My lungs swimming inside me, my heart growing small and raisin-like, I thought how it came to be.
Might I have shrunk from my fate?
But one can’t ponder such things too long.
I might’ve got caught anyway, but your sister sealed the deal.
He saw the stick and then he left the house filled with rage. That’s what the Briane girl told the police, as if she’d played no part.
They were a fiery pair, she said, her voice excited, and now their fire has swallowed them both.
What did she know of us, girl?
For ours was a tender thing, deep down.
They talked about how I smiled when they put the cuffs on to take me to county and that’s not true.
But I did tell them how I pictured you up there in heaven, halo fired up, having sweet tea with my grandma.
How she said: A good girl to save us boys, each and every one.
Here comes that grapple hook again, swinging slow for me.
I can hide among the floating ferns and duckweed.
I won’t leave until it has me.
From here I can see the white pillars.
My, how they shine.
Digits
by Michael Kardos
Winston County
The Monday after fall break, I welcome everybody back and ask if anyone went anyplace interesting. (Winston County isn’t so far from New Orleans to the southwest and the Alabama beaches to the southeast.) That’s when I notice Britney, in her usual seat, end of the second row, with a heap of gauze taped to her pinky. Or to where her pinky ought to be.
“My family almost went to Dollywood but didn’t,” says Jason, my talker in the front row.
“Britney?” I say.
“Yes, sir?” she says.
Britney is pretty in the predictable way that my students depict pretty in their short stories: blond hair, blue eyes, hell of a smile. Except nobody writes hell.
“My God — what happened?”
She looks around at her classmates, then back at me. “I had an accident over the weekend.” She could be explaining a rip in her knapsack. No wet eyes, no anything.
She’s either being tough or is still in shock, so I let it go and start in on Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants.” This is a fiction-writing class, but I assign plenty of literature too, so they’ll have something to imitate besides stories about vampires. I can take or leave “Hills Like White Elephants,” probably I’ve just read it too many times, but it’s a useful story to teach setting and subtext, and I figure they ought know at least one Hemingway.
As I explain how the conversation about beer in the story keys us in to a broader power struggle between the man and girl, I keep stealing glances at Britney. At that finger. At the absence of that finger. When class ends, I consider keeping her after, but what am I going to say? So I pack up and drive home, where my wife will be counting the seconds until she can steal a moment of peace. We have a three-month-old.
The rest of the week passes predictably: too little sleep, always running behind. Some laundry gets done. The baby becomes a week farther away from the moment of his birth, when he was just a squishy stranger. You can’t use a phrase like “squishy stranger” in Mississippi to describe your newborn, I’ve found. You can’t joke to your neighbors about the old dog crate in the garage alleviating your need for a babysitter. Not unless you don’t want any more casseroles.
The following Monday, the start of week seven of the semester, two more students walk into class missing their pinkies.
“What the hell?” I ask, and they all look at me critically.
“Accident,” says Jeremy, from the back row.
“What about you?” I ask Brian, who sits front and center. His first writing assignment, in which the students described a farm from the perspective of a man whose wife had just died (but they weren’t allowed to mention the spouse or death), included a detail about the peeling paint on the barn’s walls. I knew right away he’d be one of my better writers. Specificity is everything.
“One of those weird things,” he says.
Outside our windows, huge pine trees with their million green needles are set against a sky as bright and blue as my son’s Fisher-Price whale bathtub. Back in New Jersey everything has stopped growing by now and the air is raw, but here the sun is finally a warm kiss instead of a branding iron, and winter is still a lifetime away.
“Guys,” I say — because y’all sounds inauthentic coming from my lips even after five years — “are you okay? I mean, talk to me.” Half of them stare down at their desks. The other half look at me as if I’m overreacting. But I’m teaching three other classes this semester (two freshman comp, one intro-to-literature), and in all of them the number of fingers corresponds exactly to ten times the number of students. “Just do me a favor,” I tell them. “Promise me you’ll all be extra careful, okay?”
They smile. “Sure thing, Dr. P.,” one of them says from the middle row. Baseball cap. College T-shirt. Brandon? Austin? Halfway into the semester, and I still confuse my baseball-cap wearers.
There’s a similar look that many of them have. A way of dressing, a way of talking and moving through their days.
My students at Winston State, I have found, are almost uniformly gentle, kind, and Christian. Many are the first in their families to attend college. Most hail from tiny, tight-knit rural communities. They are totally secure in their beliefs about God and man and would rather not question the reassuring narratives that have gotten them this far. They have little use for nuance, don’t like to consider that Atticus Finch’s stubborn and naive refusal to see anything but the goodness in his dark-hearted neighbors nearly got his children murdered. Atticus Finch, flawed? Boy, they sure don’t like to consider that.
So I push, but not too hard. Fifteen weeks is enough to open eyes but rarely very wide. Anyway, my objective is to make them better writers, not to muck with their lives or how they make sense of it. Yet writing isn’t ever divorced from life, and how someone can become more attuned to the possibilities of literature without becoming more attuned to the world itself, I have no idea.
On the first day of the first class I ever taught — this was at Penn State — I was fishing for a text we’d all read before, something to forge a fast literary bond. I was working toward my PhD in twentieth-century American literature at the time, and in my class sat twenty-four freshman comp students who would rather have been anywhere else.
Most of them had been assigned The Great Gatsby in high school, and some had even read it. I confessed to them that I’d once had my own Daisy Buchanan problem back when I was an undergrad. The young woman and I had dated all sophomore year, and then I went to England for a semester abroad. When I came back to the States, she was seeing a guy on the lacrosse team. It’d wrecked me for a while, until I started to understand that Jessica had represented beauty and love and lightness to my twenty-year-old self more than she’d ever actually embodied those things. “Does that make any sense?” I asked my class of freshman comp students. “Do you see what I’m saying?”