The Middle Ground: Stories - Softcover

Ewing, Jeff

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1775381307 ISBN 13: 9781775381303

Verlag: Jeffrey Ewing, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

2019 Foreword INDIES Finalist "These landscapes, these characters, this prose, my god, it grabs you and it doesn't let you go." --Kevin Wilson, NYT bestselling author The middle ground is a place we've all crossed, the halfway point between who you are and who you want to be. In Jeff Ewing's collection of stories, his diversely American characters call it home. From a story of a man living in the shadow of an abandoned missile silo that may hold the answer to a mystery of vanished children, to one of a small-town beauty tentatively courting stardom, Ewing's sparse, musical prose illuminates lives lived in that space between fear and courage, hope and regret, life and death. Fog remembers, revenge beckons, and loneliness gives birth to fragile beauty--while in the distance the future gleams on a car hood, daring bold hands to seize it.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeff Ewing is the author of the short story collection The Middle Ground, published by Into the Void Press, and the poetry collection Wind Apples, coming May 26, 2021 from Terrapin Books. His stories, poems, and essays have been widely published in literary magazines, including Crazyhorse, Southwest Review, Subtropics, Catamaran, ZYZZYVA, Utne Reader, Cherry Tree, and Atlanta Review. His full-length play The Middle of Nowhere received the Maxim Mazumdar New Play Award and world premiered at the Alleyway Theatre in Buffalo, New York. Jeff lives in Sacramento, California.

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The Middle Ground

Stories

By Jeff Ewing

Into The Void

Copyright © 2019 Jeff Ewing
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-77538-130-3

Contents

Tule Fog, 
Silo, 
Ice Flowers, 
Double Helix, 
Coast Starlight, 
Lake Mary Jane, 
Crossing to Lopez, 
Parliament of Owls, 
Repurposing, 
The Middle Ground, 
Dick Fleming Is Lost, 
The New Canaan Village for Epileptics, 
Sognsvann, 
Barn Sale, 
Masterpiece, 
The Shallow End, 
The Armchair Gardener, 
Hiddenfolk, 

CHAPTER 1

TULE FOG

WHEN PEOPLE TALK ABOUT CALIFORNIA, they don't mean here. They're talking about somewhere else — Palm Springs, Yosemite, Venice Beach, the redwoods — places that make for a good postcard, places where it wouldn't be an insult to tell someone you wish they were there. The valley doesn't fit on the same map. It's flat and it's hot, and the ground under you feels like something dead you're walking on. In summer the news stations show people cooking eggs on the sidewalk, and the anchors laugh their asses off and shake their heads. In the winter it rains for a while, then the tule fog moves up from the river basins into town.

It starts slowly, the air thickening, visibility dropping, then it's just there, so thick you have to walk with your hands out in front of you, fingers waggling like tentacles. It brushes up against you, coming on to you. But here's the thing — and most people don't know this — the fog has a false bottom. It hangs just above the ground, leaving a foot-high gap between its ragged hem and the skin of the valley floor. And in that gap, quietly and nearly bloodlessly, worlds are born and lost.

I watch it come in, then make my way across town to the neighborhood where I grew up, a once-desirable part of town that's gotten long in the tooth. The roofs of the ranch houses sag on their rafters now that the kids are all gone and the heat and pressure they generated has been sapped out. I walk down too-familiar streets, the fog soaking my jeans, until I come to a weedy lot across from a tidy house with brown siding. Like a child with defective blocks, I start to rebuild.

I take the small slice of visible world and construct a plausible alternative. Cars roll by, legs scissor past, all of it moving slowly and tentatively in anticipation of my guiding hand. Voices and the sound of dishes being stacked filter in from a couple of streets over. Tonight, I think. This will be it.

