by Anna Moore

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Stacey walked straight to the Subaru and sat in the backseat. She left the car door wide open so her family could see her. She crossed her arms.

She did not want to go to Florida. She readied her phone so she that she could hold it in her stepfather Gregory’s face. He was first when they emerged from the house, his tee shirt bright blue with I’M HERE FOR THE PROTEST blazing on the front in yellow. He held baby Jason, who wriggled as Gregory put him in his car seat. Jason was hugely cute and happy. When he was first born, Stacey liked to watch him. Awake and on his back he was a turtle— helpless, lacking armor, a kicking mass of life. He was nine months old now. He cooed and grinned, his lips tiny and soft, a single tooth in his lower gums.

If her family weren’t there, Stacey would have smiled at him and squeezed his chubby foot. Tickled his belly. But instead, she held her phone up to Gregory’s nose as he adjusted the shoulder straps of the car seat.

“He is still in Florida,” Stacey said. “He was last seen right where we’re going!” Gregory put the pacifier in Jason’s mouth.

“I wouldn’t take my kids anywhere near there!” Stacey said.

“Why can’t she stay home?” asked Bug, Stacey’s little sister.

“She’ll burn the house down,” said Gregory. “Steal all the silver.”

“Mom,” said Stacey. “What are you going to do if he finds us?”

“He’s not looking,” said Belinda. In an effort to look wilderness-oriented, she wore a purple North Face cap with her hair in a ponytail out the back.

“He’s got his own militia,” said Stacey.

“He had his own militia,” said Belinda. “He might not even be in this country anymore.”

“We’re going to die!” Stacey said.

Bug started to cry. She had long hair, smooth and fine, like their real father’s had been before it all fell out.

“I don’t know why Stacey has to come.”

“My mother wants to see her,” Gregory said. “God knows why.” He took a deep breath, put his hands on the steering wheel. Looked at Stacey in the rearview. “You know I didn’t mean that,” he said. “Grandma wants to see you and so do we.”

Whenever Stacey felt Gregory’s guilt and exasperation, which was all the time, she lashed out. Gave herself a manicure on his father’s antique sideboard and left a Rorschach splotch where acetone burned off the finish. Drove his precious Corvette on the highway for an hour even though she didn’t quite have a license. Hid his phone. Took her dinner plate to her room and locked her door and looked out her window while they knocked.

Stacey, please, Belinda had said.

I will kick this door in! Gregory yelled.

But he hadn’t.

Nobody had, and now she ate up there alone. Which was fine with her, obv.

She pushed her purple glasses up her nose and touched her waistband through her tee shirt. It split her gut in two—a roll above, a roll below. She unbuttoned her shorts like she always did and hated herself for doing it and hated herself for caring that she did it.

She checked the CNN Fugitive Finder again.

A red dot blinked on the Georgia/Florida border, north of Jacksonville.

“We’re heading right to him!” she said.

“That was weeks ago,” said Belinda. “He’s not going to be standing on the side of the road.”

“Not without an M-16 to kill us all!”

“Shut up,” said Bug.

They drove. Strip malls and trailer parks, trees and shrubs and ditches covered in kudzu, a giant drape that smothered all life.

Stacey’s real father—the one she shared with Bug, when they’d all lived in Maryland, had been getting one more round of radiation when Belinda met Gregory, whose nonprofit was traveling to schools, soliciting volunteers to create awareness campaigns about world hunger. Great for their college applications, he’d said, but the priority was to bring young people together to work toward a goal.

Well, thanks?

Ya’ll can fix the world’s problems, he always said. If you’d come together.

Puke.

Stacey’s phone CLINKED, a text from her friend Sapphie.

Where ru

Outside Thomasville SHOOP What ru doing SHOOP

CLINK Shakespeare paper

“Gregory hates that,” Belinda said. “Why don’t you turn that off and look around? The country is beautiful through here.”

“The country is fucking boring through here,” Stacey said.

“Language,” said Belinda.

My mom is such a bitch SHOOP

CLINK She’s sweet, also skinny

Her butt is so full of cellulite it’s gross

SHOOP CLINK YOU are such a bitch!

Ikr SHOOP

CLINK But your mom is so nice!

It’s a front SHOOP

Belinda snatched her phone, turned it off, and put it in the glove compartment.

“I have to keep track of the news!”

“You’re texting,” said Gregory.

“Fuck you!”

