Regionally-Specific Award-Winning Short Story

Precise and richly evocative and timely as well

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From Judge Khan: Brammer’s short story, Regionally-Specific Award-Winning Short Story, throbs with a quiet power and secretes a cultural authenticity we are reluctant to question. He casts a much needed light on a region of our country no one thinks about, the diaspora of which, we were shocked to discover, could read and write. It is our great pleasure to award it the Brammer Prize for Excellence in Landlocked Literature.

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Her name was Mallory Dowdy, and she had the kind of ass that made the menfolk go wowie. The menfolk around These Parts are hostile and crude and they spit a lot, which adds some texture I’m sure. The name of our town is These Parts. It’s probably in Oklahoma or maybe Kansas. Here in These Parts every rock remembers and every tree whispers stories in the sighing dialect of leaves, spoken overhead on breezy afternoons. Between the rocks remembering and the trees whispering, gossip is more or less impossible to keep occluded. It spreads quickly, like some fast-spreading thing. That’s how news of Mallory’s affair reached my ears. The rocks told the trees, and once the trees have a tale it’s game over for your secrets ‘round here. In These Parts.

Now a description of Pap is necessary, for it’s with Pap that Mallory’s clandestine activities took place, per the trees’ account. Pap is one of those men who keeps to himself. He wears Coke-bottle glasses and he’s got a bear-like frame, so he looks a bit like a bear wearing Coke-bottle glasses. When he agrees with something he says “um-hum” and when he disagrees he says “nossir,” and you’d be hard-pressed to get much more out of the man than them two statements. Pap’s world is divided clean into things he agrees with and things he don’t. Maybe if you punched him real hard he’d make some other sound, but it’s mostly the two available responses provided above. One afternoon he saw Mallory’s fabled ass in her acid-washed jeans sauntering down the potholed street where he lives, her tattoo of Woodstock from Charlie Brown poking up over the waistband. Pap took one look and said “um-hum,” and the trouble officially began.

Mallory was a bit young for Pap and Pap was a bit old for Mallory, but that wasn’t the heart of the matter. Plenty of folk ‘round here are in age-gap relationships, which I don’t condone of course, but you’ve got to understand that in our impoverished rustic tableau all sorts of things transpire that would offend your sensibilities. We ain’t got no proper education nor electricity nor plumbing. All we got is God and guns and our sentient rocks and our loose-lipped flora. This is to say nothing of race relations, which are guessable. Now anywho, back to the heart of the matter, which was that Mallory wasn’t no woman at all but rather she was us. All of us, in composite. The town itself. These Parts.

She was the hissing swell of cicadas in July. She was Mama May’s sweet iced tea in a perspiring glass at sunset. She was the sound of the dogs barking at the moon, the wiry clang of a screen door, the pitter-patter of rain on the roof. She was the white-feathered underbelly of a hawk circling overhead, as well as the way the boys point at it, starved for scraps of beauty as they are, and she was the way they’d ruin anything so fine if they ever got their grubby mitts on it. She was every young girl’s dream of leaving as well as the fact that those dreams hardly ever pan out, which is to say she was a one-way bus ticket home. She was the din of a lawnmower on Sunday and the attendant green perfume, the hot kiss of the sun on the bottom of your feet on summer pavement. She was the potholes and the boarded-up arcade and the meth and the steepled church and the notion that things used to be better but aren’t so good anymore. She was the fact that good girls last but only for a moment around here. This is all to say she wasn’t no woman at all.

Naturally, a town hall meeting was called to address the fact that Pap was going steady with a literary device, which is strictly prohibited in These Parts and falls under an antiquated sodomy law we apply on a case-by-case basis. The malefolk, myself included, donned our best ten-gallon hats and bolo ties and boots for the occasion. It’s rare that we fellas get to dress to the nines, and we weren’t about to let such a golden opportunity slip through our craggy fingers. A menu was hastily assembled for the interrogation, which included a watercress salad, braised tofu, themed cocktails such as the Mallory Mule and Pap’s Pimm’s, and venison steaks.

The night was tense. The night was a drum skin pulled taut. Every move you made released an awful sound. The sound of a drum, probably. Like bum-BUM. After we were all assembled we commenced interrogating Pap. We trained our slingshots on him which were loaded with our intelligent rocks, and you best believe a point-blank shot to the dome from one of them suckers would prove fatal. “It brings me no pleasure to do so, Pap, but we got to get to the bottom of this. Answer our questions honest ‘n true, and nobody need be permanently altered tonight by a contemplative stone.”

“Um-hum.”

“Now is it true that Mallory ain’t no woman, but is instead you and me and everybody else here assembled in this kangaroo court, as well as a host of other intangible elements?”

“Um-hum.”

“And is it also true you knew this before you decided to get romantically involved with an abstraction who is by the way many years your junior?”

“Um-hum.”

“Are you aware of the problematic power dynamic that might make such a relationship toxic?”

“Yessir.”

“And have you scruples on that front?”

“Nossir.”

“Has feminism gone too far?”

“Nossir.”

“Would you agree a man’s strength is measured by the amount of truth he can tolerate?”

“Um-hum.”

“Do you believe in the validity of a vanguard, specifically a professional group of revolutionaries who will lead the rest of the people in creating and enforcing change?”

“Nossir.”

“Good lord, he’s a Maoist!” said Tate Ulrich, who was a dedicated Marxist-Leninist. “I’ll kill you, you sick son of a bitch!”

“Enough!”

Mama May’s voice cut clean through the evening like Excalibur through vegetable shortening. She had heavy bags under her tired eyes. Bags so heavy that if you managed to rend them from her and unpack them you’d find all the stuff you’d ever lost in there. Just a really exhausted lady. A tired broad. She was wide in the way that made men afraid. Every ear in the assembly turned toward this wise, wide woman.

“Mallory Dowdy is my daughter,” she said. “Same as she’s your daughter and same as she’s your mother and your girlfriend as well, uncomfortable as the notion might be. She is your brother and uncle, as well as all manner of other figures, such as the nameless youth working the gas station in the wee hours of the morning and the patron dining alone at night, glanced briefly from your passing vehicle going well above the speed limit. She is the thumb covering the mouth of the garden hose to angle a fan of water toward the daisies. She is the distance between where a thing is kept and where a thing is used. She is all the forgotten places, the girls who quietly dissolve in this land’s gut and the boys torn like jerky by its teeth. We are her, and she is us.”

“So you’re sayin’ not only is Pap guilty of sodomy, but incest as well?”

“That is the grim case,” she nodded. “May Allah absolve him.”

And so in our provincial ignorance we killed Pap. Tate Ulrich (Mallory) and Jeffery Buckles (Mallory) and myself (Mallory) and the other menfolk (Male-ory) loosed our rocks (Mallory) upon him while Mama May (Mallory) swung her great sword (Mallory) and it goes without saying the torrent was unsurvivable. We (Mallory) buried him under the town hall. We boot-scooted the night away. We invited Mallory herself to dance with us, her ass more beautiful than ever. Needless to say, we fucked ourselves.