Nels Hanson
Butterfly House "It's cooling off," Delmus said without turning from the sagging screen. "Yes," I said. "Whatever that means." "I know," I said. "Here you go—" We didn't say "rain" or "raisins" as I balanced the saucer on the porch's sill, next to the sharpened knife for the pig Delmus and his friends would butcher in the morning. Had Kate remembered the corncobs for its last meal? The night breeze from the northwest stirred the catalpa's white blossoms and blew through the porch screen. Across the barnyard I could see Kate's white skirt and t-shirt—like a wedding dress—over by the peach tree and the garbage drum. "Eddie Dodge," the wind said now, not "storm" or "hurricane." Kate held the white plastic bag in the crook of her arm, as if she supported a baby— "I'll do the dishes," I said. "Need help?" Delmus lifted the cup. "No, have your coffee." I watched Kate standing alone in the blowing dark, like a bride still waiting for the groom after all the guests had gone home, then turned back toward the light. The kitchen felt hot and close, like my mother's sealed room that smelled of stale orange perfume and stinging whiskey, after the cool night air of the porch. "Shut the window," Dolly Mable had said that first afternoon. "The butterfly will get away." I ran more water over the stacked pots, then stood at the half-sink of fresh soapy water, hesitating before I felt for a plate, looking out the window at the purple Hollywood plum as a last quail called a sudden warning— Somewhere the Standpipe Strangler was on the move. The changing leaves caught the overhead light, rising and falling back into shadow beyond the white reflection of my face that looked older and paler than both my daughter's and my mother's. They could have been twins, Kate and the young Dolly Mable who wore the velvet dress and the butterfly brooch in the picture on the night table, beside the monogrammed silver mirror and brush and the yellow cover of The Book of Changes. The plum tree swung like a black wave and I knew fall was coming, the season was changing, the hot streak ending—40 days in a row of 100 degrees or better. "If we make it through harvest I'll slide the winter clothes from the end of the closet and wear the wool jacket that needs a leather button," I almost said to the lit stranger in the pane but she already knew. It would freeze and the grape leaves fall and after pruning there would be just the black stumps and untied canes and the long wires that ran the length of each row— The pattern shifted when you moved—50,000 five-foot stakes and a hundred dark wires an eighth of a mile long jumping, rearranging, not straight but flashing in endless diagonals, pointing toward you in sharp, multiple Vs. Take a step and the whole thing changed again, instantly, so wherever you stood all lines aimed toward you. Then I would understand everything—Dolly Mable sending me to live with the Lawrences and my leaving them to become a nurse and Delmus getting hurt in the war had all been set, arranged beforehand, so we would meet at the hospital and marry and have Kate and live together on the farm. And make a place for Dolly Mable to stay, so Kate could meet Dolly's one-day chauffeur? The blowing plum branches came alive, scratching like claws against the pane and I watched my face, chalky and too bare with the wide night behind it. I blinked, leaning back from the glass. Everything was connected, all the planets and stars, not by wires in rows but by some crazy giant's cat's cradle, like the spider webs stretched across the vineyard in the morning light. My forgotten graceful ageless mother must have felt a tug in Acacia, 40 miles away, when I dropped the crystal goblet I'd taken down from the cupboard to dust, thinking of old wine. Or maybe it was only a shingle blowing from the roof one night— I watched the swaying plum limb, the hanging iron dinner gong beginning to rock. Once in December Delmus strung lights through the bare branches and hit the curved plate for Kate and me to come look. The tree bore large green and red and blue penumbras—that's what they were called—like luscious winter fruit coloring the heavy fog and I wished I could pick one and taste its cool sweetness. Now I wanted to go out and ring the old gong, ring it and ring it until something changed, I didn't care what, Kate or Delmus, the weather or Dolly Mable. I turned from the sink and my white face like a mask, leaving the pots and dishes untouched, in one motion pouring a cup of steaming coffee and lifting it to my lips— Ring… Ring…. I almost burned myself, surprised by the sudden phone. I set the cup down and stepped to the counter below the glass-doored cupboard, watching