* * *

There are six beers strapped across my chest in a bandolier. Once I settle in — my jacket rolled into a pillow, a silver space blanket spread out under me — I slide one out and pop the top. I listen to the report echo and note the sudden suspension of the small sounds you don't notice until they stop. After a minute they come back, and I register their return one by one — the crickets ticking off the temperature, a mouse or a lizard tunneling through the grass, a rattlesnake curling and uncurling, its blood thick and sluggish. The fog amplifies it all, gathers it in lovingly.

"I haven't slept in I don't know how long." A girl's voice, as tired sounding as she claims. "Right. You'll sleep ... Come on. No. Come on ... Why do I have to say it?" I can see the tires of her car, the left front a little low, settled more than the others on the angled drive. Her feet emerge together, fall in unison onto the concrete and click off toward the house in impatience or anticipation. The door closes behind her with the same hollowness that her voice carries, compressed and EQed by the fog.

* * *

My high school girlfriend's room was just off the garage there, the same room whose window lights up now with the half-assed glow of a compact fluorescent bulb. Some nights I'd coast my car to the curb and knock on the window, and Lisa would let me in through the garage. We'd sit on her bed and make out or listen to music. That was more than enough at the time — just imagine. She'd put on something slow and trickly and we'd listen until the sky started to lighten, the horizon pulsing beyond her back fence. Then I'd get back in my car and drive home. The air was like something sweet melting as I breathed it in through the window, my body tired and still vibrating faintly.

It took some practice to learn to drink lying on my back. It's a talent, of sorts. Nothing I could get into college or a circus with, but useful all the same. Because it leads to this sense of the world above and the world below coming closer, hints of reconciliation. But there is also a pale overlay — like vellum on vellum — of something else, an uneasiness not far from fear. You can hear it in the click of shoes, the slow rhythmic tapping that gradually speeds up as it digs in.

Kids avoid my field; they think it's haunted. They see lights moving through the fog, growing brighter, dimming. It's just a joint or a cigarette, but they don't know that. They're kids. Unexplainable events are their gold standard. It's only later that mysteries stop being prizes, that we fight against them with everything we have.

* * *

When I'm making my way over here from the light rail station, I take a route planned carefully to avoid the house I grew up in. Partly because it's so run down now that I'm tempted to set fire to it, but mainly because it's impossible not to look out from the yard and see what I saw when I was a kid, when there was nothing but new roofs and promise all the way out as far as you could see, all the way to the crest of the mountains. The trees were all small, our size, and the breeze passing between the houses was soft and clean as the air from a dryer vent. Now it's sharp with dry rot and rank vegetation, and the mountains curl above the houses like an animal in mid-pounce.

I can't see the mountains at the moment. Sometimes you can't even see them in the daylight, but they're there, jagged pieces of the earth pushed up at the edge of the valley like teeth breaking through gums. They define us by contrast, and we exaggerate their majesty to temper our poor reflections. Every day people go up there from the valley, and they come back changed — they claim to take something away that they didn't go up with, even though it's just an hour's drive with no hardship to it. They're better people for the trip, with a clearer appreciation of their place in the world. I don't believe them, but I understand them. You couldn't live here long without telling yourself that kind of thing.

* * *

The radio coming from Lisa's former room sounds cheap and tinny, Ray Davies' voice brittle as an old polaroid. I hadn't pegged the girl for the classic rock type. Maybe it's the only station she gets.

Lisa had a small sub-collection of albums, stacked off to the side of her bed in their own little library, whose binding theme was the moon. You don't realize how many moon songs there are until you start grouping them like that. There are far more than necessary, probably because they don't take much work. You look up and there it is, that blue shining harvest honey moon. You scribble a couple of verses about how waxen and dermal the light is, hash out a chorus expressing your awe at the magnificence and complexity of the world, then you sit back and wait for the royalties to roll in.

The kids eat it up, they think that's romance. Which it is — for a time — and far be it from me to take that from them. But the moon's been in reach for a long time now, and it's tough to look up at it...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Jeffrey Ewing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1775381307
• ISBN 13: 9781775381303
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 226
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland