48
E
2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
AT THE
b y
H a n n a h
T o w e y
THE HALF-MILE STRIP OF ROAD connecting South Chatham to Morris Island is called the causeway. There are no signs that say this, just local kids giving directions to tourists: “take a left at the end of the causeway for lighthouse beach.” They’ll never tell you to take a right onto Edgewater Drive because that’s a dead end. Unless you cut through some shrubs into Outermost Marina, closed now since last winter, when a storm built a sandbar too high for the water to pass. There’s another dead-end street on the opposite side of the causeway. Really, it’s more of a long, winding driveway for three small houses. The last house, number 52, is around where the Coast Guard’s thirteenth lifesaving station was, whose national motto still lurks in the collective mind of the town fishermen – “You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back.” The rear of the house looks over the marsh, with around three acres of woods just outside the front. During the day you can hear ducks and gulls and at night the hellish screams of coyotes and their prey, the sound of small things dying. That’s the house where I live. Every new house on Morris Island has a wall built around it because people think the island will be underwater soon. The tide eats away at more
N D
ART BY
MARY EDNA
FRASER
of the
C A U S E WA Y
Maine Coastline (batik on silk, 41x112) by Mary Edna Fraser