. In fact, if anything, I sometimes dilute a story, leaving out some detail that would make a preposterous tale even more so. As Jack Nicholson once said, “You can’t handle the truth.”

The crazy things I write about are the same things that happen to all of us. The art is in recognizing fun when it slaps you in the face.

Nancy can be reached at nwilliam@unca.edu.

She Says Yes to It All

Maryedith Burrell

If you go to YouTube and search for the Fridays TV series segment, “The Praise Satan Show,” you’ll find Lucinda, the show’s deliciously satanic hostess. Or search for “The Muppet Hunt” and check out the straight-faced girl reporter. Both are played by the seasoned actor-writer Maryedith Burrell, one of the regulars on the show that was ABC’s answer to Saturday Night Live during the early 1980s. Along with Larry David–yes, of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame–Maryedith wrote and acted for these and other classic Fridays sketches.

These comedic vignettes showcase the skills of a self-described “creative hyphenate.”  Maryedith, who is now a Master of Liberal Arts student at the University of North Carolina Asheville and will teach screenwriting in its Great Smokies Writing Program in the spring, has had a decades-long career as a stage/TV/film actor and TV/film writer and producer. These are roles she continues to juggle. She is currently writing fiction, producing a documentary, and creating a one-woman play–all while attending her MLA classes. Before leaving town for a summer assignment in New Mexico, Maryedith found time to talk about her life and career, and the path that has led from her home state of California to her new home in Asheville.

Maryedith grew up in Gilroy, California, a small farming town near San Francisco, which is known (by those who make it a point to know such things) as the garlic capital of the world. Fittingly, Garlic Girl is the tentative title of a collection of short stories set in California from 1965-1985 that Maryedith is working on now.

After attending a Catholic girls’ high school on scholarship, she headed to UC  Santa Cruz, working and studying simultaneously with The American Conservatory Theatre and The San Francisco Mime Troupe in San Francisco. Planted firmly in the land of the West Coast literati, Maryedith acted alongside future stars such as Annette Bening and Peter Coyote. That experience was “a disciplined training ground for classical theater,” she said. “I had teachers in college and teachers at ACT. The common practice at ACT was to take classes and have minor roles on stage. There were no teachers at The Mime Troupe. There, I learned on the job doing street theater.”

Maryedith carried her freewheeling creativity back to her UCSC study, inventing for herself a major in aesthestics. “This was an independent major,” she said. “One of the reasons I now like being in the MLA program at UNC Asheville is that I like studying in an inter-disciplinary way.”

After two terms at UCSC, Maryedith transferred to UC Los Angeles, where, as a student in its Theatre Arts Program, she won the Hugh O’Brian acting award, named for the actor famous for playing TV’s Wyatt Earp. One of the judges happened to be Jack Lemmon, who, impressed by Maryedith’s talents, gave her his phone number and offered to help with her budding acting career. This contact opened doors, including getting an agent and appearing on Days of our Lives. Another “byproduct” of winning the award was working with Alan Alda as a guest-star on the TV show M*A*S*H.

During the 1970s, while still a college student, Maryedith took a temporary leap from California to London when she was asked to work with The Royal Shakespeare Company by director Peter Brook. “We met at a Teatro Campesino workshop in San Juan Bautista, California,” she said, “when I was still a student and he was touring the country with the company and his production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”  Peter Brook was just one of Maryedith’s mentors during that time.  While working in the publicity department of Westwood Playhouse, she met Jason Robards, Gena Rowlands, and Shelley Winters, and a number of writers and producers who taught her lessons about forming a career that would include writing as well as acting.

To hone her creative hyphenate talents, Maryedith joined The Groundlings, an improvisational theatre company that was a training ground for comedians such as Phil Hartman and Lisa Kudrow. The Groundlings (and its connections) led to her first TV writing assignment, for The Life and Times of Eddie Roberts, a new show by the creator of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Ann Marcus. In addition to The Groundlings, Maryedith has performed with other improv groups over the years, including The War Babies, Second City, The Comedy Store Players, Sills And Company and The Spolin Players. This work offered not only the opportunity to write and perform at the same time, but also to be part of an ensemble and to appreciate the importance of teamwork.

For those who dream of life in the entertainment industry, Maryedith offered this caveat: “Be prepared to take on millions of jobs when you’re starting out.” Add Maryedith’s talent and energy to the mix, and those disparate jobs will clump into a meaningful shape.  Case in point: during the 1980s, Maryedith dug into what she described as “the mother lode of creative work on TV.”  After the Fridays show ended in 1982, she starred in two other TV shows, did a few films, wrote a number of movies and acted in “a few,” including Kiss Me Goodbye, starring Jeff Bridges and Sally Field.

Also during the 1980s, Maryedith was tapped by Shelley Duvall, whom she’d met when Duvall was a guest host on Fridays, to write five programs for the successful Faerie Tale Theatre. Big names in the film world who would not normally work in TV signed on for this venture, which made it especially fun for Maryedith. She watched actors and directors such as Carrie Fisher, Francis Ford Coppola, Lee Remick, Burgess Meredith, and Tim Burton bringing life to her scripts.