the white-numbered dial on the slanting black face, the receiver like a bull's down-turned horns. "Kyla?" Delmus called from the porch. "Yes, I've got it." "If it's Briggs I'll talk to him." "Delmus? Are you there?" "No, this is Kyla. Can I ask who's calling?" "Gladys." "Is it Briggs with the raisin bins?" Delmus called. "Gladys?" I said. "Gladys Clark!" "Oh, Gladys—" I gripped the phone tighter. Delmus' Uncle Baylor had the hearing handicap, he'd been kicked by the pinto horse 30 years ago. Gladys made all his calls while he told her what to say. "Who is it?" Delmus called again. "Gladys! Gladys calling for Baylor!" "Hello? You there, Kyla?" "Is something wrong?" I asked. "Oh. Baylor wanted me to phone. He wanted to talk to Delmus." "Just a minute. Delmus was here a while ago. Let me see if he's still on the porch." I covered the receiver. "Delmus, do you want to talk to her?" "No, would you handle it?" I took a breath. "Delmus must have gone outside." "Would you get him please?" "He went to town. The car's gone." "Just now?" What…No…House…Wait…Ask…Go…. I could hear Baylor and Gladys talking. "When's he going to be back?" "I don't know," I said, "but when he comes in I'm sure he'll go straight to bed. Baylor's going to see Delmus tomorrow, at the harvest party." I glanced down at my hand, at my ring, waiting as Gladys told Baylor. "Baylor says I should talk to you." "Is it the hog's heart?" I said to cut Gladys short. Each year Baylor asked for the heart, Gladys cooked it a special way, in a paper bag. Once it caught fire. "He has a question you can answer." What did it matter now, if Kate gave the pig the corncobs or not? "Gladys, Delmus already knows about the heart." "No, not that. Some history thing." "Well Baylor should talk to Delmus. I don't know any history." "He says you're the one to tell him. What's that, Baylor?" I looked over at the full sink, at the pile of pans, one inside the other, like round Chinese boxes. The coffee cup sat out of reach on the counter. "Where Mrs. Grayson's from." "Why?" I stared down at the telephone, at the old numbered dial. Now the kitchen felt messy and confused, I wanted to clean it up right away. "He says it's a project, something he's studying." "What project?" "He says Mrs. Grayson's an old-timer. What? Oh, she probably remembers a lot of early history." "No," I said. "She doesn't—" Gladys mumbled something. "It's for his newspaper column. 'The Way It Happened.' I mean 'Was'—" "I've got food on the stove." "Wait. Baylor wants to talk to her. He'll come by tomorrow, after the pig." "Gladys! Can you hear me?" "Baylor's the one with the hearing aid." "I know that. You need to listen very carefully now. Mrs. Grayson is ill. She can't see anyone. Can you tell Baylor that?" "Could he talk to her on the phone?" "Absolutely not. I can't allow it." Hot…I don't…Oh…Ask her…. "Why not?" Gladys asked. "She's much too weak. I'd be breaking my oath as a nurse." "You're a nurse?" "You know that." "I never did." Gladys paused. "Did you see on TV, where the little girl died, the one that got the heart?" The baby's name was Janie Janzen, she'd died the week before down at Loma Linda, at the transplant center. "Look," I said. "Why does Baylor need to talk to Mrs. Grayson?" I waited, glancing over at a mill wheel in the wallpaper. "Baylor says she knows something about the train robbers. Sontag and Evans." I felt a small wave of relief. "He says she lived down there, in Acacia." "No, she's from Merced." "She might know where they hid the gold." I laughed, I couldn't help it, not bothering to cover the receiver. So this was the new story Baylor had been working on, the one Mrs. Watkins mentioned at the mailbox after she asked about the blue car and Eddie Dodge and how Kate's red dress had got out by the road. "I was plum sure it was the Standpipe Strangler," she'd said, at her side the two chocolate Dobermans who'd pulled the scarlet dress from the line. "Baylor says the gold was from the Central Pacific." "That was a hundred years ago, she wasn't even born!" "He says her mother knew, that her mother was from Acacia. What?" I wanted to grab the coffee pot, throw it through the wire so it scalded both of them, Gladys and Baylor. "Mrs. Grayson"—I almost said "my mother"—"doesn't know anything about bandits or trains. She lived in Merced, her mother lived in Merced after she moved here from England." "Just a minute," Gladys said. I could hear the murmur of their talking. "Ask her about the guns," Baylor's voice said suddenly. "What guns?" How could Baylor know about my mother's gold derringer? "The guns Larry Jones found. What's that? Oh. You know," Gladys said, "the Mexicans." "I don't know what you're talking about." Again I saw the men drinking beer in the walnut's shade before Delmus got back from town, one of them pointing up at my mother's window. "The Mexican. Murrietta. The bandit. The guns Larry Jones found in the cave—" "Gladys—" I said, taking a breath. "Mrs. Grayson doesn't know anything—no guns, no gold, no stories. Nothing. Do you understand?" "Baylor has another question." "I've got to go." "He says Mrs. Grayson knows about some house." "What house?" "In Acacia. A great big one—" Again I noticed my face in the cupboard's glass. Did my mother really own a house, was it true she could sell it to help pay the mortgage? "Baylor says ten bedrooms—" When Sun Damsel went broke and I handed my mother the newspaper with the headline FARMERS' MECCA IN ECLIPSE I'd begun to cry and she had taken me in her arms, whispering that it would all work out, she'd sell the Acacia "property." How strange and good it felt to have a mother's arms around me, for a moment not to be one woman alone, under the moon and stars beyond the shadowed roof. "On Alma Street, a line of big trees—" I had remembered the lost children at the Fresno Fair waiting inside the square picket fence on the midway, until their mothers or fathers heard the names announced over the blaring loudspeaker. My hand in Mrs. Lawrence's, I had stared at their small forlorn faces, some pale, some weeping, and they were mine. But then my mother never mentioned the money again— "Baylor says it's, you know, a house. A butterfly house." She meant "airplane" house, like ones from the 1920s with roofs like swooping wings. "Gladys, I don't know what you're talking about. The pot's boiling over." "Mrs. Watkins told Baylor." "What's Mrs. Watkins got to do with it?" "She's the one found out—" "Found out what?" "She was famous." "Who was famous? Mrs. Watkins?" "Mrs. Grayson! It was hers." "The house?" "Yes! Mrs. Grayson was a madam down there." I saw my white face like a ghost's in the cupboard door, among the clean stacked dishes and saucers waiting for a funeral. "What?" "A madam—" Gladys said it again, matter-of-fact, as if she answered a question about a recipe. "Are you serious?" "What'd she say? What'd she say?" Baylor was asking. "She was a looker. That's what Mrs. Watkins said." "Gladys," I said. "You tell Baylor he's got it all wrong." "He does?" "There's a woman like that but it's not Mrs. Grayson." "There is?" "You and Baylor know her well." "Who's that?" "It's Mrs. Watkins!" "She was?" "Yes! You tell Baylor that!" "Oh. Baylor's not here right now—" I dropped the receiver, missing the cradle, so it fell over on the counter. I picked it up and slammed it down and went over and lifted my coffee. My hand was shaking, I had trouble getting the cup to my lips. I turned it over, dumping the coffee into the sink of soapy water. "Delmus!" "I know all about it. Baylor talked my goddamned ear off the other day." "Delmus, I want you to talk to Baylor. And Mrs.Watkins. Tomorrow morning. First thing—" "All right. I'm sure Baylor'll be around. He knows about the party. He's got to get his heart." "I'm serious, Delmus." "I know," Delmus answered. "Don't worry. I'll talk to both of them." I drained the brown coffee suds, then filled the sink with hot clean steaming water, squirting in a steady stream of white detergent from the plastic bottle with the dove on the label. I could feel the hot plates and silverware, but when I brought up a dish it looked strange, like something lifted from a dream. Someone had eaten off this plate painted with a golden apple and pear, twigs and three leaves while an open coffin rested on sawhorses in the living room. I turned on the faucet to rinse the soap and the screen door creaked. "Kate?" No answer and out the window I saw the shadowed supper gong that looked leaden, too dark and heavy, made of some extinct metal that would break the limb. When it rained, you could hear the fast heavy drops making little rings. I could hear their muffled talk, now one of them, it was Kate, clearly said, "Eddie Dodge." I stopped the tap and Kate was saying in a breaking voice, "I love you, Daddy. I just wanted you to know. So—" Then she was running through the kitchen, her face turned. "Kate?" But she was gone in a white blur, brown hair straight out. I heard her feet on the stairs. I took a step to go after her and stopped short, moving past the sink. I threw on the porch light. "What's she all upset about?" "Turn off that light, will you?" I flipped the switch. Delmus sat in the kitchen chair, his back turned, looking out at the barnyard. "What did she say?" He didn't answer but sat still in shadow. "Del?" "I don't think she wants to go to school." "She said that?" "She's