Memories have a way of invading the mind, conjured from some small movement, an event, the lilt in a voice, a child’s laughter, or, sometimes, nothing at all. A few weeks ago, I came home after a hasty, masked, social-distancing trip to the grocery store. Like always, I entered withContinue Reading
**Featured Image: Barbara Allen’s Cruelty by H. M. Brock (Cropped) My maternal great-grandmother, Cora (McNeely) Goins, lived a good deal of her adult life in a coal camp, just down the road from Kentucky, in Westbourne, Tennessee. As the coal boom slowed and the company’s profits waned, the coal baronsContinue Reading
Grace put the top down on the old Miata and we burned the open road, our hair spinning wild as Medusa in the crisp late spring. We should travel to Monrovia, California to see Upton Sinclair’s house, she had said, and take one of those cross-country road trips on ourContinue Reading
The air is cool as dark, billowy clouds let loose a light mist, and a gentle breeze rustles the brightly colored limbs of deciduous trees. Leaves, in all their late October glory, with their deep reds, dark purples, bright golds, and fiery oranges, appear to dance in the air.Continue Reading
**Warning: Graphic Depictions of Violence in this post Have you ever met the devil in Appalachia? Alone in unnerving wooded areas day or night? The devil wears different disguises. For some, he is a brawny satyr with goat legs, bovine horns, and an arrowed pin tail. For others, the devilContinue Reading
Henry Everett The old man lived for the sound of a chicken squawking, the sentry’s warning at which he drew back light from a windowless cabin, a portal cut squarely at eye-level in a single oaken door, then stuck the sightless barrel directionlessly out into night that thundered once withContinue Reading