Snakeskin Road

Zusatztext “With imaginative grace and poetic intensity! James Braziel has written an apocalyptic masterpiece that will keep any reader on edge. Though filled with the grim realities and sometimes hallucinatory violence of a devastated United States! Snakeskin Road also reinforces our hope that love and compassion can survive.”—Donald Ray Pollock! author of Knockemstiff Informationen zum Autor James Braziel’s short fiction has appeared in over a dozen literary journals! including the Berkeley Fiction Review and the Chattahoochie Review . His poetry has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize! and he was the recipient of the Individual Artist Grant from the Georgia Council for the Arts. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. Chicago 2044 Delia took her hands and swept the edge of the bed, wiping away what few wrinkles were there, then sat down, and stared at the wall. There was no sound from the kitchen, no water coming up from the furnace, nothing from the apartments below, the ones boxed on either side, the one above, no sound except her cat, Pearl, footing into the room, wandering behind her on the white bedspread, paws catching in fabric. She looked from the edge of the bed to the south wall and listened to the absence pool around her until she could do it no more. Her sister, Bobbie, was working. She worked all day as a city-state interpreter for Chicago, and stayed out evenings as much as she could, anything not to be lonely "like you," she admonished Delia with her long jaw set open, breathing in, waiting for a challenge. But Delia would just firm her lips, lock them shut. They had a lifetime of sisterhood behind them and had shared an apartment for nine years, yet seldom found ways to comfort each other. Bobbie's resentments of her older sister no longer made sense—with Delia at fifty-six and Bobbie at fifty-two, they were going the other direction, age now a liability rather than a privilege. Surely, her younger sister needed comfort, though she never said so and never offered. Delia did. Sometimes in this silence, she heard her first husband, Everett, calling for her as if he were in the living room waiting, and simply wanted her company. But Everett had died in the clay mines at Bogalusa years ago when a thunderstorm brushed over him and drowned him. He was eighty feet down, buried in Mississippi mud. Sometimes Terry, her second husband, called for her. He had always greeted Delia after his night-digging by gathering her up in his skinny arms, his hands too thin to hold anything right, lifting and lifting—what a skinny man should never have the balance and strength to do. "Put me down. We're not kids," she had demanded. It was the kind of lift that hurt. But the moment he let go, Delia inhaled as deep as she could, trying to breathe him back closer. He could be standing right there, calling, "Baby. You so sweet, my baby," in that sing-sweep voice of his, scratchy, sweeping like a broom across the floor, and still be too far. He died in Alabama, coughing up blood and clay, those skinny arms shaking. "I can't hold down my breath," he said to them, the other workers at the mine. "Help me breathe." But they couldn't, they told Delia, and they were sorry for his passing, So sorry, Mrs. Philips, as if apologies could erase his death, his voice, his touching her. She still held them responsible, and God. Jennifer was the only one left in the Southeastern Desert—her daughter and Everett's daughter by blood, and every bit of Terry's child, too. After Terry passed, Delia migrated to Chicago, the Saved World, and moved in with Bobbie. Jennifer stayed behind to marry Mathew Harrison, a clay rock miner like both Delia's husbands. He worked the Alabama River. "Why don't you come north?" she had pleaded. "The desert will never give you a fair life, Jen. It can't."...

Product details

• Authors: James Braziel
• Publisher: Dell Publishing Inc.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 28.07.2009, delayed
• EAN: 9780553385038
• ISBN: 978-0-553-38503-8
• No. of pages: 304
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature