40
2013
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
2012
the
Shower
b y r o n a l d jac k s o n
with art by Robert Tynes
I held tight, smelled the skin on her neck and the oils in her hair, which I’d dreamed about every night over there whenever my head hit the pillow. Her scent meant home to me.
Durham native RonALD Jackson has been writing in North Carolina for twenty years. His career includes stints as a sports feature writer for a Philadelphia weekly, marketing writer, ghostwriter for trade journal articles, web copywriter, and speechwriter. A trade article won a Bell South annual award for journal placements. He recently turned his attention to two of his lifetime loves, fiction and poetry. “The Shower” is his first submitted story after two years of intensive learning in a noted Hillsborough writing group, where he honed his craft under the guidance of two newly published novelists and five other exceptional writers.
number 22
DorisBettsFiction Prize finalist
I sit alone in my booth at the Reveille Café, watch Marla wave goodbye from the front counter. She looks like crap, cried for an hour over a bottomless cup of coffee. That’s what happens when you get in over your head with someone, not that my record is clean on that count. She got worked up, begged me to tell her something about myself, anything. So I let loose for once, talked about my tour in Afghanistan, about Fiona and me, about the peculiar afternoon we had at the baby shower. She asked about my lifestyle. I don’t go with men. Marla was cool, said some nice things. I don’t go with women lately either. I’ve been a loner too long now. We agreed to meet back here for brunch on Saturday. Just friends, I’m thinking. As the door closed on her back, I bobbed my tea bag in the hot water, coaxing one more cup out of it as I reviewed our conversation. Afghanistan. Easy to live lean there. Every week, a new focus. Every day, an adrenaline rush. My first mission, clearing a six-block area in Kandahar, I’d managed to act like a professional soldier, be in the right place most of the time. From there, the men took me as someone good to go, had their backs, not just some girl. The daily effort had forced a toughness on me I didn’t know I had. Back here in the world? Different story. My last year at Bragg had all the joy of going home to an empty apartment after the State Fair. Talk about losing focus. Correct that. I had one focal point, and looking back, it wasn’t a wholly rewarding one. More pain than gain, much as I hate to say that about Fiona. The flight home from Afghanistan, I’d wondered if I was leaving the tough girl back there. Waiting for the connecting flight at Gatwick, I jumped a foot when a dark-haired boy tapped me on the shoulder, asked if I was a soldier or wearing a make-believe costume. I told him it was both most times. On the Explaining her selection of this story as a finalist, NCLR Fiction Editor Liza Wieland describes “The Shower” as “a refreshing take on the contemporary soldier’s story. Here the soldier is a woman returned home and wondering how to connect with her female friends. The writing is acutely descriptive, close to the bone. The term ‘surgical strike’ comes to mind: I get what’s important. At the end of the story, I feel I know Babs and her friends and understand the complications of their lives.” This story’s veteran protagonist anticipates NCLR’s 2014 special feature section topic: war in North Carolina literature. See the submissions page of our website for submission guidelines and deadlines.