tired of things. Like everybody else." "That's not it." I stood in the door's wedge of yellow light. "Kate's been talking to the old woman. She's been getting the wrong idea—" I hesitated. Now I had Delmus' attention. "Did she say anything about a boy?" "No," Delmus said, but he didn't look at me. "His name's Eddie Dodge." "Who's that?" Delmus cocked his head. "He brought Mrs. Grayson. You were out in the field when he came." The handsome blonde boy carried Dolly Mable through the kitchen and up the stairs, my mother in the rhinestones and purple velvet as Kate stood open-mouthed on the porch. Together the three of us pushed and pulled the black trunk like a coffin up to the room. Kate and he had lemonade on the lawn while I made Dolly's bed and from the chair she kept moaning that the butterfly would get away. As I shut the window I saw them standing together by the '30s blue Cadillac before Eddie Dodge drove off. "I think she's been sneaking out at night." "Mrs. Grayson?" "Delmus—" He looked at me, his face half in shadow, like that old-fashioned clown. Pagliacci. "Out in the field somewhere. Once I thought I heard her coming in late. Climbing the rose trellis." "When? I haven't heard anything." "Last week I picked up the phone and Kate was saying how it would all work out, the way it should have been with Mrs. Grayson and Ramon. Then a boy's voice said he didn't know, he hoped she was right. I'm sure it was him—" "Who?" "Eddie Dodge!" "Let's wait a while." Delmus glanced away, now his back was to me again. "Maybe things will look different in a month." "We can't wait a month." "We have to wait a month." "I know that. Believe me. It's just everything—" Delmus didn't answer. He sat there, slump-shouldered, looking out at the dark. Now the cool air at the screen frightened me again. "Do you really think it's going to rain three years in a row?" "Maybe. Everything's changing. It used to be you could see the Sierras every day." "What's that got to with anything?" I could have bitten my tongue in half. Delmus loved the mountains, he always talked so reverently about the Sierra Nevadas, as if God had lived there once and moved away. Wilson and Sawtooth, and Mt. Whitney, the tallest mountain in America, before Alaska became a state and they counted Mt. McKinley. We had lain out in the field of young vines, the Sierra peaks gold and orange, then pink in the darkening sky, high enough to reflect the sun fallen down behind the Coast Range. That was before the smog and we were married, when Delmus lived alone with his mother, Florence. "Maybe we should move." "You're kidding—" "Why not? This isn't the only place on Earth." "Delmus, what happened in town?" "Nothing. I just walked around." "Doing what?" "Looking at things, the old buildings, the new buildings where the old buildings used to be. I remembered my dad. Larry Jones. Aaron Winters. All the old timers, water witchers and treasure hunters. Wildcatters. I thought about going over to the museum, but I didn't." "Why're you talking about moving?" "I was thinking about Oregon." "What would we do there?" "I hadn't got that far." Oregon. The thought and sound of it were fresh, green and round. Far away from this. "Would you buy an apple farm?" "Apples, blueberries. Maybe roses. Anything the rain doesn't ruin. Hell, it rains all the time up there, it's no big thing. They like it." "You really want more rain? I could live a hundred years and never see another rain." "Same here." Across the barnyard the catalpa's white flowers blinked against the pale bulk of the barn, above its open door like a dark mouth where the pig would lie on the picnic table. "What would you do," I asked, "if you were me?" "You can't stop the rain. Or make the raisins worth more, Sun Damsel pay up. Or get the bank to lend us more money." "I know that." "The livestock people are buying raisins for feed, hogs and dairy cattle, makes the milk sweet. One hundred a ton. You've seen the trucks." "All week." "I hate to drive through the country anymore, every other farm's got a For Sale sign out front. Like a stake through the heart—" I remembered the poor pig, then Gladys and Baylor and Mrs. Watkins' story about Mrs. Grayson and the butterfly house. "You've got soup kitchens in Fresno, people walking the roads picking up cans. Fifteen percent unemployment. This isn't a recession, this is a full-blown Depression. I know, I've seen it before." "I know you have," I said. "Reagan says he's been reading the Bible, that these might be the final days before the end of the world. He may be right. These last few years have felt like a hundred. You always hear people say, 'In a 100 years,' '100 years old,' 'In a 100 years none of