Black Creek, South Carolina: a small town in the swamps that convinces itself that nothing bad has ever happened and nothing bad ever will. Black Creek is the sort of place where young girls roam the streets free to imagine who they are and who they’ll become. Where women sell pies and plants at the courthouse square. Where the fire department rescues cats from the tops of electric poles. And what trouble there is, they’ll tell you, stays past the town limits, in the run-down house-turned-strip-club and Lake Darpo, where certain birds are going extinct. These eleven closely related portraits show that the real threats have long taken root. Black Creek is a place of poignancy and absurdity, love and loss, loneliness and the brief charges of connection. Its residents will do almost anything to protect what they think is theirs.
From “Where We Go”
Moto signed her grandmother’s social security checks and cashed them at the gas station down by the bridge, and out of this, she’d give her father ten dollars, sometimes five if she felt it was all she could spare. You got a heart of gold, girl, Jerry told her once, but Moto knew this wasn’t true.
Her grandmother wore a thin cross around her neck, and it shone and caught the light even in the dark bedroom. It was gold, and no matter how long Moto stared at it, it was nothing like what she felt. Whatever was in Moto’s chest was sharp and cold, and lately it seemed to grow and turn upon itself in ways that made Moto feel like something terrible was happening.
Things change, Lonnie said. It seemed like the worst part of the world, and yet, there were times when it was all Moto wanted, for everything to be different from what it was.
She looked down at her grandmother, this naked, wasted body that did not speak, that only stared without seeing. It could be over. Fast and easy. It was, like breaking into houses, a trick she’d learned from the movies. Moto’s hands moved for the pillow. Or she might have done it with the necklace, turning it, tightening it until it was over. No, it could not have been gold in Moto’s heart, but what it was would remain there, a twisted scrap, because from outside, from that impenetrable night, came a yelp and a snap.
The sound stopped Moto where she was and then drew her to the porch where she’d tied the pup and where now, from the cheap metal rail, hung only a section of rope. Moto looked out into that darkness. During the day, Black Creek was so humid you’d swear you were walking through a cloud, but some nights the air seemed to thin, and like a kind of vacuum, it could take your breath away. In the streetlight, the moths and the June bugs floated and spun like motes, nearly weightless.
There was no sign of the dog, there or beyond, but Moto went out anyway. She glanced back, but from here, she couldn’t see her grandmother. She stepped outside and pulled the door closed behind her.
She went out into that black night. The other times the pup had broken loose, he hadn’t gone far—just to the stop sign or to the bottom of an ancient oak tree where in the branches a tensed cat spat in terror. But now, the dog was nowhere Moto could see, and she could barely see at all.
Still, as if playing by the rules of some unusual gravity, she half-walked and half-ran the streets alone, whistling in that way that was meant to draw things. It must have been nearly midnight.
From “Living Things” (titular story)
Every Friday before Halloween, the fifth-grade class from Black Creek Elementary came to trick-or-treat at Twilight Nursing Home. It was one of those community outreach initiatives thought >up by an ambitious first-year teacher who was no longer a teacher at all but instead worked as a part-time hairstylist who mainly just stood outside of the Klip and Kurl smoking Basic Menthol Light 100s. Still, the tradition was carried on by a group of haggard veteran teachers who, if nothing else, appreciated the chance to get out of the classroom.
They pushed the kids ahead, through the big glass doors and into the foyer that smelled like a nursing home, like coffee and white gravy and other less appealing fluids. And these boys and girls who had, that morning, been beyond excited to dress up as superheroes and magical fairies and glittery kitty cats were now petrified by what they were seeing—the masks which were really not masks at all but ancient human faces sneering in confusion, pain, or else a desperate attempt at joy; yellowed claws reaching out to pinch fat cheeks; and there, too, was all manner of amputation and scar and removal of nonessential parts like noses and the tops of ears, places where cancer liked to bud and bloom.
A few kids actually turned and ran away, and they had to be corralled and sternly spoken to by the teachers. Imagine she’s your grandmother, one teacher said. Imagine she’s you eighty years from now.
Watching from the front desk, Bev wondered if there were something instinctual in the way the kids responded. She had a dog once that got into a pack of M&M’s. He’d eaten the colored coating off all the candies but had left the chocolate. He seemed to know it would hurt him, just as these kids, so new to their own lives, seemed naturally repelled by those so late in theirs.
