Read & Listen

Haguillory

Best American Short Stories 2021, edited by Jesmyn Ward

When Haguillory woke up at four thirty and went to the kitchen in his shorts and slippers, Dot was already there at the table, tanked up on coffee. He poured himself a cup without much looking at his wife. Outside the kitchen window, his tomatoes blushed in the moonlight. The blue crabs down in the Sabine marshes would have been gorging all night under that bright full moon, and this morning Haguillory planned to go crabbing.

He fixed his coffee and pretended there was nothing strange about Dot sitting up before dawn, when she was usually in bed until nine or ten. Her joints kept her up late, and on top of that, she’d get herself all worked up watching the late-night news or reading the paper. How she could stand it, he didn’t know; it was always the same thing: New Orleans this, Katrina that, like those people were the only ones who’d been hit by a storm.

Poke Salad

Oxford American

Yesterday your old daddy was nearly a goner. Let me tell you.

There’s an old song on one of these long-plays you sent last year for Christmas. “Poke Salad Annie, gators got your granny,” something like that. Well, old Poke Salad Annie and her no ’count daddy don’t have a thing to eat, so Annie goes out and picks her daddy a mess of greens in what they call a poke sack, which is I believe how the plant got its name—

Now, that song sounds pretty good coming out of those speakers I put together last year. Good sounds!  Since your old daddy got retired from the plant, he’s got a lot of time to just sit and think.  I put on the long plays and watch the boats just easing down the river, and I start to feel sort of romantic.  Like old Ishmael.  How did old Ishmael put it?  “I rejoice in my spine.” Whoa.

The Ranger Queen of Sulphur

Astoria to Zion: Stories of Risk and Abandon from ECOTONE’s First Decade

It was nearly dawn, and Deana had been up all night disbanding a cult of hooded dwarves who were sacrificing children to a giant eyeball. Her mouth was dry, her vision fuzzy. There was a tinny hum in her head. But she decided that as long as she was awake anyway, she might as well do as she’d promised and go with her brother to his eight o’clock appointment at the obesity specialist.

Cheniere Caminada (excerpt from Should the Waters Take Us: A Novel)

Glimmer Train Stories, #78

The week after the storm, in the lower corners of front pages across the country -- an outpouring of shock and pity, pleas for donations for the survivors. But later, when the story was more human-interest than news, reporters seemed to grow bored with this prostration before the might and indifference of natural evil, and turned the story instead to one of human evils, negligence or decadence, treading carefully of course, with great pathos, because the disaster was still fresh and so many had died – more children than adults, more women than men – that any insinuations against the innocence of the deceased was very dangerous territory indeed.

THE BOUCHERIE

South Writ Large (originally published in StoryQuarterly, Issue 40 and New Stories From South: The Year’s Best, 2005)

Of course it would be exaggerating to say that Slug had so estranged himself from the neighborhood that a phone call from him was as astonishing to Della as, say, a rainfall of fish, or blood, or manna, and as baffling in portent. Still, as Della stood phone in hand, about to wake her husband, Alvin, who was sleeping through the six o’clock news in his recliner, she sensed with a sort of holy clearness of heart that what was happening on the television—two cows dropping down through the trees and onto somebody’s picnic in the park—was tied, figuratively if not causally, to the call from Slug. “Mais, the cows done flew,” she thought.

The Camera Obscura

New Stories from the South 2009: The Year’s Best (originally published in Nimrod International Journal, Fall/Winter 2008)

It’s the most unlikely things that get you:  how he pours salt into his hand before sprinkling it pinch by pinch onto his asparagus; the way he looks up over his glasses with eyebrows arched and magnified eyes startled, perhaps, that the world is in fact right-side-up; the green button-down shirt with the cuffs rolled to the elbows and the unflattering jeans and the thick white socks and the white rubber gardening shoes, none of which have been changed in the three days since you started to notice him at all and maybe longer; and the way he catches you watching him pinch salt onto his asparagus and blinks giant eyes at you with purpose, with resolve, because you did something like this two days ago when you noticed him watching you deliver your lunch tray to the dish cart, and he’s caught on, and this is flirting, and he’s going to give it a whirl.

So This Is Permanence

New Stories from the South 2008: The Year’s Best (originally published in Tin House, Winter 2007)

For the first time since gave birth, Sarah was left alone with her new baby. Her mother and sister—run ragged for two weeks seeing to duties that Sarah avoided by, say, hanging out in sitz baths for hours with a vampire novel—had escaped at last, back to work, back to high school.  Ever since the later months of her pregnancy, after she had packed up the contents of her locker, turned in her textbooks, and left high school, apparently for good, Sarah had taken to her room, giving herself over completely to sleepless hours alone with the growing boulder of a belly and the strangely comforting idea that if only she were a spider, she might cast this thing off on a windowsill in a bundle of silk and let it hatch on its own.

When Pluto Lost His Planetary Status

Gulf Coast, Summer/Fall 2004

This is my dad’s favorite joke:

There was this old boy in the nuthouse who used to sit in his room scribbling. He scribbled all day long and most of the night, and never said a word for twenty-five years. The doctors kept watch on him, tried to figure out what he was drawing, but couldn’t make out a thing. Those twenty-five years went by, and one day out of the blue, he wanted to talk to his doctor. Sitting there in that doctor’s office, the old boy was jittery, excited. He spread his mess of drawings out on the doctor’s desk.

Lafourche Parish, 1947 (excerpt from Should the Waters Take Us: A Novel)

Reading with poet Laura Eve Engel at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA

Already, there were oilmen everywhere.  The orange groves Jacot’s mother remembered from her childhood in Leeville were long gone.  In their place, an orchard of derricks.  In the town of Golden Meadow, derricks rose from backyards — nearly everybody had one, as numerous as the satellite dishes many years later, and the persistent hum of those beasts sucking blood from the earth annoyed people’s ears but padded their wallets nicely —  not as nicely as you’d expect, but still.  Oil men in the boarding houses and general stores, on barges floating down the bayou, on rough long rafts or behind mule and ox teams dragging pipe through the swamps.  Almost all of them Texiens — it took a few years before anyone would hire the Frenchmen, swamp rats with no English, didn’t know nothing about nothing but tides and crabs. Then the Texiens realized the swamp rats had spent their lives finding their way around this landscape and keeping their boats running with their own hands.

Poitou-Charente, 1657 (Excerpt from Should the Waters Take Us: A Novel)

Audio recording from Shankpainter55, a collection of work by Fine Arts Work Center Writing Fellows

A ship at sea does not stop for a woman in labor. It does not seek the nearest port, it does not drop anchor. But neither does a terroir for a peasant’s wife, so she did not expect much different. She had given her lower berth to the old woman who had come along against her will, having no one upon whom to depend after her son and daughter-in-law departed for unfamiliar shores. But the old woman, hearing the nighttime moans overhead, gave back the berth and hoisted herself, wobbling, up the rickety ladder, lying there the remainder of the hard night with no more notice of the suffering below her than a blank-eyed bird. She had her own suffering after all. Between the surges of her womb, Terrebonne’s wife counted the old woman’s snores.