Craft in Brian Doyle's Mink River, an essay by Julie Gabrielli

Entanglement and Immersion in Brian Doyle’s Mink River


Introduction

This essay studies how four of Doyle’s inventive techniques create a language of animacy and entanglement: stories of ancestors impart timeless wisdom; character points of view alternate sentence by sentence; everyone in town is joined by the humble act of kneeling; and a bear and a crow share their unique perspectives. This study focuses on Part I, chapters 43 through 47 (68 – 73).

In the essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell observes that good writing requires deep inner attention and wordless imagination, but that “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” (Orwell) While Orwell warns about the ways that language can be used not only to reflect but also to control our worldview, writer Paul Kingsnorth goes further to assert that the abstraction of the written word is itself the problem—a stunning confession for a writer:

That language itself—or at least the kind of language we use, abstracted, boiled down into these ink marks—is part of the process by which we desacralize the world. That writing, especially, is a tool of ecocide. (Kingsnorth, “The Language of the Master”)

Kingsnorth points to the elevation of rational, analytical thought over intuition and other ways of knowing. The English language typically serves a mechanized, transactional worldview and prevents us from experiencing ourselves as interconnected with the living earth. 

Scientist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer’s diagnosis includes a speculation that English was coopted as a tool of commerce, removing it from “an ancient Anglo-Saxon intimacy with the land and her beings.” She writes, “It is said that we are known by the company we keep, and I wonder if English sharpened its verbal ax and lost the companionship of oaks and primroses when it began to keep company with capitalism.” (Kimmerer, “Speaking of Nature”)

In his essay, “Against Nature Writing,” lawyer and author Charles Foster advises writers to “try to use language in a way that subverts its colonial tendencies.” (Foster) In defense of anthropomorphism, he invokes the “vast amount of physiology and evolutionary history we share with nonhumans,” as well as acknowledging that consciousness is everywhere. “We can reasonably infer personhood where there is consciousness, and it is morally mandatory to do so.” (Foster)

Foster’s essay would make a fine roadmap to a close read of Mink River. Many of Foster’s suggestions can be found in Doyle’s prose. For example, the sensory immersion of non-human beings favors sound and smell and avoids metaphor. Readers can trust the world he creates, a world of empathy and respect, because we can trust his words, no matter how unadorned, and his language, no matter how strange. In fact, the stranger the better.

Immersive Engagement of Omniscient Narration

These chapters in Part 1 take place in the aftermath of twelve-year-old Daniel’s bicycle accident. Chapter 35, p.59 sets it up: Daniel rushes home late for dinner. He is fond of speed and risk-taking. The chapter tumbles to a breathless end with a fourteen-line, 181-word sentence of twelve strong-verbed clauses joined by buts and ands and even a few commas to narrate Daniel flying over a cliff. We are left gasping and hanging and wondering how he could survive such a terrible fall.

This event is an example of external causation, which author Matthew Salesses identifies as one way to challenge Western literature’s “project of the individual.” He writes that using human agency to drive plot conveys the idea that the world can be controlled and that the world belongs to us. (Salesses 56-57) Accidents remind us that anything can happen at any time.

The omniscient narration means the reader alone has seen Daniel’s accident. Seven of Doyle’s short chapters follow over eight pages. The others in town go about their lives, an attenuation of action that intensifies the lonely burden of responsibility.  

Fortunately, chapter 43 relieves the tension by challenging our assumption of singularity: “One living being saw Daniel fly over the edge,” and that is “a young female bear on her early evening rounds.” (Mink River 68) Shared witness draws the reader and the bear into a relationship that reminds us we are not alone after all. Since we’re here, Doyle seems to say, let’s peek into this bear’s consciousness and see what we find. Doyle employs language to introduce us to the strangeness of bears: “Her name in the dark tongue of bears means eats salt, for her habit of scouring the beach for food.” (68)

The verbs in the first half of this short, one-paragraph chapter characterize this bear (emphasis mine): the bear saw Daniel; she read the New York Times (oh, really?); she is three years old; she scours the beach for food; she sharpens her claws on cedar trees; the walks miles to find the right tree; and she will mate soon for the first time. Most of the content is about eating, not unexpected for a wild animal. Her meals past and future scroll as elaborate lists of wildly diverse beings:

Today she has eaten six young ground squirrels, their mother, several dozen beetles, several hundred salmonberries, and a dead jay. The young squirrels were delicious. Later this evening she will eat two fledgling murres on the beach. . . . She has eaten shark, skate, ray, halibut, perch, cod, cormorant, pelican, gull, duck, heron, salmon, steelhead, tern, sea lion, seal, and gray whale. She has eaten bat, beaver, bullfrog, deer, dove, rabbit, raccoon, and robin. (68)

The second half of the chapter shifts consciousness following the sentence, “She will mate for the first time in about a month, with a bear whose name means only one.” Doyle bridges from third person plural to single sentences of alternating perspectives (emphasis mine):

They will be together for three nights and four days. She will give birth to female twins. He will never see the twins. She and the cubs will leave him in the pearly dawn while he is sleeping. He has never walked on the beach because he believes the roaring ocean is a bear of incomprehensible size. (68)

Finally, the male bear gets three of his own sentences about his birth, his mother’s untimely death, and his subsequent near-starvation. The paragraph ends with another shift of consciousness: “He grew so thin the year after his mother died that two loggers who saw him on a ridge one day thought he was a dog.” (69)

In the book, Building Fiction, Jesse Lee Kercheval distinguishes point of view as more than “a mere technicality, but the choice of who tells the story.” (Kercheval 22) Who tells the story in Mink River? It could be God or Mother Earth or even the river of the book’s title. Or maybe it’s the author Brian Doyle, imagined as an ebullient hiking companion in a Pacific Northwest rainforest.

Though admitting that an “effective authorial voice . . . can help unify a tale, creating a clearer sense of connectedness,” (24)  Kercheval cautions against the distancing effect that omniscient narration can have, particularly with modern readers. (25-26)

Craft advice about omniscient narration leans heavily on keeping perspectives neatly sorted. Doyle ignores this with gusto. He cloaks the authorial voice in sensory engagement and action by attaching to his many characters with charming humor, irony, self-effacement, and tenderness—often all at once.

He begins Mink River with an omniscient, cinematic, aerial pan of the town, but within a page and a half, he attaches to an eagle swooping low to pick up—a piece of cardboard. He imagines the eagle as pompous and bombastic: “I am one bad-ass flying machine, this weird flat brown bird didn’t get away from me, no sir, nothing can elude my lightning deftness in the air…” (Mink River 12)

Townspeople are introduced as the eagle flies over. On the third page, the narrator lets us know that there are “so many stories, all changing by the minute, all swirling and braiding and weaving and spinning and stitching themselves to one another and to the stories of the creatures in that place, both the quick sharp-eyed ones and the rooted green ones and the ones underground and the ones too small to see. . .” (13) The sentence goes on for thirteen lines, nearly one whole paragraph, which ends with this question: “But you sure can try to catch a few, yes?”

