110
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y R E V I E W
Fall 2023
F INA LIST, 2 02 2 DO RIS BET TS FICTIO N PRIZE
Uniformity
by Gary V. Powell with art by Frank Holliday
of Carcass
That was not the story, but it was the story Mitch McCloud often repeated, a mantra of sorts to convince himself everything would be all right.
GARY V. POWELL, a reformed lawyer, lives near Lake Norman, North Carolina. He is the author of a novel, Lucky Bastard (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2012), and winner of Press 53’s 2022 Prime Number short fiction prize. He has been a finalist for several other fiction awards, and his work appears in many literary magazines and reviews, including the Thomas Wolfe Review, carvezine, 2012 Press 53 Awards Anthology, Atticus Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Pisgah Review, Best New Writing 2015, and Sleep Is a Beautiful Color: 2017 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology. Read another of his finalist stories in NCLR 2024.
THIS WAS THE STORY: AN ORDINARY middle-aged man meets and falls in love with someone much younger, an extraordinary human being, intelligent and kind, beautiful inside and out, who returns the older man’s love with equal ardor. Following a brief courtship, the unlikely couple forms a union and lives happily ever after. That was not the story, but it was the story Mitch McCloud often repeated, a mantra of sorts to convince himself everything would be all right. He was mouthing the words while staring out his window, looking south from his twenty-sixth-story perch in uptown Charlotte and admiring the Bradford pears blooming along Providence Avenue when his law partner, Potter Mills, burst into his office. New York artist FRANK HOLLIDAY, born in Greensboro, NC, was a key figure in the East Village Scene of the 1970s and ’80s. Along with artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, he helped found the seminal Club 57, while working days at Andy Warhol’s Studio 54. His work has been exhibited most recently at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Mucciaccia Gallery in Singapore, and the Carlo Bilotti Museum in Rome. He is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. His work is collected in the Museum of Modern Art and the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, among others.