North Carolina Literature and the Other Arts
N C L R ONLINE
23
fiction by Michael Parker with art by Jason Craighead
R EC RU ITMENT THAT EVENING SHE DROVE DEEP INTO THE southern end of the county, where the soil turned sandy and thick and then disappeared under black water. Swamps stretched to the ocean, forty miles south. These were the hardest kids to reach. The bus drive to the high school was forty-five minutes for those who lived off these backroads. Dirt roads with clusters of mailboxes, six or seven families living off a rutted two track in mostly trailers onto which they had built wings, lean-tos really, additions, listing on stacked blocks, half-walled, half windowscreened. Sleeping porches for the summer months, she guessed. The screens were always bowed out and rusty and many were studded with cotton balls to ward off flies. She had given her boys a bag of carrots. That was all that was left for them to snack on. She groceryshopped on Thursday afternoons, and for years she had hidden things from her children – there were five in all, the three youngest with her that night, the two boys in back and her daughter reading in the passenger seat – so that they would not eat everything by the weekend. But when all the trouble started at work (and at home, but she couldn’t really say where it started, given the nature of the conflict) she gave up. Have at it, just know that if you drink all the milk and eat all the cookies that’s it. Ice
cream and potato chips went first. The flat of Chek colas and lemon lime sodas she bought at the Winn Dixie for ninety-nine cents never lasted past Sunday. Then the breakfast cereal, which they ate out of the box when the milk was gone, savagely clutching the boxes to their bony chests. Her older brother, now a minister in Little Rock, had a peculiar way of eating a carrot when he was young. He would bite carefully around the core. Did everyone but her know that a carrot had a core? These days it seemed likely, given all she’d missed, all that had gone on, all she was now being blamed for. The core of the carrot is stark, spindly. It has these little limbs; it resembles a tree scorched by a forest fire. Her brother taught her how to core a carrot and she passed the skill onto her children. In the back seat at that moment her two youngest boys were loudly and competitively at work. The final product they would lean forward to thrust in her face. She was to judge the most most perfectly cored. The other two children were old enough to stay home. She had left them there after dinner. Her husband did not come home from work. It was Tuesday, and the paper he owned and ran almost single-handedly came out on Wednesday, so she rarely saw him on Tuesdays, but since the trouble
MICHAEL PARKER is the author of six novels and two collections of stories. A third collection of very short stories like this one, called Everything, Then and Since, is due out from Bull City Press in 2017. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various journals including Five Points, The Georgia Review, The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, Oxford American, Shenandoah, The Black Warrior Review, and Men’s Journal, and they have often been selected for the best of volumes like New Stories from the South and The O. Henry Prize Stories. An excerpt from his new novel, All I Have in This
World (Algonquin, 2014) was published (and the novel reviewed) in NCLR Online 2015. He has received fellowships in fiction from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. He was the honoree of the North Carolina Writers Conference in 2015 (watch tributes here). A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia, he is the Vacc Distinguished Professor in the MFA Writing Program at UNC Greensboro. He lives in Greensboro, NC, and Austin, TX.