Thus the reader is on notice that there are many tellers in this story and many listeners, not all human. Doyle’s is a many-voiced, many-eared world, a world of full immersive engagement. His omniscient narration flows from character to character as fluidly as the river at the heart of town.

The Indigenous Mind as Lens

Tyson Yunkaporta’s 2020 book Sand Talk introduces the modern reader to the nuances of the Aboriginal mind, which is rooted in relationships via oral storytelling. He proposes a way for two systems, oral and written, to act as backups for each other. “The only sustainable way to store data long term is within relationships—deep connections between generations of people in custodial relation to a sentient landscape, all grounded in a vibrant oral tradition.” (Yunkaporta 148)  He describes five distinct lenses, or minds, that characterize indigenous relationships: ancestor-mind, kinship-mind, pattern-mind, dreaming-mind, and story-mind.

Ancestor-mind “is all about deep engagement, connecting with a timeless state of mind or ‘alpha wave state,’ an optimal neural state for learning,” in which one loses track of linear time and can access cellular memory. (151-152) Kinship-mind emphasizes connectedness: “In our world, nothing can be known or even exist unless it is in relation to other things. . . . We exist to form these relationships, which make up the energy that holds creation together.” (149-150)

Pattern-mind sees systems holistically and to understand complex problems. “It is about truly holistic, contextual reasoning.” (152) Dreaming-mind connects the physical and non-physical worlds through metaphors, connecting abstract and tangible knowledge through the arts and practical action. Story-mind maps knowledge to place, transmits it via narrative, and challenges “grand narratives and histories.” (151)

Together, these five minds guide thought and action from the understanding that everything is interconnected. The following five sections will demonstrate how Mink River applies indigenous minds to modern, written storytelling.

Ancestor Mind’s Collapse of Linear Time

In Chapter 44, Daniel’s father, Owen Cooney, records his narration of family history, a modern nod to oral storytelling. The sound of his father’s voice will have meaning to Daniel. Formally, Doyle’s prose evokes oral storytelling. The chapter is framed by two, single-sentence paragraphs at both beginning and end. The old story itself opens with two Irish phrases spoken by Owen’s great-grandfather Timmy Cooney and closes with another.

The two sentences making up the third paragraph act as an in-breath to prepare for the horrors narrated in the single breathless sentence of the fourth. Owen translates his ancestor’s Irish into soft, poetic phrases: “sailed on the sea of youth” and “shaggy cloak of age” and “remember those who vanished and . . . sing them.” (69)

The fourth paragraph is a single-sentence, relentless panorama of victims named only as familial subjects and objects: brothers, an old man, children, a mother and her daughter, a father, a wife, children again. Common nouns pile up with the corpses: town, shoulders, lives, coffins, painting, food, hands, cauldron, broth, scraps, meat, soup, doctor, months. “The Hunger” and “potatoes” each are used twice, subliminally highlighting the tragedy of starvation. The seven adjectives are limited to the first half: strong young, bent, old, mad, little, boiling, desperate. To balance, the first half has but three verbs: tell, carrying, and ate. The second half evokes unadorned desperation: ram, killed, save, died, opened, found, eaten, giving. (69)

The fifth paragraph is a symphony of repetition: “There were a thousand thousand thousand stories like those stories, he said.” (69) The incantation is prayerlike.

The sixth paragraph uses fifteen short sentences to tell a more detailed story of a man named Scanlon. The first three set the scene: “One time” and “when” and “where” and “It was late in the afternoon.” The specificity of details and economy of language befit a story about a real man in a dire situation. Timmy Cooney “was cutting wheat.” The man “was carrying a load on his back.” “The larks were whistling.” “It was his dead wife he was carrying.” He carried her “in a sugan on his shoulders, a carrying-chair made of rope and knotted tightly to his back. Their little son was walking with him. The wife was wearing a blue cloak and hood. . . .” Timmy Cooney offered Scanlon a glass of milk, which declined. The scarcity of adjectives, dead and blue, and one adverb, tightly, define the harsh reality of the scene. (68-69)

Verb tense is more complicated. Here, we have simple past, past progressive, pluperfect, and even future tense, as the storyteller tells another storyteller’s story of events that happened before the time of the story itself or that had not yet happened. This effect of layering time emphasizes its fluidity: “his wife had been a girl” and “she had died” and “the man had not eaten,” but “would overcome” and “could bury.” (69-70)

The chapter closes with its frame of two, one-sentence paragraphs. In the first, the boy drinks the milk and he and his father continue their journey. In the second, Owen quotes his great-grandfather’s Irish assessment of Scanlon: “his love did not waver.” (70) There are several ancestral lessons in this chapter—the importance of bearing witness, of honoring those who suffered through remembrance, and of offering kindness and generosity to strangers. Above all, the love of family as conveyed through story transcends time itself.

Kinship Mind and Belonging

Chapter 45 opens with a single-sentence paragraph: “Everyone is kneeling.” The construction of present continuous tense indicates a state of being. The second paragraph emphasizes the singularity of this moment with two invocations of time: “For an instant, for a split second. . . .” (69) The third paragraph details twenty-four people from thirteen families in sixteen unique places taking seventeen variations of kneeling on seven different surfaces. The form of a single paragraph collects them all in kinship, unified within a single community.

This kneeling has fantastic variety. Only three people kneel to pray. Daniel’s mother kneels beside his injured body. Several people are on their knees looking for something: boots or rope or a broiling pan. Two couples kneel in intimacy: one in love, the other transactional. Several are cleaning: washing hair, mopping vomit, scrubbing a kitchen floor. A son sorts and folds his and his abusive father’s clothes. Two other sons taunt and mock their own cruel father. Another father plays with his daughters, pretending to be first a bear, then a whale. The varied phrases “on her knees” or “on his knees” alternate with repetitions of “kneeling” and “knees,” in an incantatory sweep through town.

Proximity in the paragraph illuminates relationships. After the father plays with his daughters, “His wife Sara is kneeling in the bathtub washing her hair under the faucet. The child inside her is kneeling on her bladder.” (70) Repetition of other elements further links different people—via blankets or bent heads, prayer or beds.

We even glimpse Daniel’s “shattered knees wet with blood and mud,” and, mid-paragraph, the deceased nun’s knees that the priest has just touched with oil to bless her. These two are the only people in town in that moment unable to kneel, but they and their knees still belong. Everyone is family.

