Literature and Short Stories by Carolyn J. Lewis
Nature Essay
Read Nature EssayPublished in Traverse the Magazine
The Number 6 and the Town of Y
Read The Number 6 and the Town of YOut on the ice, the wolves lifted their voices. They knew the ice; they knew what it wanted, and what it wanted it would take. In intimate song, their throats rose in crescendo, calling and calling, until the wind and the howls slammed together, opening the wounds of grief.
With the weight of the logs, each thick round as a barrel, the sled rose on end, tipping David and the horse in through a crack which widened, grew wet, deepened then split. Sawdust and nails skittered across its breaking surface. Boxes fell, spilled, broke open. Seams opened beneath the stone boat, growing wider, like a tidal pool the water rips up, starting with a tiny fissure, widening to a river, then a pond so great one can’t climb out.
It was then that her name rose to the air.
“Stel-l-l-l-a-a!”
On the porch, she lifted her head and turned toward the ice, her name shouted like terror on the wind. Fear struck her heart, grasped it with the muscle of a man’s working hand and wrenched it out of her chest. She saw the wolves on the ice, tails down, voices lifted in a howl so mournful, she knew disaster had come.
Defiant
Read Defiant“Defiant,” a short story, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, by Maxine Kumin, Poet Laureate of New Hampshire, and was accepted into Kalliope, A Journal of Women’s Art, Vol. XIX, no. 2.
There are things that are unspeakable, the red imprint of a hand that stays on the cheek and eye and hardens on the skin, rope burns that rub the wrists raw, the sullenness in a child’s eyes. And me, no more than a child myself, I thought I understood it then; I don’t understand it at all now.
What is the emotion that turns a parent against a child, the other children against the child? I cannot grasp it. I roll it in my mind like cookie dough, but it does not flatten into conceivable circles, carries no weight. I cannot pinch a half-inch thickness from it, cannot force cutters evenly onto its surface. I have to lump it up and start over, pounding the damn surface to nothing.
It is hard to say how long we stood looking in at the wreck of this child’s life, the defecation and urine, the torn clothes, skin so dark from dirt it looked like someone smeared black tractor grease all over her.
As we knelt beside her trying to avoid her teeth and unclipped nails, he came to stand in the doorway. She glanced up, saw him, hung like a whipped dog. My mother quickly untied her, picked her up never minding the stink,
for she weighed nothing, and stood in front of James Carl, Sr., her father.“Move,” my mother spoke. It was an even tone, not shouted, but it held all the authority of the church behind it in which everyone knew my mother was so prominent.
I don’t know what James Carl, Sr. thought or what he was capable of.
I had anger rising up in me until I thought I would choke on it, and instead tears came to my eyes and I started trembling and half hid behind my mother, ashamed. Of what, for whom, I could not say.
“Move,” my mother said, and he did not give ground. The man stood there, belly sticking out from under his dirty shirt, boots with manure on them standing on the bedroom carpet as if he didn’t know it wasn’t the barn floor. His eyes narrowed on the girl in my mother’s arms.
“Katie?” he said. “Come to Papa?”
The girl looked at him for a long, long moment, and I could feel from her arm I was holding she was trembling, but then she seemed to gather herself, rise half-up, her thin body shaking all over. “No,” she whispered. That defiance must have cost her because she leaned her head against my mother’s chest and closed her eyes.
My mother did not move. “I will not ask you again,” she said. “In God’s name, you do what is right now.”
And James Carl, Sr., who could have beaten my tiny mother to a pulp, stepped back, spun on his manured heel and strode out, swinging the bedroom door wide behind him, as if in the end, he knew we were going to go through and take the girl out.
How the Mormon Wives Stole the Gold from James Jesse Strang, King of the Mormons
Read How the Mormon Wives Stole the Gold from James Jesse Strang, King of the Mormons“How the Mormon Wives Stole the Gold from Daniel Ben Long,” a short story, placed as a semifinalist in the Pirate’s Alley William Faulkner Awards (currently called “Words and Music).”
“How the Mormon Wives Stole the Gold from Daniel Ben Long,” a short story, placed as a semifinalist in the Heekin Group Foundation Tara Fellowship in Short Fiction.Pale as the ice itself, the woman’s skin broke in fine lines. A first layer crumbled like opals, skittering across the ice. Her eyes blue and distant gazed at him with a look he translated first to pity, secondly to love. He knew without knowing she had been in love with someone when she died, and he felt that love now in his own marrow, in his own big heart, as if it had been he.
Yes, he said. Even I could have been loved.
Never daring to approach when she was alive, it was doubtful she had ever seen his shy presence. But he had glanced at her among the trees, across the hills, and come to know certain things about her. The two older women shouting at her. The way she danced alone amid the young maples, sashaying round a sapling, singing softly. Often, he had seen the young red-haired beauty that walked at her side among the trails, giving her a hug now and again.
Her lips had turned black, but to him they seemed still red. So had her fingernails, though to him they were soft pink. Held to her face, her hands had frozen with a gesture so delicate, he thought he would cry with the beauty of them.
No newcomer to snow squalls, he tore himself from that lovely face, scrambled up, chased after the flopping lake trout, caught and smacked them a good one with his fists. Pounding their sides until they were dead, he then kicked them solidly, thumping and thumping until their scales scattered in the wind, then retied them, knotted, on his belt with just barely enough time to retrace his steps before the storm blotted out his new lovely vision forever.
He kissed the ice next to her lips, so as not to offend her, and offered his thanks to a Lord God far mightier now than he had ever imagined.
The Religion of Loss
Read The Religion of Loss“The Religion of Loss,” a short story, was published by the Sycamore Review, Purdue University, vol. 11, no. 2, noted by the Sycamore Review as a “unique new voice” in the Novel and Short Story Market.
I played a child’s birth with a doomed legacy, only the sound the unspoken dark notes of minors and flats. I played a young boy with a voice from God: major C, sweet major G. I played a child who was not afraid to be alone: strong D and D diminished seventh wherein the fear trembled and then was taken up. I played a man who was listened to, because his words were carefully chosen, a tired man whose compassion was spoken: powerful F, soft E flat. I would have played the last supper, but I did not know what betrayal sounded like.
I did not know then how close my own loss was.
The music may have only been noise to my father, but it pealed out from the flute, circled up to the dark cross, wrapped itself around Christ’s body, leapt across the stained glass window, and turned and pealed out the open door, where I heard its distant moan and lilt echoing out across the night bay, where Te-bik-ke-ze, the Ojibwa moon, like God, was silent.
