When I Met Crazy in the Morning: Mae's Tale
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Excerpt from Josephine: Red Dirt and Whiskey
She saw the small figure walking on the muddy red road, and she smirked as she leaned forward in the rocker on the paint-chipped porch.
“I wonder where that girl thinks she is heading. She won’t be so clean for long with this red mud everywhere.”
She rocked methodically, as if there were some goal towards which she was progressing. Her face never fully relaxed. It could have been a sympathetic smile she had for the girl on the road, but the knots of hair twisted into white, shredded rags all over her head distorted her appearance.
She had spent two hours twisting and knotting each piece of hair around those torn pieces of cloth. Her arms had started to hurt, but she kept twisting and tying. Her arms went numb, and still she kept at it. When she was finally finished, she went and sat on the porch. Her arms throbbed and tingly sparks of pain traveled from her wrists to her shoulders. She rubbed her hands together. She’d started pressing her dress and applying her makeup, but she needed to sit down for a little rest. She didn’t think her hair looked all that special curly, but he had told her he liked it. So, she curled it.
He’d be over this evening, some time. She knew he would. He would come by tonight. He always came by, eventually. She never quite knew when he was going to arrive, so she tried to always have herself ready by nightfall. She had known him for a little over three months, and alternately she loved him and she hated him. Sometimes she would get so mad, she would tell him she never wanted to see him again. But, the making up always made the fights worth it. Whenever she’d try to pin him down for plans, he’d say he’d be around when he could or that he couldn’t make plans that far in advance, not like Samuel. He was nothing like Samuel. She continued to rock. Her face settled back into a grimace as she stared out at the barren road, watching the neighbor girl, Mae, dodge crater holes in the red road.
Excerpt from Melinda McGuire’s upcoming novel: Anne McGinnis
The sun was creeping over the tops of the hills. She called them mountains because she’d never seen mountains. Everything was cloaked in the bright golden light of sunrise. Ordinary things looked magnificent, rich, and ornate. She thought maybe the light made even her look that way. She wanted to capture that light, bathe in it, wrap it around her, and wear it around town. She wanted people to see her as beautiful, to see her in the same way she saw the rolling hills and the run down, wooden plank board house right now in the light from the sunrise. She was just like that old, paint chipped two-room house. It contained every living person in her family. She was just like that run down building. She might look almost pretty in the right light, but she really wasn’t pretty at all. And, just like the house, she was stuffed to overflowing with disagreeable personalities. Everything she found in her family: the stupidity, the hate for each other and outsiders, the fighting, the discontentment, she found all of this within herself.
Last night, she lay on a mat on the dusty wooden floor next to one of her six brothers. She decided she was leaving. She couldn’t stay. She didn’t think she would be able to take in one more breath of air if she was going to stay. She would just stop breathing. She didn’t have to worry about packing anything. She could wear everything she owned and still have lots of skin left over. She was planning her escape while the rest of her family slept. Her plans were constantly interrupted by the battling sounds of snoring and coughing and wheezing. Her six brothers, her mom, her dad, and her grandmother all snorted and hacked in succession. If they all could have done it at the same time, maybe it would’ve been bearable. But, there was never one moment of quiet. The little house seemed to shudder from all of the noise. The house looked tired. It slumped and sagged and creaked and wheezed. She had to keep starting her great plan of escape over and over.