excerpt from THE DRIEST SEASON

In that driest season, Cielle’s father hanged himself in the barn.  A rope tied to a beam above stacked bales of hay, a wheelbarrow, rusted cans.  Cielle found him.  Home from summer school in the middle of July, and her legs couldn’t move beneath her.  She looked and didn’t look.  Her father hung still, bloated and blue.  Years later she would think of chickens, pigs, and hides of cow tied up and heavy-looking on rope and hooks at the butcher’s.

Cielle wasn’t a child, nearly sixteen.  She walked closer and touched his boot.  Jesus.  Sweet Jesus.  She kneeled before her father and thought for a moment he could fall.  Light came in from rafter windows and cut long square shadows on wood plank walls.  Then light shifted to dark from what she knew to be passing clouds.  The barn was cool and damp.  Sharp pebbles dug at her knees.  She didn’t look at his face again, or his hands, or all that was him outside of his clothing.  Because it wasn’t him right there, but something else, someone unrecognizable, and a memory she didn’t want.  Why had she gone into the barn?  She never went in first thing after school.  But that day she did and she couldn’t remember the reason.