Paragraph three ends with a lovely exchange of care between the disturbed Anna Christie, who is “on her knees in the shallow water at the edge of the river,” and her daughter Cyra, who “has just knelt to wrap her mother in a blanket.” (71)

The chapter closes with two fretful single-sentence paragraphs. First, an incomplete sentence suggests that river’s whirl and song merges with Anna’s song through some deep hidden magic, to cause all the knees in town to “rise all at once from the mud the floors the beds the tubs all over,” then the narrator breaks from that stirring image to remind us with two words isolated into their own paragraph: “except Daniel’s.” (71)

The Interconnected Systems of Pattern Mind

Previous chapters (44 and 45) balanced the pace by alternating sentence and paragraph lengths from short to quite long, giving the effect of modulated breathing. In the single-paragraph chapter 46, the sentences devolve into the disconnected hyperventilation of confusion and panic, for example: “The doctor has a lantern. Daniel’s legs are blood and splintered bones.” (72)

Chapter 46 showcases Doyle’s gift for narrating multiple points of view both from above and within the action. Moses the crow is the de facto leader of Daniel’s rescue, given his privileged vantage of flight. Characters crowd into the salal and blackberry bushes on the steep hillside where Daniel has crash-landed. First, “Moses wheels sharply and drops like a stone when he is directly over Daniel’s body, to show No Horses the exact spot.” Then, No Horses “throws herself over the ledge of the path feetfirst and scrabbles wildly down the slope through salal and blackberry bushes.” In her desperation to find Daniel, “The bushes grab her angrily as she slams through them.” (71) So far, we have Moses the crow, No Horses the mother, and now some angry bushes. Next, family friend Cedar and the doctor join the action, and by the end, the young female bear from chapter 43 hauls Daniel up the slope.

The subjects of the first fifteen sentences of this paragraph are either Moses or No Horses, with one exception for the bushes. From sentence #16 to #32, the subjects alternate: doctor, Daniel’s legs, Moses, Cedar, No Horses, Moses, Cedar, doctor, Moses, No Horses, and so on until the odd sentence, #33: “The flashlight wobbles,” implying the flashlight has its own agency. The paragraph then ends in a ten-line rush of a single sentence whose phrases joined by ands and buts include all but Moses and the angry bushes: Cedar, doctor, Cedar, No Horses, Cedar, No Horses, Cedar, bear, doctor.

Strong, present-tense verbs emphasize urgency and characterize individuals. Moses the crow embodies upward energy and movement: he wheels, drops, shows, plummets, falls, lands, spins, shouts, sees. He shouts three different times; he leaps twice; he whirls thrice. Daniel’s mother No Horses’ downward, grounded energy stalls in stasis: she throws, scrabbles, aims, slams, stumbles, falls, sobs, runs, holds, shivers, crouches, does not know.

When the doctor and family friend Cedar appear, they take charge of the rescue. They find that “No Horses is curled over her boy her black hair a black tent in the black night.” (72) She is curled; she does not merely curl. This choice embodies her identity as mother-protector. Cedar’s take-charge verbs are flings, lands, skims, looks, peers, stands, turns. The doctor says, calculates, feels, finds, checks. Together, they brace, tape, and work to strap Daniel to a makeshift litter.

Some verbs are shared by multiple characters. Moses sees; Cedar looks, then peers. The doctor says; Moses says; Cedar says, multiple times. Nora feels (“Daniel’s heart hammering hammering hammering”) and the doctor feels (“in his jacket for his cigarettes”). Moses lands and Cedar lands. Though he alone can fly, Moses is included in the jumble of action, right along with the humans. All are part of the system, which by the end includes the bear. No Horses attempts to lift Daniel’s litter but it is the bear who picks him up and carries him to safety. (72)

A pattern of repetition further weaves these characters together. The adjective, black, modifies not only No Horses’ hair cited above, but also Moses: “He is blacker than the black night.” (71) No Horses “throws herself over the edge of the path feetfirst,” (71) then later Cedar “flings himself over the edge of the path feetfirst.” (72) Daniel’s “braids askew red black brown,”(71)  are a callback from four previous mentions of his braids, in chapters 1, 15, 27, and 35; “red black brown” also describes three blankets in the previous kneeling chapter. No Horses “runs her hands over [Daniel] tip to toe,” and later, Cedar “skims his hands over Daniel tip to toe.” (72) The kneeling itself spills over from the previous chapter: No Horses “falls to her knees by her son’s body,” (71) then “Cedar lands on his knees next to No Horses and Daniel.” (72)

Dreaming Mind Decenters Humans

Chapter 47 is a single paragraph that opens with, “The bear is confused and excited and angry,” signaling a slip back to wild animal consciousness. It continues:

“She cradles the boy in her huge dark arms and rumbles uphill right through the bushes. This animal is broken, she thinks. It smells bloody. The blood makes her hungry. She remembers the ground squirrels. The word for ground squirrel in the language of bears is meat in holes.” (72)

In those few, short, simple sentences, we feel the bear’s emotion, smell via her sharp senses, and add another word to our bear lexicon. In this chapter, we will learn that the bear word for human being is killer brother; dead is no longer eats; beaver is meat in water holes; “the word for pear in bear is the same as the word for apple;” dirt is mother below us; and salmonberry is eye of spring. (73) Doyle imagines the bear’s consciousness with a linguist’s attention to detail that renders the animal both strange and delightfully relatable.

Adjectives attributed to the bear are limited to the first part of the paragraph: confused, excited, angry, huge dark, uphill, broken, bloody, hungry, black, different, upright, dead. Adjectives illuminate, but also require adjustments of view. “Her thighs ache from walking upright. Once she smelled a dead killer brother on the beach.” (73) Such stream of consciousness makes the bear endearingly distractable. Seeing her on hind legs is integral to this scene, but pausing to note the dead body on the beach offers momentary relief from the drama.

Once the bear is awash in smells, the distractions and adjectives cease. She is immersed in the moment, focused by pure sensation. Nouns and verbs only, subjects and objects. No abstraction, no embellishment.

She smells things that humans can smell and many that we cannot: “the doctor’s cigarettes in his jacket pocket”; “the sweat and salt of his boots”; “smears of jelly in Daniel’s backpack”; “oil No Horses used to clean her chisels and gouges”; “oil Daniel used on his bicycle chain”; “bread Maple Head was baking when Cedar left the house”; “rage and fish and ice on Cedar”; “drowned beaver on Daniel”; “pear and iodine on the doctor’s hands.” (73) The only interruption in that stream is a sentence to translate the word for beaver in bear language.

At the end, adjectives return in a flood clinging to Daniel’s broken, barely conscious body: “Daniel slides awake but his face is pressed so firmly into the thick sour dirty dense black sweaty bear hair that he can neither see nor hear nor speak.” (emphasis mine) (73) Daniel’s loss of sense is rendered with negated verbs. Adjectives and sensation, then, are set in opposition to each other. Adjectives are a tool of human language. Use them sparingly or not at all to facilitate sensory engagement.