this will matter.'" He took a breath, lifting his chin. "I wonder," Delmus said, "if it matters at all." "It has to. After all we've been through—" "'Little of all we value here, / Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year, / Without feeling and looking queer.'" "What's that?" "'The Deacon's Masterpiece.'" Now Delmus turned, squinting in the yellow bug light. "'The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay.' Do you know it?" He waited eagerly, looking up at me. "No," I said, on guard. "Is it religious?" At supper he'd mentioned the Egyptian "ankh," symbol of immortality, how it looked like the sign for the female and the egg and Kate had looked away. "On November 1st, 1755," Delmus began, nodding, "a German deacon built a carriage that would last forever, never fall apart." "A deacon?" The Lawrences had made their deacon heir in their will, the crazy red-haired man who spoke in tongues and said people's faces kept changing, everywhere he looked he saw the devil. "He got all the rarest, toughest woods, oak, ash, special copper-plated screws, tempered iron for the wheel rims, heavy-duty spokes, axles, springs. He made every piece exactly even, nothing stronger or weaker, so it wouldn't rub or wear but just fill its place. Just fill its place. He finished it the same day the earthquake struck in Lisbon, Portugal." "Portugal?" "That's right. Years went by, the horses that pulled the shay died and the deacon bought new ones. Then the deacon finally died, his children took over, new deacons, one and then another. Then his grandchildren and two or three different teams of horses. The shay looked brand-new, not an hour older—" "It wasn't?" I could see it, blue with black wheels, like my mother's royal blue Cadillac Eddie Dodge had driven away— "Not a scratch or crack. No wear at all. It was perfect, built to last till the end of time." "It never wore out?" "On November 1st, 100 years to the day, while the deacon's grandson was driving it? The shay went poof!, dissolved to dust, all at once, every piece. The same second as the earthquake 100 years before. It's like Christian Rosenkreuz in reverse—his body was fresh 100 years later, it smelled like roses, when the Brothers of the Rosy Cross found his tomb in the castle." "Who wrote it?" Delmus' grandfather Ford had a shay. It was in town now, it had been for years, in the museum full of frontier dentists' and veterinarians' tools, hay rakes and plows, old guns. But not my mother's gold derringer, or Murrietta's ivory-handled Colt revolvers, they'd been stolen from Larry Jones' house 30 years ago. Baylor was after them now— "Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court judge." "It sounds like 'The Devil and Daniel Webster,' where the man's soul turns into a moth in a snuff box." That part in the movie had always got to me, the little box with bits of chewed paper and the moth that was a person's soul. A moth, not a butterfly. A butterfly house, Gladys said. "Same idea," Delmus said. "Didn't Daniel Webster invent the dictionary?" "I think it was Noah." "Delmus, remember when we used to read to each other at night?" We'd read hour after to hour, book after book, no TV, the radio turned off, just Delmus' voice and the quiet turning of the pages. Then I would read, and when we were tired we'd put "South Pacific" on the phonograph: "Some Enchanted Evening." "Bali Hai." "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair." Upstairs, Kate slept in her rabbit-patterned pajamas, at the window the trellis of crimson Lady of Spain roses. Now, since the rains, Delmus read crazy books alone and drank beer in the barn's lit doorway, in a cloud of moths like angels' wings. "You Can't Go Home Again. Of Time and the River. The Great Gatsby." "My Name Is Aram," I said. "By Saroyan." All those words and sentences and characters must still be stored somewhere in my head, like the books on Delmus' cobwebbed shelf by the divining rod. Like the library books I hid under the bed when I lived in Fresno with the Lawrences and memorized the Bible for the deacon who could see the devil's face hiding behind your face. "The Way It Was" Baylor's column was called. "Remember Wolfsheim?" "Who?" "Gatsby's benefactor. The Jewish gangster who fixed the World Series, the Black Sox Scandal?" "I don't remember," I said. Baylor's story would have a headline: Mrs. Grayson's Scarlet Past. "Wolfsheim wore cufflinks made of human teeth. He owned the Swastika Lending Company." "Did he?" "And Tom Buchanan, the villain, Daisy's husband? He was having the affair with Myrtle Wilson, the wife of the guy who owned the service station, in the Valley of Ashes?" "I remember him." "He kept trying