The Far End of Happy

by Kathryn Craft

  What advice might you have for others considering a novel based on true events?

  I’d say take a lot of notes and don’t be in a rush to publish.

  Difficult life events require time to process. Do that work. I recall someone wise saying that the best literature about the 9/11 attacks would start to come out seven years after those events. Maybe that’s a random number, but it’s not a bad one to keep in mind. Although it is all about human emotion, literature is more than an outcry of grief or anger. Your reader has no interest in being dragged through the muck and mire of your existence unless they are going to gain new perspective about life. When you can offer that, you are ready to begin.

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  Read on for an excerpt from

  The Art of Falling

  by Kathryn Craft

  Available now from

  Sourcebooks Landmark

  CHAPTER ONE

  My muscles still won’t respond. It’s been hours since they promised a doctor, but no one has come. All I can do is lie on this bed, wishing for some small twinge to tell me exactly what is wrong. My body: a still life, with blankets.

  I’d settle for inching my foot back beneath the covers. I command my foot to flex. To point. To burrow beside its mate. It ignores me, as do my hands when I tell them to tend to the situation.

  Why has someone covered me so haphazardly? Or—could it be?—that in my dreams, I had somehow moved that foot? I will it to move again—now.

  It stays put.

  This standoff grows more frightening by the moment. If my focus weakens, I’ll fall prey to larger, hungrier questions. Only motion can soothe me; only sweat can wash away my fear.

  From somewhere to my right, I hear an old woman’s crackling cough. My eyes look toward the sound, but I am denied even this small diversion; a flimsy curtain hides her.

  I close my eyes against this new reality: the bed rails, a constant beeping over my shoulder, and the device clamped to my index finger. In my mind, I replace the flimsy curtain with a stretch of burgundy velour and relax into its weight. Sink. Deep. I replay each sweep, rise, and dramatic dip of Dmitri’s choreography. My muscles seek aspects of motion: that first impulse. The building momentum. Moments of suspension, then—ah, sweet release. When the curtain rises, I will be born anew.

  • • •

  “Is time. Merde.” The half-whisper I remember is intimate; Dmitri’s breath tickles my ear. With a wet finger, he grazes a tender spot on my neck, for luck, then disappears among the other bodies awaiting him. My skin tingles from his touch.

  The work light cuts off, plunging me into darkness. On the other side of the curtain, eleven hundred people, many of them critics and producers, hush. We are about to premiere Zephyr, Dmitri’s first full-evening work.

  I follow small bits of fluorescent tape across the floor to find my place. The curtain whispers as it rises. Audience expectation thickens the air.

  Golden light splashes across the stage, and the music begins. Dmitri stalks onstage. I sense him and turn. Our eyes lock. We crouch—slow. Low. Wary. Mirror images, we raise our arms to the side, the downward arc from each shoulder creating powerful wings that hover on an imagined breeze. One: Our blood surges in rhythm. Two: A barely perceptible plié to prepare. Three: We soar.

  Soon our limbs compress, then tug at the space between us. We never touch but are connected by intent, instinct, and strands of sound from violins. I feel the air he stirs against my skin.

  Other dancers enter and exit, but I don’t yield; Dmitri designed their movements to augment the tension made by our bodies.

  I become the movement. I fling my boundaries to the back of the house; I will be bigger than ever before. I’m a confluence of muscle and sinew and bone made beautiful through my command of the oldest known language. I long to move others through my dancing because then I, too, am moved.

  Near the end of the piece, the other four dancers cut a diagonal slash between Dmitri and me. Our shared focus snaps. Dissonance grows as we perform dizzying turns.

  The music slows and our arms unfold to reduce spin. Dmitri and I hit our marks and reach toward each other. We have danced beyond the end of the music. In silence, within a waiting pool of light, we stretch until we touch, fingertip to fingertip.

  Light fades, but the dance continues; my energy moves through Dmitri, and his pierces me. The years, continents, and oceans that once held us apart could not keep us from this moment of pure connection.