Characteristic of someone who networked well and created multifaceted work throughout her career, Maryedith continued to “say yes.” The 1990s saw her starring in two more TV series, taking countless recurring roles and guest shots on others, acting in films, doing voice-overs for cartoons, and writing more movies. One of the movie assignments came from a former colleague of hers at The Groundlings who had become head of TV movies for NBC. Impressed with the work she’d done for Duvall’s series, he asked her to write the teleplay for her first TV movie, Little Match Girl.

From that point until today, Maryedith has constructed a successful career of writing for film/television (17 written and 12 produced) and acting in film and TV. Notably, she snagged a three-year deal with Disney Studios to create original TV programming, and she even turned a hand to ghost writing, for films that include The Little Mermaid and Casper.

The new millennium finds Maryedith with creative pick in hand, still mining that vein of entertainment-world gold. Since 2000, she has written a screenplay for Universal Studios, signed a deal with Sony to write the biography of Emily Post, and is having a script shopped by the producer of Super 8. She has also written a one-act play, Maxine Upwell, which was originally produced in LA and has been submitted to other one-act festivals around the country.

As if to leave no genre unturned, Maryedith created her first documentary, The Road To Miss America, in the 1990s and has continued to work in documentaries ever since. Her most recent assignment is as story producer on a feature film documentary showcasing Paws and Stripes, an organization for wounded veterans that provides service dogs for soldiers with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injury.

With a foot successfully planted in the present, Maryedith has an eye toward what’s next. Her decision to move to Asheville and enter the MLA program at UNC Asheville is testament to that. She realized that her success in writing historical screenplays could translate into writing history-based fiction and chose this program for the craft lessons she needed to take that next step. Garlic Girl, the story collection she is completing as part of her MLA work, is a genre she has dubbed “historical pop culture.” She explained, “This is a time and place of great personalities. Cesar Chavez, Angela Davis, and Patty Hearst, to name a few.” The cultural/political movements and historical events of the time thread through the stories, such as the rise of the conservative right wing, the influence of the Black Panthers, and the inception of the AIDS epidemic.

About this new work, Maryedith said, “Over the years my screen-, stage-, and tele-play writing has been fairly equally divided between original material and assignments. That’s why Fridays was so much fun. I got to do that a lot, whereas as an actor you rarely have the luxury of creating your own material. I’ve had that luxury on and off in the past, but now, I can concentrate almost entirely on what I love.”

And she is doing that from her new home base in Asheville. Having made the decision to leave Los Angeles, her stomping ground for over 20 years, Maryedith set out to relocate with a checklist of requisites in hand.  “Asheville had nine out of ten,” she said. (The tenth item on her list was an ocean, which not even Asheville could provide.) “Good cappuccino, a lot of colleges—meaning a lot of thinkers—an international community, theatre, good restaurants, a house I loved in a neighborhood I loved, and the kind of graduate program I was looking for, one that provides discipline and the incentive to write. I have a wonderful program, wonderful professors—for example, Tommy Hays and Holly Iglesias, who is also my advisor. My fellow students represent such diversity—younger, older, students who split their year between another country and here. I feel that I lucked out. Asheville has been a very welcoming community for me.”

At the end of our conversation, Maryedith provided some unique advice for budding writers, no matter what the genre, no matter how hyphenated their creativity:  “Join a gym and exercise.  Get out of your head and into your body.  Exercise helps you maintain your health and sanity.”  She added, smiling, “Get a lot of life experience.”

Nancy Russell-Forsythe is a member of the Great Smokies Writing Program. She has published fiction and non-fiction pieces in The Rambler, Verve and WNC Woman. Currently she is writing a novel based on the early Civil Rights Movement in North Carolina. She is President of Leadership Bridge, a consulting firm, and teaches career development at area correctional centers as an adjunct instructor of UNC Asheville.

While on vacation in Quebec City, I went to a free showing of Cirque du Soleil. It took place in the muggy depths of the city. The stage was tucked in the corner of a hilly area behind a field of gravel. Everyone attending had to stand up. We were crushed in together; eagerly craning our necks to catch a glimpse of the strange performers who bounded across the stage. They were unearthly creatures, garbed in spandex like a second skin. Their faces were masks of chalky paint; they were constantly twisting, impossibly limber. They juggled fire, walked on tightropes, and flipped off trampolines. One woman spread feathery wings that sliced through the air as she twirled.  Another woman mirrored her, her face a mask of harsh lines and her pirouettes more like violent kicks. Her sharp eyes were always focused on the woman in white, and she followed her like a creeping shadow.

I was reminded irresistibly of the eternal battle of the white swan and the black swan from Swan Lake as these other two dancers wove around each other, barely avoiding aggressive collision. Whether intentional or not, there was a classic story in this performance, one that had endured and been reinterpreted many times over the years.

When one is a writer or a story enthusiast, one can find a familiar story hidden in any performance. Much like we form images in our mind when we read tales, images can form tales in our minds. The visual is always inherently related to the textual. A simple image or dance can embody a thousand concepts, and a million images can spring from a single sentence. Even if something does not mean to reference a piece of writing, certain tales are inlaid so deeply in the foundation of our culture that we cannot help but think of them when events play out before our eyes. Performances create their own world of words, and words create their own world of cinema.