Story Mind: Brian Doyle’s Craft

In an essay following Doyle’s passing, James Chesbro quoted Doyle, who was teased for his style: “People are saying, wow, a sentence will start on Tuesday and it doesn’t end ’til Friday. But I want to write like people talk. I want to write like I’m speaking to you.” This squares with speculation earlier in this essay that the omniscient narrator is a Doyle persona, a hiking companion spinning yarns. Chesbro remarks:

“Some may find Doyle’s run-on sentences to be an irritation, but that’s also part of his genius. When we don’t land on the deep breath of a period and instead skip by on another comma, we are looking at a subject with Doyle’s sustained gaze, and eventually he takes us to a fresh metaphor, or an unexpected insight.” (Chesbro)

In the five pages of Mink River studied, there are few metaphors. Four can be considered modifiers that do not refer outside themselves: in the bear’s chapter 43, “pearly dawn” and “roaring ocean” (68) may just be how bears see and hear the world. In the preamble to the grisly stories of starvation and death in chapter 44, Owen Cooney quotes two of his great-grandfather’s flowery metaphors: “sailed on the sea of youth” and “shaggy cloak of age.” Both metaphors comment on mortality before the story brings death close.

Doyle’s selective use of metaphors works to enhance rather than distance. In chapter 45, “Cyra’s long thin hands like birds landing gently,” (71) emphasizes the tenderness of her care for her disturbed mother. Immediately following, in the opening to chapter 46, Moses the crow “drops like a stone.” A daring choice courting cliché, it captures both the weight of gravity and the heavy emotion of the scene.

Doyle’s “sustained gaze” leads by example to demonstrate how such direct engagement honors the world around us with our attention. In his words:

“And I am here to hear thrushes in late winter and to gape at osprey and to taste my way judiciously through excellent red wines from countries where the sun shines. And to shuffle humming through the rain, gentle and ancient and patient and persistent and holier than we ever admit. And to hear and foment laughter, the coolest sound there is. And to witness grace under duress; that more than anything.” (Doyle, “The Stories that Save Us”)

In Mink River, Doyle courts grace through the joys of noticing. He celebrates the delight of what is possible by intertwining form and content. This weaving provides insights into the ways humans perceive and describe their environment by assuming interdependence with everything and everyone. His craft creates a world that is incapable of using language as a hyper-rational tool of ecocide. His characters are far too enmeshed in the place, and in each other. The generosity of this stance, his love and hope for the world, comes through on every page. Doyle writes:

“By now I am absolutely sure what I am supposed to do: sense stories, catch some by their brilliant tails as they rocket by, carve and sculpt them into arrows and fire them into the hearts of as many people as I can reach on this bruised and blessed planet. That’s all. That’s enough.” (Doyle, “The Stories that Save Us”)

In his five-paragraph essay, “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever,” is pure Doyle, a paragraph-long sentence that amuses and rouses and end with the breathless thought, “man, this is why I read nature essays, to be startled and moved like that, wow.” He conjures the imagined story, the deep emotions, the delights of craft: “Probably the sentences get shorter, more staccato. Terser. Blunter. Shards of sentences.” His essay slips and slides, builds then subsides, through humor to mystery and sadness, or some other “dark thread in the fabric, and there’s also a shot of espresso hope, hope against all odds and sense, but rivetingly there’s no call to arms. . . .” (Doyle, Orion)

This “hope against all odds and sense” is at the core of Doyle’s craft. He deploys his trademark wit to encourage readers to acknowledge complicity and rewards us with a sweet fizz of wonder, a renewal of love for the world.

Conclusion: De-Centering Humans in an Animate World

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of a student who recognized that “speaking English, thinking in English, somehow gives us permission to disrespect nature.” Kimmerer agrees that to deny animacy has serious ethical consequences. She suggests using pronouns other than “it,” but acknowledges the dilemma presented by “he” and “she,” which view other beings through a human lens. “The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human.” She goes on to observe that “grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language. Maybe it also reflects our relationships with each other.” (Braiding Sweetgrass 57)

Brian Doyle’s grammar builds relationships based upon mutual respect, trust, and humility. He invites us to imagine other perspectives and see through other eyes, as does Kimmerer: “We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be.” (58) This teeming, animate world is Doyle’s gift to his readers.

David Abram writes that we must “renounce the claim that ‘language’ is an exclusively human property.” (The Spell of the Sensuous 80) This squares with Doyle’s bear lexicon, which is both wonderfully imaginative and utterly believable. Doyle’s story reminds us that humans have always had communion with the animate world and demonstrates a way back into rich relationship.

In Mink River, Doyle went to the trouble of giving Moses the crow’s scenes a different tone than those with the young female bear. Moses has a light, frenetic energy, while the bear is dark, heavy, plodding. One is a creature of the air, the other of the earth.

David Abram illuminates the distancing effect of committing spiritual wisdom to the page and points to the power of oral culture to connect human beings with the living earth in all its wonder. He identifies a problem: “writing greatly densified the verbal medium, rendering it more opaque to the many non-human shapes that dwell out beyond all our words.” (Becoming Animal 265)

The passages of animal interiority in Mink River bring the reader into a different sort of embodied speaking. The story, its characters, and the action are intensely local, place-based, elemental. Doyle honors the tradition of oral storytelling with chapters in which Daniel’s father and grandfather each record family stories for him.

In the essay, “Singing to the Forest,” Paul Kingsnorth speculates about the ability of the novel to tell the kind of stories most needed now. As he writes, “most in the Western canon are examinations of the human psyche . . . They are studies of the individual human mind. But what about the mind of the world itself and how that manifests?” (Confessions 228) These chapters of Mink River give a glimpse into this world-mind, how strangely other it is, and yet how familiar.

Kingsnorth wonders whether it’s even possible for us to “unhumanize our views,” then strikes a hopeful note recalling that story writing is an act of projection into another’s consciousness. Why not “make the same imaginative leap and take ourselves out of our humanity? Is it harder to imagine a sensate landscape, or the worldview of another living being, than it is to imagine life on a Martian colony or in a fifteenth-century village?” (232-233) Throughout Mink River, Doyle has projected his imagination into other consciousnesses, drawing us into his animate, many-voiced world.

In Craft in the Real World, Matthew Salesses asserts, “Craft tells us how to see the world.” (Salesses 26) One might argue that the world Doyle wants us to see is a world that:

  1. does not depend on conflict to drive plot: external causation decenters humans and reminds us that we are but one small part of the vast web of life;

  2. revels oneness and connects characters to each other and to the reader through multiple narrators and contrasting points of view;

  3. invokes the open-endedness and episodic continuity of cyclical time via looping, nesting, and intersecting stories within stories;

  4. demonstrates the magic of the real with characters who accept animism as part of the everyday world;

  5. modulates pace like breathing through the variability of sentence and paragraph lengths: long, multi-phrase sentences create breathlessness and speed up time, short sentences focus and linger, and digressive passages stretch out time;

  6. questions the tyranny of commas;

  7. represents simultaneity with many characters making the same gesture;

  8. celebrates the incantatory, prayerful power of repeating words and phrases; and

  9. uses metaphor sparingly. Some characters, bears for example, are usually too hungry to bother with metaphor. Crows may tend toward cliché, but that’s just how they are.

Salesses writes that novelist Milan Kundera “wants to decenter internal causation (character-driven plot) and (re)center external causation (such as an earthquake or fascism or God).” He writes also that author Julio Cortázar “categorizes his own and other ‘fantastic’ stories as simply more inclusive realities.” (Salesses 25) The inclusive reality of Mink River allows Brian Doyle to de-center human agency in favor of coincidence, randomness, and other-than-human actors. This humble stance re-centers all of life: crows, bears, salmon, bushes, flashlights, the river, and many more. Mink River immerses readers in an interconnected web of life, with human beings not at the top or in the center, but one among many in a world of wonder.

Sources

Abram, David. Becoming Animal: an Earthly Cosmology. Vintage Books, 2011.

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. Vintage Books, a Division of Penguin Random House LLC., 2017.

Chesbro, James M. “Brian Doyle once write, ‘stories are prayers.’ He has left us with many.” America, the Jesuit Review, 2 June 2017, https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2017/06/02/brian-doyle-once-wrote-stories-are-prayers-he-has-left-us-many.

Doyle, Brian. Mink River: a Novel. Oregon State University Press, 2012.

Doyle, Brian. “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever.” Orion Magazine, 30 Oct. 2008, orionmagazine.org/article/the-greatest-nature-essay-ever/.

Doyle, Brian. “The Stories That Save Us.” Notre Dame Magazine, Spring 2007, magazine.nd.edu/stories/the-stories-that-save-us/.

Foster, Charles. “Against Nature Writing.” Emergence Magazine, 21 July 2021, emergencemagazine.org/essay/against-nature-writing/.

Kercheval, Jesse Lee. Building Fiction: How to Develop Plot and Structure. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

“Learning the Grammar of Animacy” Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Milkweed Editions, 2013, pp.46-59.

Kimmerer, Robin. “Speaking of Nature.” Orion Magazine, 12 June 2017, orionmagazine.org/article/speaking-of-nature/.

“Singing to the Forest.” Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays, by Paul Kingsnorth, Graywolf Press, 2017, pp. 225–233.

Kingsnorth, Paul. “The Language of the Master.” Emergence Magazine, 18 May 2019, emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-language-of-the-master/.

Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language,” April 1946. The Orwell Foundation, 22 Apr. 2021, www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/.

Salesses, Matthew. Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. Catapult, 2021.

Yunkaporta, Tyson. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. HarperOne, 2020.

Julie Gabrielli pours her restless imagination into fiction, architecture and grad students. Her architecture, writing and painting explore living in the threshold time of societal unraveling, environmental reconciliation and climate collapse. Julie lives in Baltimore with her heroically supportive husband, sharp-witted son and goofy singing dog Brody. When not teaching or writing, she obsessively listens to politics podcasts, works out, runs and sails. She is a graduate of the Twitter Academy of Snark.

Selected Poems, by Gale Acuff

When you die your body rots away be 

 

-cause it's corrupt my Sunday School teacher 

says and she should know, she's 25 if 

she's a day, it's as if I'm rotting a 

-way right now, too, and me only ten 

years old, maybe I was born decaying 

so I wonder at what point in life, mine 

anyway, I was in between being 

born and beginning to die, would that be 

my birthday but right down to the milli 

-second? Something tells me that she doesn't 

know or if she does she'll never tell but 

she did tell us children once that when we 

croak then we'll have the answers to all we 

ever wanted to know. But I don’t know. 

                                          

I don't want to die but I have to but 

 

I don't know exactly when, sometimes I 

wish I knew but mostly maybe not, I'm 

only ten years old and if I learned I'd 

die at 90 I'd spend eighty years just 

worrying, I know myself pretty well 

or as well as any ten-year-old can 

and I don't want to die and I think not 

at all but at Sunday School they say that 

if I don't then I can't go to Heaven 

much less Hell or is that Hell or much less 

Heaven, I always mix 'em up so I 

don't want to die before I learn the truth 

but I'll have to ask my teacher at school, 

regular school that is, where God's no good. 

 

Nobody wants to die but maybe that's 

 

not true, somebody does, maybe lots, but 

I'm not one of them unless I fail tests 

at regular school and have to go home 

with the bad news that I deliver at 

the supper table when my parents ask 

how school was today and answering Oh, 

it's still there gets me only so far which 

of course is not far at all and when I 

have to have one of them sign my report 

card and the letter-grades are lousy I might 

get grounded and my allowance suspend 

-ed for a month or both so then I wish 

I was dead, or is it were, and I could try 

harder but failure wouldn't be the same. 

 

After Sunday School I hang around like 

 

I guess God does when everybody's gone, 

He's got the whole church to Himself again 

and I hope He doesn't mind be being 

here but it does seem holy, I have to 

admit it and I'm only ten years old 

and usually don't take religion 

seriously in case my friends fun me 

about it but then of course I might die 

at any time and I don't want to so 

my only out is eternal life, I 

have to croak to get it, though, and I can't 

live forever here on Earth nor hide out 

in church, neither. Is God scared, too? Poor soul. 

 

You can't go home again unless you're dead 

 

and that means to Heaven where God made you 

and put your soul into a baby body 

and you were born and after some time here 

you are or I am at least and to go 

home you have to die so maybe every 

Sunday when I walk home from church it means  

that I'm failing, I'm living as I'm walk 

-ing there but expiring as I double 

back so four times a month I have to die 

but I always rise again going home 

and it's even the same for regular 

school or when we go to the Foodway or 

Korn Dawg King or miniature golf unless  

I've got them reversed but that's religion. 

 Gale Acuff has had poetry published in Ascent, Reed, Journal of Black Mountain College Studies, The Font, Chiron Review, Poem, Adirondack Review, Florida Review, Slant, Arkansas Review, South Dakota Review, Roanoke Review, and many other journals in a dozen countries. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel, The Weight of the World, and The Story of My Lives.

The Rich American, a short story by Paola Lastick

Back when he lifted his hand and waved goodbye to Palmira for what he thought would be forever, the city had been rundown and full of petty thieves and lowlife criminals. Now, thirty-nine years later, Inmer Bolivar thought the city magnificent. He was an American now and in Palmira that counted for something. It counted for everything. In America it had not counted as much as he had hoped. In America he had been nothing more than another foreigner chasing a dream. But in Palmira he was the dream. And as his years advanced, he had come to realize that a man must go where he is already appreciated. So, he emptied out his bank accounts and stuffed his meager life savings, fifteen thousand dollars, in old shoes and put them in a box filled with old clothes and couriered the box to his ancestral home in Palmira where shortly after arriving he took out his American passport, brought it to his lips for a kiss and tossed it into the red-hot flames of the fireplace.

