Bay Conjury

“Bay Conjury,” a story by Faith Holsaert (fiction, ’82) appears online at Watershed Review.

I am Madeleine who was nicknamed Dunk.

I knew the machines, I knew the land, I knew the outbuildings and the barns and the livestock they sheltered. They were my body. He’d trained me up to be his son, his little farmer. The white envelope cut into me like the blade of a plow, working me, preparing me. We both knew the white envelope bushwhacked his plan.

Last night Isolde, with her slanting cheekbones and her Russian accent said, “No way emergency preparedness. We will be bush whacked.” She was carrying a 1940s handbook of English idioms.

Jackson with his feist dog held against his chest said, “I dated a guy whose tag was BushWhack.”

“To live or travel in the wild,” Isolde said.

One of the first photos I took was in the dusky bottom near the creek. The sun was behind me, and I was facing downhill, standing on the edge of my great long shadow laid out in the blue pooled at my feet.

I told myself when the day rolls around for another missed payment, I’ll get on a plane, leave the house, leave LaFayette, leave Indiana.

Already I hear someone else running the water in my shower. …[Keep Reading]…