Runaway

Description

"Have you ever wanted to run away from it all to some dusty little town, change your name to Wanda and wait tables while your life changes chapters? Have you ever felt the need to leave the wife behind, hop a train or hitch a ride and seek out the California sun? Have you ever come home to her clothes gone, her keys, her cat and nothing left there but a hint of her perfume? We've all had those times where we've dreamed it, planned it, lived it. This collection of short stories addresses every variation of running away, wanting to run away, and trying to run away"--

Sujets

• Literary
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 04 mars 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781948692274
• Langue: English

Extrait

Runaway
Runaway
Luanne Smith, Michael Gills, & Lee Zacharias editors Lake Dallas, Texas
Copyright © 2020 by Madville Publishing All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
No part of this collection may be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher. Requests for permission to reprint or reuse material from this work should be sent to:
Permissions Madville Publishing PO Box 358 Lake Dallas, TX 75065
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
• “The Anchor Song” by Maurice Carlos Ruffin was first published in So to Speak: a feminist journal of language and arts (fall 2014), https://sotospeakjournal.org .
• “Daphne: The Aspen Version” by Erica Soon Olsen appeared in Menacing Hedge (2016) and in Girlmine (Bull City Press 2019).
• “The Fishing Dog” © 1999 by Bonnie Jo Campbell first appeared in North Dakota Quarterly and later in Women and Other Animals (U of Mass Press 1999). “Kansas” by Emily Chiles was first published in Blackbird (Spring 2019).
• “Lost Her Way” by Jen Knox was previously published in Juked Magazine and in Resolutions: A Family in Stories (AUXmedia, 2020).
• “Lubbock, 1974” © 2018 by Bobby Horecka first appeared in Amarillo Bay . It is also included in Long Gone & Lost: True Lies and Other Fictions (Madville 2020).
• “Reapers” by Jeffrey Byrem was first self-published in The Promise .
• “Sugar” by Misty Skaggs was first published online by journal Fried Chicken & Coffee (2012).
• “Vivian Delmar” by Louise Marburg was first published in Joyland (2019).
• “Willie’s Crucifixion” by Rick Campbell first appeared in Kestrel: A Journal of Art and Literature .
• “Xmas, Jamaica Plain” by Melanie Rae Thon first appeared in Ontario Review and was later included in the collection First, Body, published by Houghton Mifflin.
Cover Design: Jacqueline V. Davis Cover photo: Lori Beneteau, licensed through Shutterstock, Inc.
ISBN: 978-1-948692-26-7 paper, and 978-1-948692-27-4 ebook Library of Congress Control Number: 2020931918
Contents Foreword Neighbor Boys and Cousins Jodi Angel Kansas Emily Chiles Ritual Aden Albert Running Toward Away Richard Jay Goldstein If That Isn’t a Sign from God, then I Don’t Know What Is Philen Bradford Sugar Misty Skaggs The Whiskey Monkey Maureen O’Brien Vivian Delmar Louise Marburg Nothing to Light Our Way Emily Hoover Daphne: The Aspen Version Erica Soon Olsen Reapers Jeffrey Byrem Reading Herzog Michael Simpson Iris with Mermaids Deborah Johnstone Sioux Falls, South Dakota Marisol Cortez Sever K.B. Carle Lubbock 1974 Bobby Horecka Running in Circles Merrill Gray Under the Grapefruit Tree Shelbi Carpenter Willie’s Crucifixion Rick Campbell The Thing Lou Morrison The Anchor Song Maurice Carlos Ruffin After We’re Gone Brett Riley Xmas, Jamaica Plain Melanie Rae Thon The House of Unintelligible Omens Randall Watson The Fishing Dog Bonnie Jo Campbell Contributor Bios
Foreword
This anthology grew from a message thread between Luanne Smith and Madville’s publisher, Kim Davis. It was already a notion as Luanne and I sat over lunch in Portland, Oregon, exchanging childhood recollections about running away. Why else would the subject have come up? I’d never shared mine, and I was struck by its similarity to the memory Luanne had relayed to Kim. Both of us had run away often and young, seemingly with our mothers’ blessings, neither of us traveled far, and we always returned unharmed. Luanne’s grandfather told her that it was illegal for five-year-olds to cross the street, that those who did would be arrested and put in jail. Still, every time she got mad, she packed a shirt and stuffed animal in her Barbie case and departed for the front yard, her mother waving goodbye. Because the only sidewalk was on the other side of the street, her side bordered by a ditch deeper than she was tall, her journey consisted of pacing back and forth with her dog Spot, who pushed her back whenever she got too close to the ditch. On the one occasion she was angry enough to risk arrest and slipped past the dog, Spot grabbed her shirt with her teeth. In Luanne’s words, “Between Grandpa, fear of prison, a big ditch, and my dog, I never made it out of our front yard.”