            He sat at a café now. He was truly short with a very brown face and small black eyes that slanted downward at the corners. His hair was black on top and deeply grayed at the temples. He wore a salmon-colored polo he tucked deep under the waist of a pair of ironed jeans that tapered to a point covering his ankles, the cuffs of the jeans resting over a pair of black leather loafers. He studied the menu, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. He lifted his head, his small eyes searched for the waitress. She saw him from the corner of her eye and nodded in acknowledgement as she walked over to where he sat.

            “You are Inmer Bolivar,” the waitress said.

            A smile came to the old man’s face. “You’ve heard of me?”

            “Everyone has heard of you.”

            “And what is it that you have heard? Good things I hope.” He unfolded the napkin and placed it over his lap and crossed one leg over the other as he leaned back on his chair. The cigarette bobbing up and down as his thin lips moved.

            “They say you are an American.”

            “Who is they?”

            “They everyone,” the waitress said sweeping her arms across the room.

            The old man looked and saw there were a handful of people in the café. People he did not recognize. The old man shook his head. “They lie.”

            “You are not an American then?”

            “I am from Palmira. I am like you.”

            “You are not like me. Not like me at all.”

            “I am more like you than I am an American.”

            “You are not Inmer Bolivar then?”

            “I am Inmer Bolivar. But I am not an American.”

            The waitress looked at him curiously. She did not know what to make of him. She had heard the old man had arrived from the United States the night before and was now living in the house on top of the hill across the river. A house that had sat empty for years.

            “Sit with me,” he said. With one foot he pushed the chair opposing him from under the table toward her.

            She looked around. “I can’t.”

            “Sure you can.”

            “No,” she said smiling. “I can’t. I’m working.”

            Inmer looked at the girl. Her brown hair. Her big brown eyes. Her milky smooth skin. She reminded him of his first wife. The wife that had given him four daughters he didn’t see anymore.

            “Get me a beer then,” he said.

            Back in the kitchen, peering through a small window above the sink at the girl and the American was Marco, the dishwasher. Marco was not a native of Palmira like the girl and the old man. He had moved to Palmira from San Cipriano three months prior and had fallen deeply in love with the girl. Up until the American sat in her section he had thought she loved him too, but as he watched her, he began to doubt. From where he stood, he could only see her back, but he could tell by the way she leaned on one hip and shook her head that she was smiling. She had been smiling the whole time. The American was smiling too. That he could see plainly. Of course, it was her job to smile he told himself. But he had heard things about the American he didn’t like, and the girl, to Marco, was too naïve to see what the old man was attempting to do.

            Inmer drank his beer slowly. It felt good to be back home where the weather seldom changed and the breeze always carried the light earthy smell of the sugar cane fields that lined the edges of the town. This evening he was particularly happy. He hadn’t been happy when he had walked into the café, but after seeing the girl, he felt good again. He felt the years that had lain on his shoulders begin to lift.

            The girl pulled the loose strands of hairs that swung at the side of her face and hooked them behind her ears. She had heard of the American from her mother who had said that in his youth he had been nothing better than a common thief and womanizer and had been well known in the small town. She looked at him from the bar across the room and didn’t think he looked like a thief or a womanizer. He looked old and quiet like an old dog that had lost his bone to a stronger dog. She dug her hand into the pocket of her apron and pulled out a fistful of crumpled pesos which she put on the counter and began to smooth out. It had been a slow shift and in all the ten hours she had waited tables that day she had only earned enough for bus fair and a loaf of bread. Meanwhile the American with his expensive leather shoes sat smoking his cigarette and drinking his beer from the bottle. She thought she should get to know him better.

            The boy came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on his apron and approached the girl from behind.

            “It’s getting dark. I can walk you to the bus stop.”

            She picked up the bills from the counter of the bar and rolled them together and secured them with a rubber band then put them deep inside her bra. She said, “It’s not dark yet. It won’t be dark for another half hour.”

            “It gets dark very fast,” he said.

            She looked at the American who was watching her, and not wanting to give him the impression she was with the boy, she took off her apron and said in a loud voice, “Good night, Marco. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She walked slowly across the café by where the American sat. She smiled as she walked out the door.

            The boy saw how the old man looked at the girl. He did not like that look. He knew very well what that look meant and he instantly found the American shameful. To think she could very well be his daughter. But what could you expect from a man who had lived all his life in America.

            From where he sat, the American looked at the boy with interest. He could tell the boy was brooding in the far corner and the old man observed how he watched the girl as she walked past him and out the door. Only when the girl was out the door did the boy turn his gaze toward him. The American fixed his eyes intently on the boy and they made eye contact for a second, then the boy looked down and turned to go back into the kitchen. So that was the boy he would have to contend with, he thought. He was a handsome boy. Thick brown curls and a chin that tapered to almost a point below his thin lips. But he was not a man. Not yet anyway. A man could give the girl what she needed. A boy could not. If the boy had been a man the girl would not be worth the effort, but he was not a man.

            The next morning Inmer woke to someone knocking on his front door. He was not expecting company. He had no family living in Palmira. His mother and father had died when he was fifteen and his only other family, an older brother, lived in New York with a German wife and three sons. He had no uncles or cousins or any other relatives living in Palmira or elsewhere. He put on a black t-shirt and went to see who was at the door and was delighted to see it was the girl from the café. She wore a tan skirt that fell just above the knees and a thin white shirt. Her hair was neatly combed and parted down the middle.

            “Pleasant surprise to see you at my door,” he said. He stepped aside to let her in.

            “I can’t stay,” she said. “I’m on my way to work and thought I’d come see you. I’m hoping you have work for me.”

            “Work?”

            “Yes, work. I clean and sweep and can cook. I cook exceptionally well.”

            “I don’t need a cook.” The old man licked his lips. “I may have other things you can do for me around the house, I suppose.”

            A white dog, a stray that had been coming up to the house since Inmer got there, came up behind the girl and put his wet snout on her ankle and began to sniff. The girl jumped.

            “Don’t worry about the dog. He’s harmless,” he said. “The poor thing came by begging for food the day I got here. I should not have given him anything, but I gave him a piece of ham from my plate and now I can’t get rid of him. Please, come inside.”

            The girl followed him into the living room where she sat with her hands tucked under her legs. She could see he had not yet unpacked. There were boxes stacked on top of each other all over the room.

            “I should go,” she said. “I’ll be late for work and my boss won’t like that.”

            “Stay,” he said. “Tell him the American insisted. He’ll understand.”

            “I can’t,” she said. “Think about my offer. Will you?”

            The man looked at her. She was beautiful. She was young too. He guessed her at nineteen, twenty, no more than twenty-two.

            “How old are you?” he said.

            “I’ll be twenty in the fall,” she said.

            “Twenty is a great age. I remember when I was twenty.”

