For a second I hope that we really will attract people, become some kind of annual sacred/secular event. But only a few handfuls come to the fair, another handful to the revival; people move back and forth between them. I leave my house and walk down the street, not to participate, just to look. The preacher works his crying people, is in the middle of a testimony, talking about himself. “I was egotistical,” he says, “self-centered, until I discovered the Lord had a plan for me.” I stand next to the tent, the moist green odor of a tent that’s been used only recently for camping, listening to him tell me the story of his life which adds up to something about God helping him dodge paying rent in South America. “Nothing matters,” he says. “Nothing that happens in the world as long as you yourself are saved.”
The gospel rock band starts playing incredibly loud. I buy myself a Lemon Shake-It and watch the ferris wheel circle with no one on it and then with a small family on it and then a couple, the garish lights and the music. I look over to where the mother is sitting alone in her booth, surrounded by airplanes and no customers. But her eyes are thrilled as she eats a smoked sausage covered with green peppers and onions. She watches the rides, the lights. And back in town on their porches people sit and swing and cry and laugh, husbands touch wives, children show off, watching the end of the summer, knee deep in dust.
I go home, put a record on the record player. Melissa comes into the living room where I am sitting and takes a chair in the corner. She leans into the room, sits trembling, lips quivering. I should have guessed earlier, I think; the eyes are soulful, there is a life in there. The mother comes home, dumps her airplanes onto the sofa, telling Melissa what a success the fair was, what a great job she did. Melissa looks at her mother, looks out the window at the lights, tugs at the second sweater she’s put on over the first one, her lip trembling more rapidly. “But they’re leaving in the morning,” the mother says. “They just found out they have to be in Illinois tomorrow night.”
She begins a dance in the middle of the floor, an awkward, clumsy dance, her polyester jacket bouncing on her hips. Then the music stops and the lights go out in my house and, through the window, all up and down the street. It’s dark and quiet where the fair was, the revival. “Too much electricity,” Melissa says. “They’ve used up too much.”
The mother picks up the airplanes in the dark, keeps dancing without music as she goes to Melissa and kisses the top of her head; the slick fabric of her jacket rubs the daughter’s face. Sparks jump from Melissa’s hair. I sink against a wall, touch a curtain, wonder why it has taken me so long to understand this, so simple, watch the mother waddle through the door. I am alone with the daughter sitting quietly in the chair. I feel a great sadness as I go to her and touch her hair where the mother has kissed her, feeling the room, the house, the town, the places we are all standing, slightly but definitely shake loose from the dust and begin to rise.
THE FLANNERY O’CONNOR AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION
David Walton, Evening Out
Leigh Allison Wilson, From the Bottom Up
Sandra Thompson, Close-Ups
Susan Neville, The Invention of Flight
Mary Hood, How Far She Went
François Camoin, Why Men Are Afraid of Women
Molly Giles, Rough Translations
Daniel Curley, Living with Snakes
Peter Meinke, The Piano Tuner
Tony Ardizzone, The Evening News
Salvatore La Puma, The Boys of Bensonhurst
Melissa Pritchard, Spirit Seizures
Philip F. Deaver, Silent Retreats
Gail Galloway Adams, The Purchase of Order
Carole L. Glickfeld, Useful Gifts
Antonya Nelson, The Expendables
Nancy Zafris, The People I Know
Debra Monroe, The Source of Trouble
Robert H. Abel, Ghost Traps
T. M. McNally, Low Flying Aircraft
Alfred DePew, The Melancholy of Departure
Dennis Hathaway, The Consequences of Desire
Rita Ciresi, Mother Rocket
Dianne Nelson, A Brief History of Male Nudes in America
Christopher Mcllroy, All My Relations
Alyce Miller, The Nature of Longing
Carol Lee Lorenzo, Nervous Dancer
C. M. Mayo, Sky over El Nido
Wendy Brenner, Large Animals in Everyday Life
Paul Rawlins, No Lie Like Love
Harvey Grossinger, The Quarry
Ha Jin, Under the Red Flag
Andy Plattner, Winter Money
Frank Soos, Unified Field Theory
Mary Clyde, Survival Rates
Hester Kaplan, The Edge of Marriage
Darrell Spencer, CAUTION Men in Trees
Robert Anderson, Ice Age
Bill Roorbach, Big Bend
Dana Johnson, Break Any Woman Down
Gina Ochsner, The Necessary Grace to Fall
Kellie Wells, Compression Scars
Eric Shade, Eyesores
Catherine Brady, Curled in the Bed of Love
Ed Allen, Ate It Anyway
Gary Fincke, Sorry I Worried You
Barbara Sutton, The Send-Away Girl
David Crouse, Copy Cats
Randy F. Nelson, The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men
Greg Downs, Spit Baths
Peter LaSalle, Tell Borges If You See Him: Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism
Anne Panning, Super America
Margot Singer, The Pale of Settlement
Andrew Porter, The Theory of Light and Matter
Peter Selgin, Drowning Lessons
Geoffrey Becker, Black Elvis
Lori Ostlund, The Bigness of the World
Linda LeGarde Grover, The Dance Boots
Jessica Treadway, Please Come Back To Me
The Invention of Flight Page 10