“Don’t,” said Belinda. She squeezed Gregory’s shoulder. “Please, Stacey,” she said. “I am so tired.”

Good.

Stacey looked at the houses set back from Highway 319. Dirty mobile homes, some cars in the yards. Tarps over holes in roofs. A few families with busy kiddie pools and adults smoking in painted metal chairs spackled with rust.

“Are they poor?” Bug asked.

“Very,” said Gregory. “Look at those children.”

“Why don’t you feed them, Gregory?” asked Stacey, as she always did. “Why don’t you do anything for our people?” she asked. “In say Mississippi? Louisiana? Or even right here?”

“All people are our people,” Gregory said.

“You’re a phony,” she said. “Such a neo-lib.” In her most recent essay for AP American Government, Stacey had shredded them all. Their over-and-over-again votes for aristocratic elitist drips so they could keep what was theirs while the world died in fires of climate change and floods of fascism.

A+++++++!! The teacher had written. You really know your stuff!

She’d printed out the paper with comments and left it on Gregory’s pillow.

Through the rearview, Stacey saw two veins on his forehead pop out like interstates on one of those old relief maps that hung on the wall of her school library, there on display to prevent anyone from moving out of nostalgia—a fake feeling anyway, Stacey had learned in Advanced Sociology, an empty space of longing to keep everyone grounded in times past and eras long gone. A big con.

God, she couldn’t wait to go to college. She’d made it not into Columbia, her first choice, but Berkeley. With a scholarship. Despite being forced to move to Atlanta her senior year. Despite her dead dad. She had kept herself at the top of her class.

The sun beamed on her thighs. Fat girls wore shorts all the time. Why couldn’t she just deal with it?

“All these strip malls,” Gregory said. “It never used to look like this. There was more wilderness. More beauty.” He told endless and boring stories about growing up in rural Georgia, eating Fudgesicles and playing in the woods, screen doors slapping open and closed.

“Developers,” said Belinda.

“There used to be more forest between towns.”

“Can we go to Chick-Fil-A?” asked Bug. Jason grinned at Stacey from his car seat. She wanted to pull on his toes and hear his huge laugh.

Stacey crushed the urge like a failed revolution.

“They’re against gay rights,” said Belinda. “We shouldn’t have gone last time.”

They passed a funeral home that looked like a miniature casino, a rectangle-sign over the front door with blinking lights around the border. Serve your dead well, it said.

“This place is gross,” Stacey said. She meant the South. All of it. Every dripping racist inch of it. She pulled her nail file from her front pocket. It was frosted glass, the handle etched with lacy flowers. The top point had broken off, leaving two jagged and lopsided spikes. She carefully filed her pinky nail.

“Where are we going to eat, then?” asked Bug.

“Terry Tarleton’s Piggy Park!” said Belinda. “It’s a famous local place.”

***

Wasn’t hash made of boiled pig’s head? Hadn’t Stacey read that somewhere? Melted skin, softened pieces of bone and cartilage in gravy and broth. She sat at the picnic table on the back patio of Terry Tarleton’s Piggy Park and watched a father feed it to his kid. The table was crumby and mildly grimy, with divots of chipped paint on the surface and the bench.

“Great restaurant choice,” Stacey said to everyone.

Bug sat on the bench, legs gently swinging. Stacey wanted to touch her shoulder and smile, giddy-up her braid like she did when they were younger. This time she waited for the urge to shrink and then felt it disappear, a drop of water in hot earth.

A Sphynx Cat, hairless and wrinkled, slept on one end of a bar that this place obviously never used since it was lined with bus tubs full of papers. On the other end, a TV was on CNN. Another interview with his former wife, who somehow was not in prison.

“Can I please have my phone back?”

“No,” said Gregory, bouncing Jason on his knee.

“I want to know where they’ve seen him last.”

“He’s in the forest, hiding under rocks where he belongs.”

“You said there was no more forest.”

“Let’s hope he’s in a hole, like Saddam,” said Belinda.

“Who’s Saddam?” asked Bug.

“Here you go!” said Terry Tarleton herself, walking out from the kitchen with plates of food stacked up her arms. She was a big woman with most of her weight in her hips. She wore a dark orange shirt with grease stains around the collar, tight slacks, and a gigantic white apron. She put their plates in front of them and looked at the TV. Radar circles, a map, that red dot.

“He’s getting closer,” said Stacey.

“Can’t we go home?” asked Bug.

“Grandma wants to see us,” said Gregory. “We’re already a little late.”

“I’ll call her,” said Belinda.

“Please do this time,” said Gregory.

“Don’t worry, Sugar,” said Terry to Bug. She sat right beside her on the bench and pointed to the TV. “That man comes around here, we don’t call the police.” She nodded to the gun cabinet behind the bar, glass panes foggy with dust.

Gregory and her mother hated guns. Belinda, who had never been anywhere near a mass shooting, wept whenever they happened. Stacey used to hold her hand, but now she rolled her eyes and said Oh please and offered to write a memoir called Mom’s Manufactured Trauma. Sometimes you just toughened up. Grew some armor. People in prison did! Women in Texas did! Nurses did! Why couldn’t Belinda? Because she believed that LOVE WINS, the words printed at the top of that sign of lies that Gregory insisted on keeping in their front yard.

But love didn’t elect white supremacist racists or kill everyone with a virus. Love didn’t boil babies. Stacey learned about this when she wrote a paper on war crimes for International Baccalaureate World History. During an attack on a tiny village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, soldiers had dropped newborns, alive, into a cauldron of boiling water while the mothers watched, begging in terror.

Love could not re-freeze arctic ice or restore forests burned to ash.

Love could not save anyone. It had lost long ago.

So Stacey no longer had a problem with guns. The last time she’d stayed over at Sapphie’s, she had agreed to show Stacey how to use one. They went into Sapphie’s garage and she opened the gun safe in the corner. They stood in the middle of the concrete floor where a car was usually parked, the garage door closed, the light on.

“You just line up the sights,” said Sapphie, holding a Glock and aiming at the lightswitch. “The front and the back. Stand hard. Put your legs apart a little, like this.”

She handed it to Stacey.

“Is this plastic?”

“The grip is,” said Sapphie.

Plastic weapons. Sapphie showed her the safety, turned it on and off. She was barefoot with pretty toenails. Light blue.

“It’s unloaded,” she said. “You can pull the trigger.”

“Are you sure? Can you check?”

“It always is,” said Sapphie. “We’re not crazy.” Stacey aimed for a black cabinet knob.

“Pull it,” Sapphie said. “Go ahead.”

Click.

Stacey and her family had stopped eating to watch the silent TV. Footage of the last moments of the trial, when he wept and put his head down on the defendant’s table like a child in trouble at school. They had taken his giant toupée and his scalp looked white and pink, dotted with freckles. This bothered Stacey. They couldn’t let him have his hair? Just that little thing?

“Mr. Tarleton is the best shot in Lowndes County,” Terry said. “We don’t worry about a thing in here.”

“You didn’t support him?” Belinda asked.

“Honey, I was never with that monster.” She put her hands on her hips. “He wasn’t doing nothing except for himself. I told my friends—you’re voting for a menace! A liar! Terrorizing the whole country! Taking us all back! And now they know. And they say, Terry, you told us so.”

“It’s just wonderful that you never supported him,” said Belinda.

Stacey cringed whenever her mother said just wonderful.

Terry shook her head. “No Ma’am. Things ain’t the way they used to be, though.” A call bell rang in the kitchen. Jason hiccupped. “We crossed a line. We ain’t never going back.”

***

Gregory forced them to go to three antique stores in Thomasville and bought matching brass lamps, bases tarnished green. Stacey stayed in the car, but he refused to let her have her phone back until they were on the road again.

Fuck my life SHOOP

CLINK Maybe your grandma will give you money again

Not worth it, between her and Jason too much drool SHOOP

“Let’s stop at that Confederate monument!” Belinda said. Jason was asleep in his car seat. Stacey rested her arm on it.

“I don’t want to be late,” Gregory said. “Did you call Grandma?”

“I think it’s just up here,” Belinda said. “Stacey, check your phone?” Belinda didn’t like to use hers. She thought cell phones and the Internet in the palm of your hand were responsible for the decline of western civilization.

“Belinda—”

“Every time, you say we’ll stop.” Belinda said. “Every single time.”

“It’ll just be a plaque, if even that,” said Gregory.

Belinda crossed her arms. “I would like to see a Confederate monument, please. I still haven’t, not out in the country. We are in the South. It is part of their culture.”

Stacey turned the sound off on her phone. “It’s this road coming up,” she lied. Because fuck them.

“This next one?” said Belinda.

“Yep.”

