Essays

Although everyone still called me the resident Victorian, truth was I had been shirking. And I’m not sure when I would have returned if it had not been for my friend Sarah.

My mother and grandmother used to drive me to North Carolina every summer for camp where, as memory serves, the squirrels were white, the dawns were dewy, and the threat of lake snakes never did come to fruition.

Magnolia trees symbolize good fortune and stability, but ours had run out of luck, and not long after the agent’s visit, we had to cut it down. In the tree’s seasons of health, we had admired its glossy leaves and star-shaped flowers, and we hid Easter eggs under the boughs for our daughters to collect.

His earphone in my ear made me feel warm and woozy. I liked being yoked to this beguiling stranger as we sat with our forearms touching. Beneath the armrest, his muscled thigh pressed into mine. I pressed back. Ministry’s industrial synth-pop never sounded better.

We are on a two-lane road. No one is around us. It’s green. The kind of green that is so pure and deep that it doesn’t seem real. There are hills everywhere, and empty pastures and fields. There are also volcanoes in every direction.

Dad was never anywhere near the fighting. In one of his early letters from Africa he reassures his mother that he is over 1,000 miles from the fighting front. But war has a way of finding people who think they are safe.