My mother never waved goodbye. Instead she would offer to help me pack my suitcase, and once I stepped onto our front stoop, I would hear the formidable click of the door lock behind me. Apparently, I never chose to run away in summer, for this was in northern Indiana, just outside Chicago, and in my memory it is always winter, always cold, always dark. But we had a sidewalk, and so slowly I walked to the end of the block, where the widow of a police officer who had been killed in the line of duty still lived. Though I often crossed the street beyond in daylight—to visit playmates or on my route to kindergarten, later first and second grades—the fate of the policeman brought my expedition to a halt as inevitably Luanne’s ditch, for he had gone out one night, crossed that street, and never returned. And so I turned around to walk even more slowly home, where I sat on that cold concrete stoop until misery and hopelessness forced me to knock and beg to be let in. Always my mother won.
But just as neither of our childhood threats ever came to fruition, neither Luanne nor I have chosen to develop these memories into stories, not yet. Though they have pattern, they remain at the level of incident. They are anecdotes, nothing more.
What follows in this anthology is a collection of stories, real or imagined, that have been carefully crafted into works of art on the theme of running away. Most of the characters travel much farther than we did, and certainly the stories do, into consequence, awareness, and resonance. In many of them absence becomes presence—the absences created for those left behind or the absences created within those who leave, or even think about leaving, others behind. In every one of these stories something is missing, a parent, a feeling, or some essential part of the self.
It is no surprise that many of these stories are motivated by abuse. Those characters older or less fortunate than Luanne or I were often run for good reason, though doing so frequently traps them in even more desperate situations. In one case a teen mother sacrifices herself by returning to an abusive father to let her baby daughter go for what she hopes is essential medical care. Not many of us know where—or even how—to run, and though a few characters run to , most of them run from . But to or from, one thing comes clear to them and to the reader: you can run from yourself, but no one ever completely escapes.
The two prize-winning stories * both involve rituals, one mysteriously invented, the other ill-conceived. And though both of the honorable mentions * begin with young women barely into adolescence hanging out with friends, the tone and atmosphere of those tales diverge. That these are all such different stories should give everyone heart. As similar as my childhood memory is to Luanne’s, my recollection ends with humiliation, hers with sweet humor. No one’s running away story is quite like anyone else’s. Perhaps no one’s circumstances are quite like anyone else’s. Memory and imagination never spin exactly the same way. More importantly, the art one creates from such circumstances, or the circumstances imagination creates, is unique. These fully realized stories speak in diverse ways to a nearly universal desire. Who has never wanted to run away from something? Every one of these stories has been selected because it contributes to a larger narrative. Every one of them speaks to the questions that belong to that larger narrative. Who are we if we refuse to be shaped by our pasts? Who are we if we choose no longer to be ourselves? Who are we, whether we are left behind or gone?
My thanks to my co-editors, Luanne Smith and Michael Gills, for the wisdom and care they brought to their reading and our deliberations, and to Kim Davis for guiding the collection into reality and giving it a home. It is an honor to work with them.
Lee Zacharias January 6, 2020
* “Ritual” by Aden Albert and “Willie’s Crucifixion” by Rick Campbell are the winners.
* “Neighbor Boys and Cousins” by Jodi Angel and “Nothing to Light Our Way” by Emily Hoover” are the honorable mentions.
Neighbor Boys and Cousins *
Jodi Angel
Bobby said Wayne could get Black Cat firecrackers—the real ones—and maybe some M-80s, too, but it was Tony Guiterrez that finally came through, and they all came over to my house that afternoon and Wayne said I could hang out and blow things up if I’d practice “doin it” with them, which wasn’t a bad trade since doin it for real meant taking off our underwear, and none of us wanted that yet, but practicing doin it just meant pulling our pants down and me letting them climb on top, one at a time, and rub on me until I could feel the small tight knot between their legs.
Wayne and Tony Guiterrez lived in the cul-de-sac around the corner from my street, the one that dead ended at the orchard, and Bobby had biked over from the Forward Addition, and all of them were standing on my front porch, sucking on Rocket Pops, and Tony Guiterrez had a grease-stained paper bag in his hand, with the words Holiday Market printed in green on the side, and he raised the bag up when I answered the door and he said, “I got ‘em,” and we’d been talking so much about Wayne’s plan of robbing a trucker from Mexico that I wasn’t quite sure what might be in the bag, but then he shook it and I could hear things inside jump around, and Wayne said, “boom,” and I knew Tony Guiterrez was talking about bricks of Black Cats just in time for the 4th of July.
Behind me, the living room was a cool, dark cave of air conditioning and cartoons, and my little sister was on the couch with a can of Pringles, and I knew at any second she was going to threaten me with telling mom if I didn’t close the door, come back inside, stop letti