“I thought it was further up.”

“Fine,” New Stacey said. “Don’t believe me.” She crossed her arms, looked out the window.

“Gregory, make the turn.”

“I don’t have time!”

“Yes you do. Please, honey! Go on!”

The tires barely squealed as Gregory turned onto the county road, and Belinda whooped.

The lamps thunked in the trunk.

The road stretched deep into countryside, the hills slow and rolling. They drove past brick homes, a weedy public park, a tiny closed General Store, then through an abandoned downtown and a neighborhood of dilapidated tract houses with families on the porches, a diapered child in the dirt.

“The poverty,” said Belinda. “Look at that.”

“We should turn around,” said Gregory.

“Keep going,” said Stacey. “Like 2 more miles. It’s a former plantation.”

“Really?” asked Belinda.

“What’s a plantation?” asked Bug.

“Where slaves were forced to live and work,” said Stacey.

“Masters in the mansion, slaves in shacks.” Belinda shook her head. “Awful.”

“You’d think they’d have signs,” said Gregory.

“It says it’s been unmarked for years,” said Stacey. “I think everyone forgot about it.”

“Amazing!” said Belinda. “I’m so excited!”

Her mother. Always looking for that real thing, that real experience. In IB English, Stacey had read “The Loss of the Creature,” and was left with a clear understanding of Belinda—her superficiality, her hollowness. Her desperation.

“It says turn here,” said Stacey.

“That’s a dirt road,” said Gregory.

“That’s what it says.”

“Are you sure?”

Stacey nodded her head. “Positive!”

“Okay. Here we go.” The road was brown but tinged a dark orange, a rusty curve that cut into the earth.

“Thanks, honey,” said Belinda.

Stacey put her phone face down in her lap and turned the sound back on.

Tall pine trees grew along the road on either side, the tips mottling sunlight that shone into the car.

“What time do we have to be there?” Gregory asked. “I don’t want Mom to worry.”

“We have plenty of time,” said Belinda. “I’ll call and let her know.”

Bug’s side of the Subaru was all shade. The road was getting worse. Gregory hit a pothole so deep that the bump woke Jason. He started to cry.

“How much further?” Gregory asked. Through the rearview, Stacey saw sweat on his upper lip.

“Is that a railroad bridge?” asked Belinda.

“I think so,” said Gregory.

“It’s tiny,” said Belinda. “It’s like a ruin. How weird.” She turned to Stacey, who was looking out the window. “Look at your… oh my God.”

Stacey clasped her hands and hooked them around her knees as she met her mother’s eyes.

“What?” said Stacey.

“Turn around,” said Belinda.

“What do you mean?” asked Gregory.

“She lied about everything. Turn around.”

“God damn it!” Gregory yelled.

Jason cried louder.

Belinda blinked, sniffled, then put her hands over her face and sobbed. “Mommy?” Bug asked.

“I’m okay, honey.” She pulled a Kleenex out of the glove compartment and blew her nose, still sobbing. “I’m okay.”

“There’s no plantation?” Bug said.

“No, honey. Stacey didn’t get the directions right.”

“We were going to see a mansion!” Bug started to cry.

“What does this get you?” Gregory slapped the steering wheel in fury. “What? What does—”

Stacey’s phone rang. She’d set the tone to By the Seaside, a jolly organ melody that startled them all, especially Gregory, who lost control of the steering wheel as the Subaru hit another pothole, bounced as if on a trampoline, and went hard into the sloped shoulder. They crashed downward into a thicket of blackberries. Green knobs of fruit and tiny thorns pressed onto Stacey’s window. The tires kept spinning, pushing the car further in, back tires scraping dust and gravel.

“Is everyone okay? Jason! Bug!” Belinda yelled.

“Everybody out!” Gregory yelled. “I can’t back up!”

The thicket was blocking Stacey’s side of the car. Belinda helped Bug out and tried for Jason but couldn’t unbuckle the car seat. He cried for Mommy, arms reaching toward her.

“I’ll get him!” Stacey yelled.

“Don’t you touch him!” What Gregory called Stacey at that moment was unthinkable.

She started to cry.

Gregory climbed over the gearshift to exit the Subaru from the passenger side, then reached into the back and finally unclicked Jason’s seat belt and hoisted him out. He was screaming.

Stacey kept crying. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

“Are you okay?” Belinda asked, looking in.

Stacey nodded and wiped her face with her fingers.