to get Nick to read that book—" "What book?" "About the Nordics being threatened, the dark races taking over the world." "Oh." Delmus shook his head. "It was all there, only backwards, like in a mirror." "What was?" "World War II." He nodded. "The Holocaust. He used that exact word, for the double murder and suicide." "Wasn't F. Scott Fitzgerald related to Francis Scott Key?" I didn't want Delmus to start in about Fitzgerald's strange prediction, if that's what it was. Or remember poor Mr. Rosenbloom and the numbers tattooed on his wrist. He'd had a heart attack after he'd pulled off the highway and stopped to eat at the Branding Iron in town. As I'd slipped in the IV I saw the awful green ink and started to faint. "Fitzgerald was Ike's lieutenant at Fort Leavenworth. His sister married Admiral Sprague, the one who helped take Saipan. Iwo. Okinawa." "Didn't he have a drinking problem?" "I think so," Delmus said. "Gatsby was Christ, a kind of Christ." "I don't remember that." "That part about the Master's body being too hot to touch at noon? And the first night he made love to Daisy, when he was a solider—how the lines on the sidewalk made the rungs of a ladder, he could've climbed up to the stars if he hadn't stopped to love her?" "I've forgotten." "It was Jacob's ladder." Again I heard the catalpa's leaves and felt the night wind from the Pacific. Books, or memories of books, couldn't save you, I thought, not from rain or life's strange orbit. Or from Worlds in Collision, the tattered paperback I'd noticed on his oily workbench. "They killed each other's lovers." "Who did, Delmus?" "Tom and Daisy. In the book." "Oh," I said. "The book." "Daisy ran down Wilson's wife with Gatsby's car, Tom told Wilson where Gatsby lived, Wilson shot Gatsby in the swimming pool, then killed himself." It was like a story from The Fresno Bee, the Standpipe Strangler on the loose, who drowned his ravished victims in the irrigation cisterns. "I thought you were the killer," my mother had said, lowering the gold gun shining from the hall light. I stood in the doorway and realized I was still alive, the derringer hadn't fired. I'd smelled smoke, run up the stairs sure she'd set the room on fire with a cigarette. "You've got an awfully good memory." "There's times I wished I didn't," Delmus said. "I know the feeling." Wait a little longer, till your little wings are stronger, then, then you can fly away— Dolly Mable would read me the book about the bluebirds, the mother and child together on the branch, and I would put my hand across the page and make Dolly skip that part and promise we'd always be together in the house with the stained-glass door and the yellow butterfly with spread wings— I'd remembered this afternoon under the catalpa, watching the mourning dove cross the gold vineyard toward the blue gum grove, its wings moving in and out of light as if it crossed a bright ocean after a storm, before the heart-shaped leaves and the pendulous pods rustled and whispered, "Rain. Eddie Dodge." "Do you know, Kyla, when I was a boy and we'd go to town? My folks would tell me their lists, so they wouldn't forget. They never wrote them down." "Remember tonight," I said. "In six months remind me how I felt. When things are better." "All right," Delmus said. "I will." I began to giggle. "What's funny?" "And I'll remember the battery for the pickup." It had just come to me. Delmus had taken the car to town and forgotten. "Okay— " Delmus laughed. "Remind me tomorrow." "I'll try to remember—" A white catalpa flower went sailing down the wind. Naomi. Last night Delmus had called the name in his sleep, his closed lids lit by the white moon through the still gauze curtains. In the Lawrences' Old Testament she was the daughter-in-law of Ruth and had lost her husband. "She said to them, 'Do not call me Naomi, call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.'" "I only had one lover," I said suddenly, waiting. "I know," Delmus answered, without turning. "Same here." I opened the folding chair that leaned against the wall, then drew it up next to his. "Got it?" "Yes." Like Noah and his wife we sat listening to the wind from the sea. Nels Hanson has worked as a farmer, teacher, and writer/editor. He earned degrees from UC Santa Cruz and the U of Montana and received the San Francisco Foundation's James D. Phelan Award and a citation in its Joseph Henry Jackson competition. His stories have appeared in Antioch Review, Texas Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, Long Story, Short Story, South Dakota Review, Starry Night Review, and other journals. Stories are currently in press at Terrain, and the Overtime Chapbook Series at Blue Cubicle Press. |