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"Jessica Treadway’s fiction takes us into the terrifying and mystifying truths of family life. This is the real thing: how it can go wrong, how it can be redeemed. There’s no sentimentality here, just honesty, faith, and the glorious transformations of literary art." –Christopher Tilghman
From "Absent Without Leave":
When I got to town, I tried to guess which of the three usual places I might find my father. He could have been at his apartment, flopped on the thready sofa in front of the TV, his feet with their thick yellow toenails sticking out bare beneath the comforter, a pile of Saltine-and-peanut-butter sandwiches on the milk crate table beside him; or in a back-row seat of the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the basement of the Reformed Church; or balanced on his lucky bar stool at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post next to the library. I figured he wouldn’t be home, because he often said there was nothing more pathetic than an old boob laughing to himself in an empty living room at reruns of Gomer Pyle.
That left the AA meeting or the bar. I wondered what kind of mood he would be in, and where it would take him. The sky was gray, chilly, carrying snow in the breeze – not a day for resolutions. I drove to the VFW and found his old green Impala parked on a rough slant in the lot, and eased my own car into the space next to it. My father is not a veteran of any war, but that never seemed to matter here at the post. He has always been welcome wherever men seek brothers. On the Impala’s front seat I saw a library book called Shop for Success in the Job Market, next to a copy of the day’s newspaper folded back to the want-ad pages.
(Originally published in AGNI)
From "Outside":
Joe Wheeler was amazed at the world. With every step he could smell the dry dirt his shoe displaced and sent spreading into the air. He tried by stopping suddenly, a few times, to locate the exact point at which the particles became invisible as they rose from his feet; but they dissolved slyly against his blond shins, as if beating him at a race.
As he moved forward on the path, he was aware of the bugs flying around his face, but it seemed that by the time he got his hand up to shoo them, they had either bitten him or flown ahead. The green around him, and the brown under his heels, were sharp one moment and indistinct, flickery, the next. Dying, or at least his dying, was like that: like driving a car over a hill road, losing the radio signal in the high rock. The way a song came clear at the crest, then passed in and out of static as the car moved up and down through the gray: it was like that. Except that a radio could be fiddled with, turned up in volume, or switched off. Joe had no controls. And when his senses were working, they often came in too strong – he heard things people meant to be secret, or saw details no one else could discern.
He walked slowly, because his legs were sore at the hips, and because he was afraid that if he moved too fast he wouldn’t notice something he couldn’t afford to miss, like a car coming down one of the crossroads, or a kid speeding by on a bike. Three people passed him on the waterline, two women and a man; the women did not even look up, and the man turned his face to spit on the other side of the bushes as Joe hurried to get out of his way.
He stopped again by a thick-berried branch. Was he invisible? He ate some of the berries straight off the leaves – no point in waiting to wash them, that was a plus. They tasted dusty until he bit in, but the juice was sweeter this way. He was proud of the care he took to save himself from the thorns.
He turned to watch the joggers receding, their bodies bobbing toward Fairview Drive. He could not believe that they hadn’t seen him, but silent intersections didn’t surprise him anymore. A year ago, if he had passed the same man going at the same speed, they would have raised their hands above their heads in a high slap as their courses crossed. Now people moved by him without acknowledging he was there. It was as if they didn’t trust him, because he knew something they could not.
It happened, sometimes, even at home – the other night his daughter came into the living room to turn on the TV, and Joe, waking from a nap, had to speak up before being sat on. The rest of the family laughed when he told them about it, but Penny’s eyes had turned nervous since then. And his son, Matt, trying to escape admitting what it summoned in all of them, poked Penny and said, “It’s not like he’s history yet,” and then Joe saw in Matt’s face the most damaging kind of regret, and shock at the arrow he had shot from his own tongue. The wound to Joe’s soul was not as deep as what he felt for Matt at that moment – forgiveness, and the knowledge that he would be gone long before Matt ever understood it had been granted. That was what being a father meant, living or dead, and he knew this if nothing else would survive the subversion of his flesh.
(Originally published in The Atlantic)
From "Something Falls":
They always meet us at the door and search what we’re carrying, before we can go in. It’s the same for everybody, just routine, but it always makes me feel guilty. As if they think we’d be trying to smuggle in something dangerous. As if we’d be looking for some way around the rules.
The thing is, we don’t even realize sometimes, my wife and I. What counts as dangerous, I mean. We learned the obvious things early on – they made us take Dee Dee’s ceramic Far Side mug back home with us, that first day, and the instant coffee we brought her had to be poured into a margarine tub, from the glass jar. Those things made sense, once they were explained to us. Glass and ceramic, you could smash them and come up with a ragged edge. Dee Dee asked us for a jump rope, because they wouldn’t let her go outside to run or even walk, for exercise; we went to the sports store and bought one of those high-tech ropes, with wood handles and a strap at the center to balance the weight. When we presented it for inspection, it got checked with the other sharps.
A jump rope? I said, and the nurse didn’t have to tell me why, because Helen caught on right away, and she said Honey to me and then I got it, too: you could hang yourself with this toy.
(Originally published in Ploughshares)
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