Belinda sighed and closed her eyes. “Try to climb around the car seat.”

Stacey maneuvered herself, got out, and stood with her family. The road ended at the bridge; the forest continued on the other side. Sycamores towered above them.

“We had an accident, Gregory!” Bug said.

“I know,” Gregory said, looking at his phone. “No service.”

“We had an ACCIDENT!” Bug screamed.

Stacey’s phone was in the bottom of the Subaru. She heard it clink.

“I have service!” Stacey said. “I could crawl back in and try!” No one looked at her.

Stacey heard birds. Jason grew quiet; Bug hugged her mother’s legs. Gregory held his phone up to the sky and stared at it, walked toward the bridge. “Come on,” he said.

Stacey pictured herself walking through the trees, finding a house, calling for help.

They heard a car and all five of them turned to look. Dark blue, driving toward them.

“That’s a limousine,” said Belinda.

“On this road?” said Gregory.

Bug jumped up and down. “Help! Help! Help us!” She waved her arms and ran toward it.

“Come back here, Bug!”

The car stopped, motor running, tinted windows up. The limousine was alien, out of place. There was no breeze. Sweat pooled in Stacey’s bra, her stupid bra with pads that were too big for her.

“Why don’t they get out?” Bug asked.

Everyone waited.

“Check your phone again,” Belinda said.

“I’m going to go get mine,” Stacey said. But then the driver’s window went down. A man got out of the back and stood on the road beside the limousine. He wore a red cap that was illfitting and cheap—they could all see it, a spot of aberrance in all the green.

“Oh my God,” whispered Gregory.

“Mommy!” Bug cried. “Mommy!”

“No,” said Gregory.

“God help us,” said Belinda.

He approached them and pulled a gun from his front pocket. He held it with a drooping, awkward wrist and thick fingers that didn’t know where to be.

“It’s you-know-who,” he sing-songed. The writing on his cap was frayed, unreadable, marred with dirt and grime. He wore a white undershirt with a tear in the shoulder, suit pants, and filthy black dress shoes.

“We won’t tell anyone we saw you,” said Belinda.

“Got that right,” he said. He was much thinner. He turned his head to the side but kept his eye on them. He put the gun in his pocket. “Come on, boys!”

Two men got out from the front of the limousine. One wore a cap with a rainbow peace sign and overalls that hung only to the middle of his shins; the other wore a suit without a tie and no shoes. Both of them had automatic rifles, the kind men used in mass shootings. They left the car doors open. The sky above the trees held a faint orange glow where the sun had just been.

“We won’t tell,” said Gregory. “We just want to go home.”

“It’s tough, yeah,” he said. “It’s tough all right. Like tall grass tough, huh?”

“What?” said Belinda. “What are you talking about?”

“Like Times Square. Yeah. I know. I know it all. I knew more than anyone, do you get that? Did you get that? I had it all. I knew more than anybody. Ever.”

His face looked like papier mâché painted pink and blobbed with red. As if he were wearing a pull-on mask of himself.

“Our family is in crisis right now,” Belinda said. She rocked Jason as she spoke, twisting back and forth at her waist, spreading her fingers around the back of his head, pulling him to her shoulder. “We just want to go home.”

“They made me eat dog food out of a bowl,” he said. “On the floor of a cell. A rat right on my foot.” He pointed to his toes.

“I’m sorry,” said Gregory. “I’m sorry.”

The men walked toward them.

“It’s tough. Yeah.” He smiled and his teeth were so white they shocked Stacey. Whiter than real, young and shining, a fantasy. “But I’m tough.” He sat on the ground and grunted.

Stacey knew what to do. She knew! She knew psychology. She’d taken beginning, advanced, even a lab.

She squatted down to meet his eyes. “You are tough.”

He looked at Stacey, the skin beneath his eyes desiccated and sunken. He was no longer a big man. “Do you know me?”

“Like you’re my own father,” Stacey said. She didn’t know where her voice was coming from.

“I’d think of me like a daddy.” He licked his finger and made a clean stripe through the layer of dust on his shoe.

“I do,” said Stacey. “I will.” The man with the peace cap walked to Gregory and nudged him gently toward the trees.

“Where’s he going?” Belinda asked. “What are you doing? Please God please God please God please.”

“They took my money,” he said.

Gregory walked into the trees, rifle at his back. “Belinda!” he called.