            “Maybe it’s a great age for a man. For a woman it just means I’m too old to be taken care of and too young to care for myself.”

            “You want someone to take care of you? Is that what you are looking for?”

            “I didn’t mean it that way,” she said. “I just meant that it’s difficult to find work, that’s all.” But the girl had meant it that way and she was pleased he had picked up on it. She wanted him to imagine taking care of her.

            “Where are your parents? Don’t they take care of you?”

            “I live with my grandmother and she’s very old.”

            “Come tonight. Perhaps you can help me unpack,” he said.

            The girl was thrilled and hugged him. She pressed her body against his, her arms around his shoulders, and told him she was very thankful and that he would not regret giving her work.

            When the girl left, Inmer closed the door and sank into the spot in the couch where she had sat. The dog lay at his feet. He thought of the girl. He wanted the girl. But could he have her? Would she want him to have her? He thought of the fierceness in which she had hugged him, and he was sure she was sending him a signal. When he was young he could read the signals well. He had read many signals. The signals had come from all over and it had been hard for him to refuse any of them. But now in old age he wasn’t sure he was reading her right. At any age, how can a man truly know what a woman wanted? All Inmer knew was that in the precise moment her body pressed against his he felt things he hadn’t in a very long time.

            Men were predictable creatures, the girl thought as she walked down the cobbled street toward the café. This fact the girl had known well for many years living side by side with her three older brothers and seeing how girls would get their way with them. Marco, who also fit well into this theory, was firmly wrapped around her finger. She hadn’t wanted to hug the old man but had felt it necessary. She recalled his body, soft and weak, pressed against hers and the smell of his aftershave and she knew he would be reliving that hug for days. That made her smile. She liked him thinking of her. She wanted him to think of her. The more he thought of her the more she could control him. He had money. She knew he had money. A lot of money, and men, when well controlled, were more than generous with it.

            At the café the boy couldn’t concentrate. He was thinking of the girl and of the old man and of how reprehensible the whole situation was. He couldn’t let the old man fool the young girl with his money. Marco had no money to offer the girl, but what he did have was a great love for her and that, he thought, should be enough.

            “Hello Marco.” The girl said as she walked into the kitchen where Marco stood in front of the sink scrubbing a plate. She was beaming with absolute happiness.

            “What’s got you in such a great mood. Haven’t seen you smile that wide ever,” Marco said.

            “I’m very happy.”

            “What makes you happy?” He immediately wanted to take back those words after he said them sensing he knew the answer.

            “Do you really want to know?”

            “If it has anything to do with that old man you can keep it to yourself.”

            “What do you have against him?”

            “He’s a dirty old man. I see how he looks at you.”

            “Don’t tell me you’re jealous.”

            Marco said nothing. He was certain she knew how he felt for her, but nothing of the sort had ever been discussed between them.

            “I find him quite sophisticated, actually,” she said. She pulled her apron down from a nail that hung next to the back door and tied its strings around her waist.

            “He is nothing but an old man with a dirty mind,” the boy said. “I think you shouldn’t be too friendly with him. Might get the wrong idea.”

            “Don’t be silly,” the girl said. She walked behind the boy and put her hand on his shoulder. “I think he’s going to hire me to cook for him.”

            The boy dropped the plate into the sink full of soapy water and turned around and grabbed her arm above the bend of the elbow. “You can’t work for him,” the boy said. “I see how he looks at you. He is not a good man.”

            At this the girl smiled. The boy did not like the way she smiled.

            “He is rich, Marco. He will pay me well.”

            “Those are just rumors,” the boy said. “You don’t know it to be true.”

            “He is from America. He has to be rich. I can feel it. Women can feel such things.”

            That night and every night for the next month and a half the girl stopped by the old man’s house after her shifts at the café ended. She cooked and cleaned for him and they drank wine together on the balcony of the old house. The old man, knowing that women had to be brought in slowly like a big fish on a hook, would leave out an expensive looking watch on a dresser or a few large dollar bills on the kitchen counter. Each time he left something out for her to find he would watch from behind a door or through the corner of his eye to see her reaction, which was always the same. The girl, upon spotting the expensive item, would stop and turn around to see if the old man was near, then she’d touch it with a slight curve to her lips. Every time this happened the old man knew he was inching closer to having her.

            One particular night the moon was full and bright and the scent of jasmine from the garden filled the air. The girl and the old man sat in their usual spots on the balcony drinking their wine. The girl looked at the old man with his hair combed to the side, the deep wrinkles that lined his forehead when he talked of his time in New York or Chicago or Miami. Part of her felt sorry for the old man. His prime time, she could see, was long gone. But even if she felt sorry for the old man, sorry didn’t pay the bills and what she made cleaning and cooking for him was not much. Especially since she knew she could have so much more if she agreed to be his woman, but the thought of sleeping with him repulsed her. No, she could not keep going like this and she wouldn’t have to. Her hand reached deep inside the pocket of her shorts and her fingers lightly touched two little pills she’d taken from her mother’s cabinet. That night, as she drank the wine slowly, her belongings packed in a grey suitcase hidden behind the jasmine bush below the balcony, the girl waited for the old man to get drunk.

            “I’d love to bottle that scent in a perfume bottle,” the girl said. “I’d wear it every day.”

            “I can get you all the perfumes you want,” the old man said. “Expensive ones too.”

            The girl said nothing. She looked at the old man and tightened her grip on the pills inside her pocket.

            The old man was beginning to feel relaxed and light. He was enjoying the breeze and was starting to feel that the girl was coming around to his way of thinking. He had not wanted to hire her to cook and clean but was happy he had. He wanted her to be the woman to see him to the end.

            The girl stood up. “I’ll get you another,” she said. She picked up his almost empty glass.

            “I’m not finished,” he said.

            “You’ll be done soon.”

            “But I’m not done yet. Sit with me longer.”

            “You’ll be done soon enough, and I might not want to get up then.”

            “Then I’ll get it.”

            She sat down.  She was anxious to get it over with.

            “You should stay the night,” he said. “It’s dark and I don’t like thinking of you out there in the darkness alone in a bus.”

            The girl lowered her gaze and then slowly lifted her eyes to meet his. “I might,” she said. “But first let’s have another.”

            The old man lifted his glass and drank the last of it. “If it will make you stay,” he said. He handed the glass to the girl.

            In the kitchen she poured was what left of the red wine in the man’s glass and reached for the two little pills in her pocket. She looked at the man who was sitting, his back to her, petting the dog that lay at his feet. She dropped the little pills into his glass and watched them disappear. He would fall asleep and she would search the house and she would get the money and then she’d run. She would run until her legs gave out from under her.

            She brought out the glass of wine and watched as the old man drank it. Then she sat in silence. They sat until the old man’s head bobbed a few times before it rested on its side against his shoulder. The dog, loyal at his feet, lifted his head to look at the girl then put his head back down. The girl pushed her chair back and got up. She walked into the house where, with her pulse slightly quickening, began to look in the living room. She turned up the couch cushions and looked behind paintings on the wall. She lifted lamps and opened drawers.