As I watched the frenzied Cirque du Soleil performance, ideas were stimulated in my mind. Inexplicably, I started spinning plans for stories that had nothing at all to do with the themes of this performance. I weaved tales about the nature of stories, about people trapped in that ever-changing, interconnected web of worlds where fiction and reality are the same. Something about the atmosphere of this dance simply moved me; inspiration was thick in the air. The unearthly masks of paint the actors wore did not merely transform their appearance. They allowed the actors to make themselves fictional characters- beings of pure fantasy with a script written out for them, concepts borne from imagination that nevertheless had a real person pulling their strings. It seemed to me that all performers are writers in some fashion because they all play out their own vision of their character’s story.

I left this cinematic experience with a new understanding of how deeply storytelling was imbedded in every facet of life and performing. The mind was theatre that never stops broadcasting.

Despite all this miraculous understanding and birth of new ideas, when I got home and sat down to write, the images and tales that had flooded my brain instantly evaporated. Without the electric atmosphere of the crowded stage and the energetic rush I felt from watching a hidden story unfold before my eyes, I found that my imagination was an unknowable mush, any new revelations hidden in a  mess of nonsense. I stared at the document I had bought up on Word in vain hope that the story to end all stories would miraculously beam from the unconscious depths of my jumbled brain to the blank page. It didn’t happen.

It appeared  that what I had failed to realize about this wonderful theatre of the mind was that sometimes it chose to simply broadcast static.

Caitlin Donovan was born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina and is currently attending UNC Asheville. She is pursuing a Literature/Creative Writing Degree at the college. Her family consists of her mother, father, and some lovable felines. She enjoys writing poetry, short stories, and books. Fantasy is her favorite genre. Her prose piece “Passion Vine Wine” was published in the 2011 edition of UNC Asheville’s literary magazine, Headwaters. She also assisted Headwaters editorially. She is currently working as an intern for The Great Smokies Review.

According to the New York Times, there have been 18 film adaptations of Jane Eyre, 19 if you count I Walked with a Zombie. In the midst of this summer’s heat wave, I sought refuge at a movie theater where the latest version was playing. A total of six people sat in the audience, all of us old enough to have seen several versions. Still, we held our collective breath as on screen the otherwise astute heroine failed to realize that the strange sounds emanating from the attic were in fact the ravings of her beloved employer/fiancé’s first wife.

I knew all about the first wife in the attic. The whole audience knew. Poor Jane didn’t catch on until she saw the madwoman, in the flesh, with her own eyes. That’s what movies do: they let you see things with your own eyes.

I believe that literature—by which I mean printed writing written with thought and structure and meaning and on good days with imagination and flair—has given movies their most memorable characters, meaningful images, and magnificent landscapes. Movies, in turn, have transformed precious moments off the printed page into pictures so vivid and compelling we don’t just watch them, we experience them with all the intensity of being there. At best, movies and literature have a beneficial relationship wherein one enhances appreciation for the other. At worst, the relationship devolves into diminishing returns including television series, comics, cartoons, computer games, sequels, prequels, take-offs, spin-offs, and, of course, remakes.

One of my pleasures while viewing a movie made from a book is identifying what filmmakers got right (i.e., visualized the way I visualized it when I read it) and what they got wrong, either because they left something out or their interpretation was misguided (i.e., different from mine).

I also enjoy identifying a film’s sources, obvious or obscure. Recently, for example, I saw a movie claiming to be a modern update of an old-fashioned western. When the protagonist rode into town silent and alone, I recognized him at once both as an archetypal cowboy and as the latest incarnation of Jane’s Mr. Rochester. Think about it: a strong, gruff, reticent hero, feeling guilty about his first wife, who in this case had been abducted by aliens.

Since at least 1910, when the first Jane Eyre movie appeared, literature has inspired films. A hundred years later, films are still made from books. The difference is that, now, movies shape how books are written. Today’s writers write in scenes; describe characters in close-up; show action through a wide-screen lens; avoid exposition and introspection. Editors and audiences encourage them to cut to the chase.

After much discussion about which Jane Eyre is the most authentic, which Rochester the most appealing, I re-read the book. For me, Brontë, despite overwritten passages and overwrought ruminations, aimless meanderings and perplexing detours, trumps all imitators and adaptors. Only she has the freedom the printed word affords to go where the story goes, accept characters in all their humanity, and look at life in all its complexity, without having to force it into a short form dictated by common wisdom and designed for current taste. That is why her work endures, in my opinion, in a variety of forms, ever changing but always essentially the same.

Judi Goldenberg, Assistant Editor of The Great Smokies Review, was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She first came to North Carolina for graduate school and returned years later with husband Joe for their retirement. She was a college teacher, a market research analyst at an ad agency, and a marketing and communications manager at a bank. Her book reviews have appeared in the Richmond News-Leader and Times-Dispatch, American Book Review, and continue to appear in Publishers Weekly. She has also published short stories in small literary journals. For two years, she was a local columnist for the Asheville Citizen-Times.