Adam’s Apple Creek

She was ugly as the mud fence that could have surrounded this sad, rocky plot of Appalachian soil, had there been the knowhow for a mud fence.

The woman was a mix of black, white and Native American, her hair a perpetual rat's nest, her eyes the color of rusted cans. Although she was too inbred to think straight, she could feel pity, and felt it for the inbred and unstable man from down the Creek, knowing that he would starve after his parents died from the flu and giardia respectively. She took up with him.

They passed their days in a their familiar squalor until one day she discovered she was pregnant from their instinctual gropings for anything even vaguely pleasurable. Already obese and now ponderous, she taught him from where she lay inert on her pallet how to make the cornbread. At times she had to call him over and slap him like a child, but through this instruction she began to feel the very first stirrings of affection for her child.

Her mother came to live with them when her own obesity proved too great a burden on her small community of fatherless children. Her habitual disapproval and the sickly sweet marijuana smoke from the mother’s pipe unhinged the man on the day his companion was to give birth. He killed the older woman by rolling her down the hill where she lay still – and finally quiet – upon a bed of leaves near the dirt road. The man walked down to body, but when he noticed the road he began to walk it, because that’s what you do, but his mate called to him. He walked back up the hill to her obediently. She made him heft her into the old wheelbarrow and cart her down to the road to see her mother. She knew what to do but couldn't see him digging a hole, so they left her there and painfully wound their way back up to the shack, a journey that took hours to complete.

She then directed him to deposit her on the old sprung sofa, from behind which she pulled out the shotgun and blasted him against the wall. He sat down and died, less than he was.

We are almost finished. The recoil of the shotgun triggers her labor. It was going to be a breach birth, but before this mercy could befall her the birds begin singing sweetly and the walls of the shack tumble down like dusty cards, revealing another roofless room of bare cinderblock walls, and there, standing near naked with a damp towel held to his loins, is the author of this story. He blinks at her. The towel falls to reveal nothing important, but it is revealed. He stands nude amid birdsong, which is very loud and distorted as if it were emanating from broken loudspeakers. The unfortunate obese woman is gone as if by cheap magic, and the baby is born elsewhere, on many other pages in too many books.

A firing squad enters from the right and the left. Seven grim men and women, all graduate students, all ages and races, all educated and well-read, all lovers of the classics but for one who reads science fiction for pleasure. All have rifles, none of which are loaded with blanks. They stare at each other until one, a proud lesbian, detaches herself to push the author against the cinderblock wall. She lights a cigarette for herself. The group lines up and, at her command, aims, although she herself does not; she merely smokes. The author appears confused. The birds are singing gaily but soon rise up in startled flight. The birds are not seen, only their shadows, rising through the echo of gunshots thundering against the hills. The sad hills.