  Utter blackness surrounds us, and for one horrible moment I lose it all—Dmitri, the theater, myself.

  But when the stage lights come up, Dmitri squeezes my hand. His damp curls glisten.

  Applause crescendos and crashes over us. Dmitri winks before accepting the accolades he expects.

  I can’t recover as quickly.

  No matter how gently I ease toward the end of motion, it rips away from me. I feel raw. Euphoria drains from my fingertips, leaving behind this imperfect body.

  I struggle to find myself as the others run on from the wings. We join hands in a line, they pull me with them to the lip of the stage—and with these simple movements I am returned to the joyful glow of performance. We raise our hands high and pause to look up to the balcony, an acknowledgment before bowing that feels like prayer. My heart and lungs strain and sweat pushes through my pores and I hope never to recover. I am gloriously alive, and living my dream.

  The dance recedes and the applause fades, but I’m not ready. My muscles seek aspects of motion—where’s the motion?—I can feel no impulse. Momentum stalls. I am suspended and can find no release.

  The curtain falls, the bed rails return, and I am powerless to stop them.

  acknowledgments

  It wasn’t long after my first husband’s suicide standoff that I knew I’d one day make a story of it, and now that I have, the words “thank you” don’t begin to cover my indebtedness to those who have brought this novel to fruition. My agent, Katie Shea Boutillier, contributed the enthusiastic vision that helped define (and title!) this project. By acquiring it for Sourcebooks, Editorial Director Shana Drehs allowed me the chance to share it. Associate Editor Anna Michels rolled up her sleeves and asked just as much of herself as she did of me as we shaped it into its final form. Eileen Carey designed another dynamic, meaningful cover.

  I’d like to extend thanks to Mason’s Road, the literary journal of the MFA program at Fairfield University, for publishing “Standoff at Ronnie’s Place,” a memoir essay from which some of this material is taken, and to my editor there, Elizabeth Hilts. Suicide facts came from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention website, www.afsp.org.

  Jane Hull, Pam Byers, Lisa Leleu, Amy Barnett, Rachel Trauger, and Kathleen Hoy listened to drafts of my memoir material and consistently encouraged me to share the story. Linda Beltz Glaser helped me wrap my head around what it would mean to fictionalize true events. For all manner of end-game support, I must thank my first reader, Janice Gable Bashman, as well as writing pals Tori Bond and Donna Galanti.

  It isn’t easy to stand beside someone through the trying events that inspired this novel. To every family member, friend, neighbor, and stranger who reached out to us, my deepest thanks. For their exceptional support during and immediately after the events in this story, I want to recognize Ellen Gallow, Scott Graham, Dr. Peter Klugman, Jennifer Zelenak, Stephen Brassard, Phyllis Graham, Lois Martin, and Bally Mennonite Church, to whom I was a stranger; sadly, John Graham, Robert Graham, and Anita Freedson did not live to see publication. To my surprise angel, Dierdre Smith Dabney: I wish you could have lived long enough to realize
how very much your role in this story meant to me. I only hope you knew.

  To my husband, David Craft: not every man would hold up as well while his wife spent a year with her former husband. For all the ways you are remarkable, not the least of which was proofreading at the rate of one hundred pages per day as my deadline loomed, you have my love.

  Jackson and Marty: thank you for your generous permission to build this novel from aspects of our shared experience. You are courageous, exceptional men.

  And lastly, to Ron: I hope you found peace. I finally found mine, in allowing someone named Ronnie to walk away from this standoff with hope in her heart.

  about the author

  Author photo by Jackson Williams

  Kathryn Craft is the author of The Art of Falling. Long a leader in the southeastern Pennsylvania literary scene, she loves any event that brings together readers, books, food, and drink, and mentors other writers through workshops and writing retreats. A former dance critic, she has a bachelor’s in biology education and a master’s in health and physical education from Miami University in Ohio. She lives with her husband in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and spends her summers lakeside in northern New York State. You can contact her through her website, www.kathryncraft.com.