“I think you’re a good man deep inside,” said Stacey. Because wasn’t everyone? When everything was stripped away?

He crossed his legs into lotus position but cringed as if the effort caused him great pain. Dust from the road stirred around him and settled into his pants, his black socks.

“Let’s go into the trees,” he said. “I’ve been everywhere in the world. I’ve been to Abu Dhabi. You know that? I’ve been everywhere there is.”

“You’re right, Daddy,” Stacey said. Everything had left her now. “About all of it. You’re always right.” She took a step toward him.

His gun rested on his palm, open in his lap. “I’m thirsty,” he said.

The man in the dirty suit walked to Belinda, Bug, and Jason. “These are my babies,” said Belinda.

“They’ll turn on you,” he said. “I bet they will.”

“No, Daddy,” said Stacey. “We’re loyal. She raised us like that.”

He looked away from her.

“We adore you,” Stacey said. “We never stopped loving you.”

He stood. Stacey saw the whiteness of his skin beneath his undershirt. He walked her through the legs of the trestle. Stacey saw bits of wrappers, cigarette butts, tiny pecks of glass and batteries and plastic bits and pieces that you’d never have known were there from a distance. Nobody ever did. No one knew how much there was. It was all so infinitesimal.

He stopped beneath a cluster of trees and stood behind her, put his hands on her waist and squeezed her flesh. He smelled.

“My little girl.” He turned her toward him, with Belinda and Bug and Jason right there— but no, they were back on the road, Stacey couldn’t see them anymore. Were they crying? Was that what she heard? Or was it animals?

Stacey’s throat was tight, a rubber band around a scroll.

He guided her to the ground and her legs bent strangely; she couldn’t quite feel them. But at her hip, something pressed into her flesh like the tip of a knife. The nail file. Its jagged edges had torn a hole in the lining and cut her skin.

Above her, the branches formed shapes and spaces, layer over layer with the sky behind.

“Say Daddy to me,” he said, his breath on her ear and in her neck.

Stacey pulled out the nail file and wrapped her fist around it so the spikes stuck out. He took a breath to speak and Stacey envisioned his head as a water balloon and plunged the file into his neck and pulled it toward her like a lever. Blood spurted. A stream arced in the air. Did it whistle? Was that a whistle? Stacey scrambled out from under him. He gurgled and put his hands over the wound. Blood poured between his fingers. Stacey was shivering, freezing. Her chin trembled; her shoulders hurt like she had the flu. She heard him fart, smelled his shit, saw him piss himself as he convulsed. His hand dropped hard onto the face of a rock. She heard his little bones crack.

Stacey clutched herself, her teeth clicking.

 “Sir?” a man called sharply. “You there?”

Could he hear her teeth? She bit her tongue. There was no trace of sun, no clouds. Was it dusk? Everything was gray but clear, all the trappings swept aside, the nail file a nub in his neck like a miniature tombstone. She heard herself breathe, high slices deep in her ears. She tried to pull the gun from his pocket, but her hands were thick with blood and made the metal too slippery. She wiped her palms on her shirt, on her bare legs.

“Sir?”

She could not swallow. She tasted blood (from her tongue?) and opened her mouth, closed it again, licked her lips.

“We’re coming, Sir!”

She heard a rush of footsteps and grabbed the gun and held it exactly as she’d been taught. Her arms came together in an arrow and she took a tiny step forward. She was about to scream, a wild baby assassin, desperate to do good.

---

Anna B. Moore has published lots of creative nonfiction and a little fiction in places such as American Scholar, Shenandoah, The Offing, Missouri Review, Pembroke Magazine, Pithead Chapel, and Black Warrior Review.  Her essay, “Deathbed,” was an honorable mention in Best American Essays  2022. Two others, “That Our Stars Had Become Unmanageable,” and “Jenny Dies by Jet Ski,” were nominated for Sundress Press Best of the Net Awards in 2022. Her first novel, Don’t Pity the Desperate, will be out on September 10 with Unsolicited Press. 

Jerry Craven is director of Ink Brush Press and active founding editor of the literary Journal Amarillo Bay. He is a member of the Texas Institute of letters, Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. In 2011 he designed and began Lamar University Literary Press, which he directed for twelve years. Craven has published thirty-three books and is currently completing the 34^th, another collection of poetry. He is an award-winning graphic artist; samples of his art are posted on the website http://www.jerrycraven.com. He lives in Texas with his wife the poet Sherry Craven.