            Coming up empty the girl moved to the bedroom down a narrow hall. She lifted the mattress. Nothing. She could feel her pulse beating against her chest. She looked in the drawer of the nightstand. Nothing. She looked under the bed. She found a small shoe box and grabbed it. She pulled the lid off. An old pair of slippers. She could feel sweat trickle down her back. She needed to find the money fast. She had to make sure she was far away when he awoke the next morning. She ran to the bathroom where she turned on the light and opened a cabinet on the wall. Nothing. Damn old man. Where could the money be? She made her way to the kitchen. She climbed on the counter to reach the cabinets above the sink but found nothing but plates and bowls. On top of the refrigerator she spotted a can of coffee and she remembered how the old man had once given her a twenty-dollar bill from a similar can. She jumped off the counter and reached high over the refrigerator until she felt it with her fingertips. She walked the can slowly toward her and caught it as it fell in her waiting hands. She lifted the lid off the can and saw a few dollar bills; fives and tens. She pulled out the money and began to count. Only sixteen dollars. She put the money deep inside her bra. She turned to see where she hadn’t looked before and saw there was a door under the kitchen sink unopened. She knelt and opened the small doors wide. She moved the detergent and sponges and felt under the pipes. Nothing.

            With her head deep under the sink she heard slow-moving footsteps approaching behind her.

            “What are you doing?” the old man said in a groggy voice. He was holding his head with one hand.

            Startled, the girl attempted to run out of the kitchen but the old man stuck his hand out and grabbed her by the arm. She writhed and twisted attempting to loosen his grip but his hands were strong.

            “You came here,” the old man said. “You came here to rob me. I should have seen it. You are nothing but a common thief. No. Worse. A thief at least will rob you and stare at you in the eye while he is doing it. You drugged me to do it. You can’t even look at my face. Look at me.”

            Hearing she was no better than a common thief the girl got angry and she pushed the old man with all her strength. He fell backwards onto the floor, and when his head hit the linoleum it made a dull thud, like a melon. She stood still for a while, watching to see if he moved. He didn’t move. She couldn’t just leave now. The old man had changed everything. Panicked she pulled a knife from the kitchen sink and she stood over him. She could hear his labored breathing. She gripped the handle of the knife tight. He tried to lift his head and, with her heart now threatening to leap out of her chest, she raised the knife, closed her eyes, and swung the blade just above the old man’s collar bone. When she opened her eyes she saw there was only a thin line of blood forming on his throat. She hadn’t cut deep enough, but even slow a flow will empty out and by morning she would be gone and so would he.

            She stood, frozen. She looked at the blood pooling behind his head and soaking into his shirt. She had never killed anything before, she thought, unless you can count flies. She remembered the first fly she killed when she was six. She had come up slowly behind it with a fly squatter and wacked it like her mother had shown her. The fly, unlike the old man, had instantly died and fallen off the dining table.

            “I’m not a common thief,” she said. She searched the old man’s pockets and found a thin roll of twenty-dollar bills. She put the roll in her pocket and ran out of the house grabbing her bag from deep inside the jasmine bush and disappeared into the darkness.

            On the floor of the kitchen the old man awoke to the dog licking his throat. At first the old man thought it was the girl kissing him, but as he floated to consciousness he realized it was the dog and he remembered what had happened. He sat up and put his hand on his throat. He felt a warm liquid and a stinging pain as his fingers ran over the shallow cut. He looked at his hands and saw the blood. He looked at the white dog and saw its muzzle and paws were red also. He felt dizzy. Then a cold spread through his body as he looked at the kitchen drawers. The girl had been looking for his money. In a panic he got up from the floor and, with much difficulty, stumbled to the bathroom. He opened the door and pulled up the toilet tank lid. There inside a plastic bag tied to the wall of the water tank, was the money he had hidden. It was all the money he had. He put the lid back on the toilet tank. Feeling much relief that the girl had not found his money he sat on the toilet seat and rested his arm on the nearby sink. He felt lightheaded now and knew he must get help. He attempted to rise but his knees buckled under his weight and he fell to the floor. He looked up at the light on the ceiling and noticed one of the two light bulbs was out.

            At the café the next morning the boy looked at the clock above the stove. It was ten o’clock and the girl was still not there. The old man was not there either for his usual expresso. The boy began to worry. Did the old man finally have his way with her? He washed the dishes from the early morning shift, and as he washed he thought of the girl nuzzled at the chest of the old man and he felt the anger deep inside him rise. Every time the door opened the boy peered from behind the window above the sink to see if it was the girl coming in holding the hand of the old man. By noon the boy was seething and could take it no more. He took off his apron and left the sink full of unwashed dishes. He walked in determined steps to the old man’s house.

            The boy stood at the front door. His hands balled into fists. His stomach turning. He had no claim to be there. No real claim. He felt it was a matter of honor. The girl was young enough to be the old man’s daughter. She was too naïve to see the cleaning and cooking was just a way to get her into his house. He knocked on the door and as his fist pounded the wood of the door the door opened slightly.

            “Irma?” Are you in there?” The boy pushed the door open a bit more and when the dog came to him, he saw its paws and muzzle were matted with red and brown blood and he immediately thought of the girl lying somewhere in a pool of blood.

            He rushed inside the house calling the girl’s name, but no one answered. The boy followed the dog’s bloody pawprints to the kitchen where he saw a pool of blood on the linoleum. He looked around the kitchen frantic.

            “Come out you bastard? What have you done to her?” he shouted.

            He saw pawprints on the floor leading around the corner and he picked up the knife and followed them. He walked slowly. He did not know if the old man was armed. As he neared the corner, he saw a light on in the bathroom and he walked slowly toward it. He stopped at the bathroom door and pushed it open with one hand. The door swung lazily and stopped when it touched the foot of the old man’s shoe. The boy saw the shoe and knew it was the old man. He felt a delight because that meant the girl had defended herself. He opened the door and the old man lay by the toilet with his hand on his throat. The boy could see the old man was still breathing. He left the bathroom to search for the girl. In every room there were drawers open, and their contents strewn about the floor. In that instant the boy remembered what the girl had said to him “the old man is rich.” And he remembered the smile on her face when she told him she was going to clean and cook for the old man. It had been a strange smile and he had not liked it. And as he looked around the house a grave picture began to emerge in his mind, and he knew what he had to do next.

            The boy dropped the knife and ran to the bathroom where the old man lay on the floor in a pool of blood. “Old man,” he said. “Don’t go yet.”

 Paola Lastick is currently a student at the Mountainview MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University. Her writing has appeared on blogs as well as the newspaper, The Real Chicago. She lives in a suburb of Dallas with her husband, daughter, and three small yappy dogs.