My body feels good in the water. It feels strong there. It feels like power. Certain power.

Writing about feeling powerful in this body, using this body to be athletic, isn’t special. It isn’t special except that I am a woman. I am a curvy woman. I do not look particularly muscular. I do not look particularly strong. I actually look and feel, when I’m being touched, soft. Soft.

I’ve been a swimmer as long as I can remember. I’ve been in water my whole life. I was raised on, bathed in, and left to wander the banks of the Tygart River.

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This piece is closer to a poem but I’m going to call it a distilled narrative. I don’t write much poetry and I’m sure folks who do write poetry will scoff. I’m sure I’ve missed something important, some opportunity in the language or structure. I must have missed something because I submitted this to a zine maker and it was rejected. Rejection sucks. But I know deep down that rejection is part of this game. And I still get to publish my own work and see it mean something to someone, even if that someone isn’t the someone who decides to accept or reject it for whatever publication. Anyhow, enjoy this poor little reject. A Distilled Narrative: Weekends At Dad’s.

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Sam and I drive out of town. There is no traffic despite it being rush hour, the COVID-19 effect. It is a Wednesday and we are hiding from the 14-year-old we live with. We are headed to Snake Hill to get a run. As we drive Sam is talking to me about mountain bike trails. He is talking and pausing and smiling and laughing. And he takes a breath and says, “Mountain biking makes me feel like a kid again, stoked to see what’s around the next turn. What makes you feel that way?”

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I love flowers but I don’t want flowers delivered to me. I want to buy the clearance flowers from Kroger and arrange them myself.

I like the beach but I don’t like how hot it is. My favorite part of the beach is watching, feeling, listening to the waves crash. I don’t like sand, not when it’s wet, and I don’t like salt water, except for how it makes my hair look. I like my beaches chilly; I like to wear a sweater and sit curled in a blanket. I’ve never sat curled in a blanket on a beach with someone I love. I’ll bet it’s nice.

When I go to a fine restaurant where there is good food to be eaten, I eat it. Often, I eat too much of it.

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I know what my most interesting story is.

It’s the one where I lose my mother and grandfather in a horrific car accident on a bluebird day in September of 2016. The car they were driving was a roadster that the whole family had helped to build. That isn’t the end, my childhood dog died on December 24, 2016. She had a tumor in her stomach and started acting strange while we were all opening presents and drinking craft beer around the Christmas tree. Then my father died in September of 2017. He died of cirrhosis of the liver, having spent the majority of the last decade drinking himself into deep anger and paranoia…

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I push the key in the knob and it turns, the familiar click of the mechanism inside works and the door opens easily. It is dark and damp in there. I feel my soul pick up the weight of the place. It picks up the weight and wraps it in thick wool blankets and nestles it deep in my chest cavity. I barely breathe, just shallow little tugs at the air. The kind of breaths you take in a library or when you are playing hide and seek, worried your wretched body will give you up.

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A letter to the grieving.

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1.      I want people to move here and to stay here. I want those same people to be motivated and vibrant and breathe life back into each and every little town speckled across our rolling hills.

 

2.      I want the people of my state to be thoughtful, educated, and prosperous.

 

3.      I want everyone to take 5 minutes out of their day to learn something new about the world around them.

 

4.      I want the people who live here to be healthy and happy. I want them not to feel so hopeless and helpless that they turn to whatever vice they lean on. Gambling. Opiates. A particularly nice bottle of bourbon. A not-so-nice bottle of vodka.

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Lately I’ve had a lot of reasons to bring up my upbringing. A lot of my justification for my life, my choices, my ambition, the things I decide to care about, come from having been raised by a single mom. Sometimes I worry that my mom shows up too often in my writing. I worry that she has become some strange crutch for me to lean on, but the truth is, she is a lot of who I am.

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I learned most of my driving social principles in the bar where my mom worked. I was young, too young for a bar really, 15 16 17. It was a small place you couldn’t get lost in, at least I never did. I drank sodas and soaked in what I saw.

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I’m 7 years old. My dad is standing behind me. His big arms are wrapped all the way around my tiny body helping me support the weight of the pistol in my hands. I can smell the ivory soap he used in the shower hours earlier. “Ready?” he says to me. I nod my head yes, but I am never ready for the boom. I feel his sturdy finger press mine into the trigger and my small arms do nothing to fight the recoil. “Getting better,” he says, “Just need more practice. Any daughter of mine is gonna know how to protect herself.”

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I’ll make this about my mom too. My dad knew everything was about her, she deserved it. Even his death felt somehow in response to or in spite of hers.

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The women of my childhood and of Appalachia seemed to me to unabashedly handle their shit. They may not have read as many books as you but by God they would pay their bills and go get some beers at the bar and take their kids to the river and be at work bright and early on Monday morning or Saturday night or whatever their start time happened to be at whatever job they happened to have.

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When I was 13 or 14 or 15, Mom asked me to paint some of their lyrics over an old sign for her, Shine my life like a light was the line, from the song “Let It Be Me.” When I got the sign done, mom put it up on the back deck, she hung it proudly. A small reminder of the important things. A reminder to shine her life and she did. She shined it upon everyone and everything she encountered. That sign hung on her back porch until she died.

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