by Mesha Maren
She opened her eyes. The pistol glinted. She brought her arm back and then up, her fingers loosening, the weight of the gun springing away as it arced out into the night. In the silence after it landed she could hear the forest around her, the secret sound of things decaying, and the river out there, slipping on between its banks.
In the later hours of the night, rain fell and brought with it a fog that curled along the bottoms of the branches. Jodi followed the river south, back toward town, her feet steadier now on the flat expanse of low ground. After a while, a great exhaustion washed over her, exhaustion that was also a form of sweet relief. There was nothing then but the darkness, the layers of it fragmenting before her, and the steady murmur of the trees stretching over a landscape so old it was half hidden in itself, a land that had been sinking for so long its surface was only a scrim over the density that lay below. It was this, Jodi thought, this thick secrecy that haunted her, kept her coming back and wanting more, dreaming of the place even when she was in the midst of it. Like a lover who never tells all so that even in the throes of passion you cannot help but notice the melancholic taste of unknown scars and memories.
By the time she reached the caves it was early morning. The ground was wet underfoot and the air still tasted of smoke but from what Jodi could see the flames were gone. She had avoided the road and Effie’s land and borrowed on some older sense of direction that in her exhaustion made a simple kind of sense.
She found the entrance and crumpled for a moment, there in the leaves. Then, pushing on, she flattened her body and pulled herself through, into the comfort of darkness and then on again, until she found the narrow channel beyond the white cake.
Out on the rock platform the wind lifted and curled around her. From there she could see the dawn paling above the dark trees and the mountains opening. Beyond the bit of land that once belonged to her, beyond the cabin and all that familiar, there was more.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Randal O’Wain most of all, for inspiring me every day, for encouraging me to be an art monster, for always reading, listening, and loving me.
Thank you to my parents, Anne and Sam Maren-Hogan, for all your support through the years. I love you so much.
Bill Clegg, you are absolutely the best and I am endlessly grateful for you.
Lauren Groff, you believed in me when I needed it most. I am truly so lucky to have crossed paths with you.
Katherine Min, you saw something in me back in the very beginning and I don’t think I would be here without you.
And a huge thank-you to my readers. This book wouldn’t be half as good without you:
Kathy Pories
Claire Falkenberg
Adam Jernigan
Juliet Escoria
Fred Leebron
Pinckney Benedict
Naeem Murr
Justin Wymer
Antonio Del Toro
Grant Gerald Miller
Blake Butler
Matt Borondy
Patrick Kukucka
Thanks to the Iowa City Public Library for your wonderful little study rooms, where most of this book was written. And thank you to the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Elizabeth George Foundation for your financial support and the Ucross Foundation and the MacDowell Colony for the time and space.
And thank you so much to Chris Clemans, Simon Toop, Henry Rabinowitz, Drew Zagami, Jillian Buckley, and the rest of the crew over at the Clegg Agency. And a huge thank you to Michael McKenzie, Brunson Hoole, Jude Grant, and everyone at Algonquin!
About the Author
Mesha Maren’s short stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, the Oxford American, Southern Culture, Hobart, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an Appalachian Writing Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She is the 2018–2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and also serves as a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the Beckley Federal Correctional Institution.
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2019 by Mesha Maren.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011885
eISBN: 978-1-61620-888-2
